The Laws of Thermo-dice-namics, or Musings on the Potential Heat-Death of Role-Playing Games

Like any pursuit that has existed for a length of time, role-playing games have evolved. During the early days of tabletop RPGs in the 1970's, there was only really one show in town: Dungeons & Dragons. Its designers started with a core rule set and expanded it over the years, adding new content with each subsequent edition. So what began as a single, rough gaming system had grown and refined itself, and found itself no longer alone as other new systems emerged from within the gaming community.

The number of games proliferated as major RPGs established themselves around distinct, central system mechanics -- d20/f20 (Dungeons & Dragons); percentile rolls (Basic Role-Playing, Call of Cthulhu, Delta Green, Warhammer, etc.); dice pools (Vampire: The Masquerade and its kin, Shadowrun, etc.); GUMSHOE/point spend (Trail of Cthulhu, Night's Black Agents, etc.); and, more recently, PbtA/2d6+ (Apocalypse World, Dungeon World, Monsterhearts, etc.). You get the idea. There are, I'm sure, more central systems that could be added to this list, but that's not the focus of my attention here. Suffice it to say there was an expansion, a proliferation of new ways of playing that emerged over the years.

As we approach the present -- roughly 50 years into the existence of RPGs -- the number of games presenting entirely novel ways of approaching system mechanics has, arguably, slowed. Beginning in the "recent" past of around 2007 onward, several new games emerged (Labyrinth LordFor Gold & GloryDark Dungeons, etc.) that tried to reconstitute older game systems, the original versions of which were unsupported or out-of-print at the time. Largely, these were attempts at recreating the original core game mechanics exactly, or at least coming very close to that goal.

Around the same time, other new games were developed (Basic Fantasy Role-Playing, Dungeon Crawl Classics, etc.) that took those old systems as a core inspiration and improved on some of their awkward mechanics using concepts from modern RPGs -- replacing descending armor class with ascending armor class is one obvious example of such an improvement.

Over the last few years, I've continued to observe a number of original RPGs being produced or kickstarted, yet virtually none of them are centered around an entirely new core game system. At the same time, I have noticed some new products attempting to adapt together characteristics from the major, separate systems into a new game. This leads me to wonder: if, given enough time and even more new RPGs that attempt to synthesize successful mechanics together into a new and "better" game, could we reach a point wherein the gaming community holds some unified view of a "best practice" for game design? And, if so, would that ultimately lead to a stagnation of design? With a sufficiently large number of eyes on RPGs, and with design-thinking being a popular and driving force behind development of products and services at-large, is it possible to engineer RPGs to a still point?

I know, I could be overthinking this. Or underthinking it, depending. Like many complex systems, game mechanics could represent an extremely vast set of potential combinations and outcomes -- more than we'd need to keep us going for a very, very long time. Perhaps there is just a momentary lull in new mechanics that will not last long. It's true that there are recent examples of new games that introduce completely new system mechanics into the mix -- I'm thinking specifically of Caleb Stokes' Red Markets here.

Ideally, we'll never be without variety and diversity in our RPGs, in every way imaginable. May we never have to contend with the looming threat of a stagnant, lukewarm gaming universe in which all of our consumable imagination has been exhausted.

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