"Dungeons and Dragons."
"That sounds cool. What it's about?"
"It's a game where you go treasure hunting."
Sounds like a fine premise to me. Sign me up.
A lot of people find the idea of a "win condition" in an RPG to be utterly baffling. The way that you "win" at D&D is by having fun, right? But like... wouldn't that be true of all games? Isn't that just a bizarre dismissal when you really think about it? People don't seem to balk at sports or board games or escape rooms having a win condition. You can both have the goal of "have fun with your buddies" and have the goal of "win the game" simultaneously, believe it or not. In fact, they often reinforce each other!
It's not that explicitly-stated campaign goals are rare in RPGs. But they certainly aren't the norm. D&D used to be a game with a specific goal: find treasure. That's what you got XP for. Nowadays, most DMs just give XP for "advancing the story," whatever that means. This has plenty of advantages, of course. It's certainly more flexible. But it also means less.
Or rather, it means less from a game design point of view. To the DM and their players, the motive to advance their own story might be very meaningful. But it's not supported by the system at all. The burden resides entirely with the DM to sell that story.
When the game itself has a built-in assumed goal, other mechanics can then tie into that goal and make for a more cohesive system. For example, Blades in the Dark is a game with the explicit goal of "pulling off capers." It's not a generic system. It's not a game where you go to wizard school and study hard and graduate, it's not a game where you run a cozy diner and gossip with NPCs, it's not a game where you fight grand battles between armies of thousands in an open field, and it's not a game where you play as cops chasing down bad guys and solving mysteries. Those things are fine and all, but that's not what this game is for.
And by limiting the scope of what the game is about, there comes a freedom to add more and more stuff building on top of that scope. You can design deep rather than wide. There's a whole framework of managing your shared criminal enterprise and playing with factional politics against the other gangs and evading the efforts of the law and all that. I'm sure Blades in the Dark could feasibly have been released as a generic system instead, but then the book would be half as long.
Busting a Myth
I will admit that there is a tricky tension here. I myself have written a lot on the subject of motivations in RPGs. I frequently advocate for the "player-driven sandbox" as an ideal of play. Rather than telling the players what their quest is and why they should care, maybe just offer them an open world and let them do with it as they please. They can decide for themselves what they care about.
But the truth is that all games are a balance between some kind of constraints on the outside versus some amount of freedom to explore within. "Railroad vs Sandbox" is a false dichotomy. All games are sandboxes, merely of different sizes. The scope of how much freedom they offer. The real goal, then, is to figure out how much freedom your players need in order to be satisfied.
This is one of the reasons you don't hear fans of 4E D&D or Lancer or whatever complain about being railroaded. Sure, their GM just told them what the story is, where their characters go, why they go there, and what today's battle is going to be. But once initiative is rolled, they now get the whole battlefield as their sandbox. Those kinds of players are content just exploring the freedom of how exactly they go about kicking the bad guys' asses within the confines of that fight. If you ask them, a well-designed fight with a well-designed combat ruleset offers lots of meaningful choices.
But of course, I myself need a little something more than that. A dungeoncrawl is just a sandbox that's slightly bigger than a battlefield. It's about the size of, y'know, a large building. Some gamers are fine being told where the dungeon is, why they're going there, and what the goal is. They accept this because once they arrive, they now get a whole intricate building to explore with winding hallways and secret doors and different creatures to interact with and weird magical toys to play with.
If you need even more freedom than that, I totally understand. I want the open-world. I want you to hand me a hunk of wilderness region or an island or a kingdom and let me move around as I please. But there will always be constraints. Even if you're playing in a sandbox the size of a planet, you're still (probably) limited by the atmosphere.
So in reality, I find that most players not only accept some kind of flexible goal being thrust on them, but they may even benefit from it. Remember, old-school D&D wasn't a game about doing anything. It was a game about hunting for treasure. That's a goal that can comprise nigh-infinite activities of course, but it is somewhat of a constraint on the possibility space. A constraint that does just enough to shape the game towards interesting situations.
But of course, I'm not here to sell you on gold-for-XP as superior to the goals of modern D&D. There's been a backlash to the mainstream Trad D&D ideal of "the epic quest," but I think that's unfair. It has a widespread appeal for a reason. There's nothing wrong with a game that's explicitly about going on an epic quest to save the world. The problem is the same as it's always been: the GM or their game not offering the players enough freedom to satisfy them, regardless of whatever other constraints are being imposed.
The same folks who made the Labyrinth RPG also made one for The Dark Crystal. I think it has a lovely compromise: the players are given an epic quest tied to the game's "story," but then they're set loose into an open world and told "you figure out how to save the day." I'm not sure why WotC can't bring themselves to write adventures like that. They flirt with the idea, but they always ruin it. But the moral of the story? Giving the players a goal isn't the problem.
You know what's really cappy? A game that has an ending.
I know we all glorify "the eternal campaign" as the universal goal of all roleplay gaming, but we really need to revisit that. It sounds incredibly rewarding, but I think most people haven't thought it through. I contend:
- The worst way for a campaign to result is by fizzling out. A campaign with a proper ending will pretty much always be more satisfying than that.
- No campaign can actually last forever, if at least for no other reason than the fact that the group members eventually have to die.
- Therefore, any campaign which is determined to last "forever" rather than having an ending can thus only ever instead fizzle out, which per our first point is the worst result.
Maybe you can make it last for a surprisingly long time, sure. But consider the alternative I suggest.
Alice is Missing is one of the best examples of a capsule game I can think of. It rates exceedingly high on, like, every cappy trait. And part of why it works so well is because it is designed entirely around being a 90 minute experience that leads the group towards a conclusion. Does anyone ever complain about the lack of freedom? Do they complain that it should keep going and going and going? Of course not. This game is universally acclaimed for its ending.
Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal will last you more than 90 minutes, of course. But not forever. In fact, that's where the tension is drawn from. They're both games about racing against the clock, trying to complete your goal before time is up. For all the hoopla people make about setting the stakes and making sure actions have meaningful consequences and all that, the most elegant solution will always, always be "there's a countdown timer, every time you ever attempt anything in the game you get one step closer to doom, try to be efficient." You can try to arrange for situational time pressures on a case-by-case basis ("gotta do this dungeon fast because you have limited light" or "gotta do this heist fast because the cops are on their way" or "gotta kill this demon soon because the ritual is almost done"), but it's pretty convenient to just give the entire game itself one big overarching time pressure.
Interestingly, Alice is Missing is not really a game that you can "win." Most of my examples are biased towards challenge-oriented play because that's my own default preference, but other paradigms of play can make good use of goals and endings as well. Because ultimately, all of this serves to support that design ideal of a game providing a "complete" experience. Completeness usually implies finitude, and the natural constraints of real life mean that playing towards an ending is almost always going to be the smartest choice. As a game designer, don't be afraid to lean into that.
Yeah Dwiz but David Lynch is anti-ending
Okay sure but you aren't making Twin Peaks, buddy.
In all seriousness, I can definitely see the wisdom there. Especially in a game, trying to assert a specific ending might inevitably be a bit railroad-y, right? You can't predict what the players will do, especially as the campaign goes on longer and longer. While I'm a firm believer in the ability of a GM to improve at anticipating likely outcomes, surely it is folly to write out the full conclusion of a story before the players get there.
Here was a question raised early on in our first discussion of capsule games: is running out of content an ending?
I suppose it technically is, but I'm not a huge fan of that option. All the benefits I've described so far about finitude and well-placed constraints aren't really served by a game that just... runs out of juice. It's more comparable to the "fizzling out" result for a campaign, except that for once it would be caused by the system rather than scheduling issues.
Something I will advocate for as being pretty cappy are sequels. Whereas RPGs usually have sourcebooks expanding their content or new editions entirely, I think there's a lot of potential to simply offering up a follow-up campaign after you've finished the first one. A proper capsule game has no expectation that you buy anything beyond what you've already gotten... but if you insist on continuing your vision, why not make it another capsule?
Funnily enough, when I raised this suggestion to Josh, he brought up the same capsule game that the venerable Warren D. did in one of the comment sections: Super Blood Harvest, a trilogy of games packaged together in one book. A capsule of capsules!
-Dwiz
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