Tabletop Adventure Games - what are they?

[jamiltron]

What are qualities you associate with “tabletop adventure games?” I know I have some ideas in my head, which are the following:

• Adventure games involve “adventurous” things: exploring, traveling, fighting, various action exploits, solving (or causing) crimes and mystery, etc. I don’t think adventure games have to be pure action games, but if you’re not going on an adventure, you by definition cannot be an adventure game.
• A fairly traditional referee/player dynamic: referees present and adjudicate the world, players control characters within it that interact with the world, attempting to overcome challenges by any logical means.
• Character agency is at a premium, there should be very little, if any, non-diegetic limitations placed on the choices characters can make.
• Consequences should follow via the logic of the fiction. Without consequences character agency is kind of irrelevant.
• Character creation should be short. Its hard to set an exact time limit because everyone takes different lengths of time to do so, but I would say if character creation takes, on average, an hour or longer it probably doesn’t fit.
• Players should be able to play without knowing the rules. The referee should be able to teach as we go, or handle necessary mechanisms if they feel able to.
• Play should be goal-oriented. While there can be low stakes instances of play intermittently, the crux of the game should be such that players drive towards a known outcome of which they are proactive of, not reactive.

I think that’s most of it. What about you? What do you think you’d add or change to the above? Any that you disagree with?

[Jenx]

That is, I’d say, a fairly good and comprehensive list. To be fair you’ve also thought way more about it than I have hah.

Going down the points:

1 - I do agree on “adventure” kind of being key. Even if solving mysteries and investigations are definitely adventurous I actually think that a lot more action should be called for to label the game as such. Call of Cthulhu, as we all know, is primarily a game about the strategic application of dynamite. Court drama and romance, as main focal topic and themes, to me are things that just do not fit for Adventure Games, as an example.

2 - I can see the divide, I actually am not sure I really consider that as a key element. I think some sort of story-based wargaming campaign can very much also end up being an adventure game, and while a lot of those could benefit from a referee, they are perfectly doable via player consensus. But I do think the typical delineation of referee and player roles help, especially if any form of exploration or mystery is to be present.

3 - No argument here. To me any RPG without a fairly significant player agency just fails at its primary function. If I wanted something else I’d read a book or play a video game or play a boardgame or something.

4 - “Consequences” I think are the best way to put this. I think the overstatement of how much character death is a ruling theme in old school dungeon crawls kind of misleads a lot of people. It’s just that “death” was usually the primary consequences for failure in a lot of cases, but I do think that you can run a typical adventure game with character death being a very very rare occurrence, as long as some other type of consequences still follows from their actions.

5 - Relating to the previous, I don’t agree that quick character creation is as key of an element. I personally prefer games with simple and quick chargen, but that’s just a personal preference. I think if the game has death be the most severe consequence to a character’s actions, but in 80+% of cases the consequences are something else that incapacitates, inconveniences or just generally fucks with the character, then it’s fine to simply have more laborious character generation as most characters are more likely to stick around for longer.

6 - This one I think is entirely down to preference. As a referee I actually prefer fairly light and quick rulesets, and as such prefer if my players learn at least the majority of the rules they will interact with on a regular basis within 2-3 sessions of play. While I am happy to remind people or correct them if needed, after a certain point I find it actually kind of disrespectful and actively detrimental to the game for a player to still not know they need to roll d20+modifiers to make an attack roll in a D&D game.

7- No real comments on this one. I agree.

[Griffiana]

I mostly prefer the term “Tabletop Adventure Games” above “Roleplaying games” because the latter tends to confuse people. One describes the content of the activity, the other describes the activity self.

I think the term “Adventure Game” for our purposes describes a very simple activity: You will be making decisions with equivalent consequences in a shared imaginary world. You will have real agency in a imaginary space where you normally would not.

In this sense the term Adventure game shouldn’t be read as describing the outcome of the game, but rather the activity you all intend to undertake in the game. Not “We had an adventure and killed the BBEG” but “We are going to go on an adventure!”

I agree with most of the above points, but I’d say that these are more like criteria which require most but not all in order to define a TAG.

Edit1: I think it’d also be of benefit to describe why we are here and play these games. A description of folkways rather than a prescription (dunno if I’m using that right) of the rulesets we favour.

Edit2: For example - I would put Orbital Blues firmly within TAG, but it has some real storygamey elements.