My Philosophy

Originally published July 20th 2025

Recently I reconnected with a friend of mine and we talked about where we had been chilling out online. I mentioned that I was in a discord server for ttrpg people who are leftists who like telling edgy jokes but don’t like saying slurs so it was a pretty good place to chill.

She then asked me if there are any hot takes from that server about ttrpgs, I explained that the main thing was that we believe adventure design is just as if not more important than system design.

She then said “I want to know more about what that means as a mode or philosophy of play?”

So I explained and I guess I want to elaborate on it somewhat and do it as a blogpost, and a slightly wankery one I guess.

This is the first tenant, and something that went unspoken but does inform a lot of how I see the world. Folk art practices are just as legitimate as commercial art practices. We interact with folk art storytelling all the time when we interact with friends and family because people like telling stories. We can tell when a friend or family member is good or bad at telling stories and that has little to do with how well these stories conform to the structure and styling of what you could find on prestige television.

Secondly it is fundamentally impossible to play a system without an adventure, but it is possible to run an adventure without a system. I have spent a lot of time doing free form roleplay and it was just as if not more fun than a lot of roleplay I have done with systems. This is not because the systems were even bad, but simply because the act of roleplaying is fulfilling within itself.

So that’s great and all but what does this mean as a mode of play? It means the games I tend to run have an incredibly humanistic lens, eschewing traditional commercial narratives, having faith that it will still end up as a good story even if it lacks a 3 or 5 act structure.

What primarily drives the world of my games is the fact that there is a concrete fictional reality, where human beings make imperfect choices on incomplete information, and those details add up no matter how insignificant they seem at first.

And these realities are also interlaced with the internal lives of the characters, even if they are unstated.

To quote Blades in the Dark, pg 169. “The abstracted parts of the game—Tier, coin, stash, quality, engagement rolls—are abstract so that the game play can focus on what’s most important: the choices, actions, and consequences of the player characters. Action rolls are where the meat of the game happens. Don’t feel beholden to the abstractions when you have specific fictional details to work with.”

The specific fictional details reign supreme to me, it doesn’t matter how I choose to resolve the uncertainty of an action or emotion. What matters is that character X decided to run away and train hop because their grandmother passed away because they are young and don’t know how to deal with grief yet.

The relationships people have with each other is what is most important, not that you spend a point in character creation to have that connection. The fact that character x always caries a pocket knife with them is important, not what a pocket knife is mechanically capable of doing.