Emergence and Progression in TTRPGS: A Fool's Ramblings

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I’ve been thinking a bit about why I have enjoyed running Cairn and why I haven’t been enjoying D&D 5e or Lancer recently, and I think I have stumbled upon an answer: Emergent vs Progressive gameplay. There’s lots of writing about this, mostly around videogames, so I’m going to talk about these terms as I understand them, but I’ll also try to include some other writings that I’ve looked at.

Emergence is when simple rules interact with complex systems. Think Chess or The Sims. Simple rules, like, “a pawn can move one space forward” or “Sims need to eat” come into contact with a complex system, like a human brain crafting a grand strategy, or a simulation of an entire world. 

Progression in games is a newer phenomenon (according to Juul) where there is a series of challenges, and there are strict rules which the player must follow in order to solve them and eventually reach the end. For the most Progressive game, think Mario. Run right, jump, maybe throw a fireball, and move on to the next level until the game is over. The creator has a strict say in how players interact with the game (again, according to Juul).

Emergence is extremely important to how I play games. The tension from rules and systems coming into contact creates opportunities for stories to be crafted. Emergence’s dictionary definition is “greater than the sum of its parts”, but I’m a scientist at heart; that's against laws of conservation, there must be something else happening!. What I think happens is the tension created in the interaction between the rules and the systems creates play at the table. As we move on and think about our play experiences, we narrativize them, and they become stories. As stories, we remember them better, and can share them with others more easily.

For whatever reason, we humans like to tell stories. We do it to make sense of the world; we do it for fun; we do it for infinite reasons. We do it so much that we have invented certain methods for telling specific types of stories. I’m going to talk about this as genre. Now, there’s also the “genre” that has been captured by capital to sell books and movies, but I’m not talking about that here. I’m talking about when you pick up a sci-fi book and know there’s going to be some made up jargon that you’ll have to pick through. This Genre is made when artists are in conversation with each other, when art is imitating and transforming previous works, when readers pick up on these things and form expectations around them, which in turn circles back around to alter what kind of art they make. Its a complex system, but none of it is magic. Capital feeds off this cycle like a parasite, and can turn it to its own uses, but Genre is still hugely important to how we understand art.

That means, when we try to craft a story out of our tabletop play experiences, Genre is one part of the sieve that is your noggin.

Enough of Genre, its getting away from the point of this post: I like tabletop games that focus on Emergence rather than Progression. My two touchstones for this will be Cairn for Emergent Games and D&D 5E for Progressive Games, because I know these two games well. What makes them fit in their respective categories? Lets look at rules (in this instance rules = TTRPG system, for clarity) and how they interact with the system (the simulation of the fictional world).

The rules for Cairn are short, they can fit on one page, while the D&D player’s handbook is over 300 pages long, a lot of those being rules. In D&D you can look up in the book exactly how many feet any character should be able to jump, laterally and vertically. Cairn, not so much. In D&D, the rules are trying to be the simulation. 

The simulation of the diegetic game world is happening in everyone's imagination. Every person at the table has an idea of how the fictional world works: its physics, its history, its genre trappings. 

Rules of D&D capture some of the simulation. Less work for people’s imaginations, if you want to know how something works, you look in the book for it. A historical event, a long night’s rest, a hearty meal, a plot point, it's all in the book if you can find the right page. It eliminates the play that comes when a question needs to be answered. Rather than negotiating as a group what happens, it’s encouraged for the game master to search through a book for an answer, which conveniently makes buying all the books a requirement to being a good player. 

A caveat: no two table play cultures will ever be the same. A table playing D&D could very much end up playing a game that looks a lot more like Cairn. How a game is designed does not equal how it is played, but it does have an influence. Each game carries a cultural weight with it. There aren't a billion episodes of tv that will give you an idea of what Cairn is like to play, but there is for D&D. There are a ton of actual plays of D&D that cater to and encourage specific types of play. Most of those also encourage you to buy into specific products, that will help you recreate those styles. That also means that you're marketing a specific experience, and it's a lot easier to recreate that experience if you control how people interact with your game. Sound familiar? Progressive games allow just that. 

Now I don't think Emergent games are fundamentally better than Progressive games, I just find they cater to the type of play I like to participate in (most often as a gamemaster). I didn't get at all into when Progressive games become Emergent, like speed-running. I'm also not an expert, so if you have any more readings/blogposts you can recommend I will gladly read them. 

I'm gonna stop it here before it gets too unwieldy. Thanks for reading. 

Here are some readings that inspired this:

Episode 1 of Game Studies Study Buddies - Juul - Half Real

The Open and the Closed: Games of Emergence and Games of Progression

A Classroom Lesson on Language and Genre