Participationism, and the Humble Tavern

I stumbled upon this article recently, and it kind of set me off. I've had a lot of thoughts stewing lately, as of the Kenku Structure post, and this seemed to trigger some of them into coalescing. The article does what I've seen a lot of things purport to do in the past, which is provide alternatives for the "You meet in a tavern..." campaign opening. As a culture, fantasy gaming has a strange relationship to this trope; some want to move past it as a particularly tired cliché, while some counter-revolutionaries want to reclaim or rehabilitate it. It's got to the point where it's become difficult even to play it straight, where you're basically running an affectionate parody if you do adopt the trope.

The interesting point for me is that I think the argument that we need to spice up our campaign intros basically misses the point of the original trope. Say you meet in a tavern with your crew of adventurers, and some shadowy figure in a cloak comes to your table and gives you a quest. Boring way to start a campaign, right? Well, yes and no. See, there's a lot of background assumptions we bring to reading that intro. These are brought out if we look at the sorts of alternative starting scenes that usually get suggested: The PCs attend the festival of the Inciting Incident when the evil forces suddenly attack, the PCs start in prison, the PCs start in the briefing room, or get summoned to the king, who sends them on a quest to cure his magical ailment etc etc. All of these carry the background assumption of participationism.

Participationism may sound like something tweeted about by parents who are annoyed that their kids' sports days aren't competitive enough any more, but it actually describes the conceit behind the modern rpg campaign: That the players are there to participate in the narrative the GM has prepared, that they're supposed to seize the quest hook that gets presented to them, because that's where they catch the narrative thread they then proceed to follow. This is what all the alternative opening scenes have in common: There's no real possibility of the PCs turning down the quest they get given, since the assumed function of the scene is just to set them up to follow the narrative. This is also why, when you hear advice on avoiding the tavern trope, someone will always pop up saying to start the PCs in media res - basically, to skip the presentation of the quest as a mere formality. Because in a participationist campaign, that's exactly what it is; refusing the quest hook is not done, it disrupts the game, so the scene presenting it as a choice is really just a ritual denoting the start of proceedings.

Imagine you were playing in a campaign without that expectation. Someone comes up to you in the tavern and offers you - not "gives" - a quest. You quiz them about the task, not just to collate a laundry list of things to do, but because you actually want to assess whether you want to take up the offer. You might even look for leverage - what's the reward? Why us, why not someone else? What's stopping them taking the problem to the authorities instead? If you're the only ones who can do it, you have a strong position to ask for more in return. Then again, if the motivation is an appeal to justice or your moral character, it's an opportunity for the Paladin to express their character, genuinely choosing to act out of goodness - if they want to - rather than tacking that on as a rationalisation for just sticking to the plot.

You might be able to put it off while you make up your mind and canvas other hooks to get involved in, or ask around with your other sources. Even if the players do end up taking the job on the spot, the context of a game without the expectation that they would snap it up changes the scene - they could have been doing anything else - and still might later on - but they chose this because they wanted to do it. That electrifies the quest, regardless of its humble setup.

The secret here is engagement. I've written before about how engagement in rpgs comes primarily from giving players the opportunity to make choices. This is how the tavern scene in an open campaign, played out though it may be, gets for free a whole heap of investment and immersion that the more colourful inciting incidents in a participationist campaign struggle to provide. It doesn't need to be showy or flashy, because the players are already drawn into the game by the setup - straight from the get-go, they're already being asked to make decisions in character, to define and pursue their goals for themselves.

The participationist campaign can't deliver on this front. If we assume that we have to answer the call to action, we lose that chunk of investment that comes from working out if we actually want to, and, if we work out that we do want to, actually doing so of our own free will. Hence the advice is to supplement narrative flavour to garner investment - personal stakes, ties to backstory, interesting and novel scenarios for the inciting incident or the in media res opening. But this is essentially adding flair to the mummery, a scene that gets acted out but that no-one's invested in, because everyone already knows what the outcome will be.

I think this fundamentally comes down to a lack of understanding about how, in ttrpgs, gameplay is the primary driving force behind investment and immersion, and about how to use gameplay to create engagement. The technique of having a punchy or intriguing opening scene to grab the audience is drafted in from narrative media, where it's designed create investment in characters and plot over which the audience has no control. When you're playing the characters, and creating the plot - when you have control, at least nominally - it falls flat. What makes players invested in characters and events in an rpg fundamentally comes down to gameplay - having the character or event factor into their choices, or their actions, or their plans - not (absurd though it may seem) the narrative stakes that get pasted onto them. The participationist structure, taking its cues as it does from narrative media, fails to take into account the importance of using gameplay in this way. Its proponents, assuming that the quest in the tavern setup is supposed to be accepted, only see that the setup lacks sparkle, not how it garners the investment that more colourful versions lack by keying into the players' choices, actions and plans.

🕸

The reason we view the tavern scene as quaint is due to the extent to which this mentality has taken hold. The gaming cultural mainstream seems to favour participationism to the exclusion of all other forms of play. The Alexandrian blog has charted how railroading, the enforcement of participationism by the GM, has supplanted all other GMing and scenario-design skills even among the people writing official D&D modules. Participationism isn't equivalent to railroading, but the two are comorbid; railroading is a technique, while participationism is an overarching expectation for play with an associated game structure, but mostly the one is used as a de facto strategy for enforcing the other.

The renaissance undergone by D&D in the form of the behemoth that is 5e owes a huge portion of its popularity to Critical Role, which unequivocally follows a cultivated narrative created by Matt Mercer. Crit Role isn't necessarily a railroad, but it definitely follows the model of players following the GM's narrative - getting their kicks by expressing their own characters somewhat within individual scenes, but seldom if ever altering the course of events, since that would be disruptive to the conceit of the game, and the show. This is how we sign up new GMs, by showing them a GM acting as storyteller, performing his story to a rapt and attentive audience - the players - who agree to be participants in the narrative as it happens around them. This is how we bill the rpg experience to attract people to the hobby, and thus how we create expectations for play.

Participationist expectations are especially noticeable with players. Players who have played even a bit under the style come to expect to follow a set story. They self-railroad, taking actions that would otherwise be non-sequiturs because they think it's the expected plot, and shying away from actions that would lead them away as potentially disruptive to the game. The meanings of words like "choice", when used at the table, are eroded; the GM assures players that they have free choice, that no actions or outcomes are expected or planned for, and the players nod along, perhaps thinking that this assurance is some ritual nonsense divorced from the words' actual meanings but adhered to for the sake of propriety, like saying "bless you" when you sneeze. Their actions - the GM's and the players' - betray the truth: That participationism has become so ingrained and internalised that we no longer have a framework for conceiving of anything else, and that even the language for describing any alternative game structures has lost its meaning.

How did this become orthodoxy? There are a few likely candidates, but honestly I don't know which were responsible in what measure. First chronologically is the rise of tightly plotted modules, such as Ravenloft and the Dragonlance series. Tying in D&D to novels that you literally play out at the table may have shifted the culture somewhat, although I've seen strongly mixed receptions for that concept from people who got into D&D around that time, so I don't know that it was received rapturously and absorbed wholeheartedly into the gaming consciousness.

For the Crit Role generation at least, besides CR itself, I'm minded to point to assumptions brought over from video games, particularly those that aspire to a sort of openness in their worlds or stories. Video games, at least until some radical paradigm shift occurs, are constitutionally incapable of allowing players to set their own, novel goals that are recognised by the systems and NPCs in the world. Further, they're logistically incapable of allowing for all of the possible outcomes a player might conceivably attempt to bring about for a given scene if playing their character without the assumption that they have to follow the goals set for them by the game. The model for freedom within most of these games, then, is the freedom to express your character or playstyle within a scene, or within the boundaries of an objective set by the game. The battle will always end the same way, but you get to approach it with relative tactical freedom; you get to express yourself by designing your own custom character and seeing them in cutscenes, but the cutscenes themselves will always play out the same.

(As proof of my point, Mass Effect 2 has as its final set-piece a battle where the outcome and narrative consequences actually change depending on how you approach the battle itself, and this blew peoples' minds - and, to my knowledge, has never been replicated by another video game, even within the same franchise.)

I think this model of relative freedom within scenes and overarching narrative constraint outside scenes is ported over to ttrpgs to support participationist play. This style is sometimes called the OC style of tabletop gaming, because the focus is shifted towards expressing one's original character ("OC") rather than affecting the events of the game. What this misses is the fact that these video games are using this structure as a workaround to make up for their inability as a medium to provide the sort of freedom that ttrpgs have straightforwardly built in. The closest you can come to freely refusing the call to adventure in Mass Effect is putting off the mission indefinitely. The closest you can get to setting your own goals in Skyrim is wandering the landscape randomly. Given that in a ttrpg a player's ability to act freely and pursue their own goals is critical for ensuring engagement, and that ttrpgs have, built in as a default, a much broader and multi-dimensional range for free action than in a video game, we shouldn't use these video games as our model for how to structure player freedom in tabletop games.

Constraining the scope of the players' freedom to engage on their own terms, the better to cultivate and deliver a narrative, is a misplaced priority in a tabletop rpg, because what the game delivers that no other game can isn't the ability to experience a story in a certain way, but to create, with the other players, a story of one's own. Participationism prioritises the content experienced over the players' ability to dictate how and when it gets experienced. This is quite understandable, but it has it backwards; what makes the game what it is is the players' ability to decide if they want to engage with a given thread or detail, and if they do, when and how they want to do so. We should build campaigns by building on that principle, by creating fertile ground for adventure to happen if the players pursue it, not by creating adventures waiting to happen to the players - because there is a difference.

🕸

Lets round off by circling back to the tavern. This whole discussion puts me in mind of a fun phrase I like to use to rebut the idea that the dungeon is a dull, archaic scenario structure that we've rightly left behind: If setting your adventure underground makes it boring, your adventure was boring to begin with. The dungeon just mirrors the structure of your adventure; if it's a linear railroad, it'll be a boring dungeon, because it would have been boring anyway - if it's an interesting web of factions and intrigue, or an interesting space to explore and feel out the structure, it'll make for a fun game regardless. I feel like the same is largely true of the campaign opener; if setting it in a tavern makes it boring, it was probably a boring scene with no real choices anyway. You can dress it up all you want, that added sparkle won't get your players invested more than actually giving them agency - the one thing that ttrpgs alone can do, and the thing people really come to the table for.

I was going to append a discussion of how I got into gaming via old school rulesets, and thus how my sensibilities might have developed to be so different from those who are actually my peers - people who got into gaming in earnest at the same time and with the same game (5e, of course) that I did, but who nevertheless embrace participationism, despite my having an extremely averse reaction to it. That'll have to wait for next post though, as this is already very long and rambly. Perhaps the nostalgia will make for a lighter, less angry post.

(Upon close reading of the original article that brought all of this thinking together, I've realised that I think the campaign structure that the author has in mind is actually a rather free and open one, with multiple quest hooks the players could follow up or leave. I've liked some of Creighton's articles in the past, and disliked others, but you can definitely check him out for ideas on how to run a non-railroady scenario with which the PCs can engage on their own terms.)