Daily Note: Tabletop Roleplaying Games

These notes are a summary of concepts presented in “Tabletop Roleplaying Games as Procedural Content Generators.”

Matthew Guzdial, Devi Acharya, Max Kreminski, Michael Cook, Mirjam Eladhari, Antonios Liapis, and Anne Sullivan. 2020. Tabletop Roleplaying Games as Procedural Content Generators. In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games (FDG ’20). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 103, 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1145/3402942.3409605

  1. Tabletop Roleplaying Games
    • Tabletop roleplaying games are similar to board games but focus on players acting out roles
    • Player choices shape the in-game story, influenced by game mechanics and group dynamics
  2. Generative Content in Tabletop Roleplaying Games
    • Mixed-initiative generators
      • Systems that involve both player input and automated generation
    • Examples of generators
      • Game Bits
      • Game Spaces
      • Game Scenarios frameworks
    • Possibility space
      • The theoretical range of all possible outputs from a generator
    • Expressive range
      • Visualizing the generator’s output through tagged components
  3. The “Fruitful Void” Concept
    • A core theme left unsystematized but influencing game mechanics and player decisions
    • Players engage most with story elements they shape themselves
  4. Ambiguity in Generative Systems
    • Need for both ambiguity and interpretability in generated artifacts
      • Promotes user reflection and extrapolation
    • Generators should balance randomness with structured guidance
  5. Narrative and Interpretation
    • Player stories emerge through extrapolative narrativization, adding personal interpretation to game elements
    • Imagination playgrounds
      • Scenarios designed with deliberate ambiguity for player interpretation
    • Encouraging players to “fill in the blanks” enhances engagement
  6. Procedural Generation in Tabletop Roleplaying Games
    • Content pipelines
      • Multiple generators working together to create richer outputs
    • Character generation
      • Dice rolls determining personality traits, history, and objects
    • Lookup tables
      • Tree structures building character backgrounds
      • Rolling tables constructing year-by-year backstories
    • Encounter generation
      • Pre-authored X·Y tables for randomizing encounters
      • Digital storytelling aids (e.g., card decks for scene guidance)