A revision of my classification of RPG Systems and Playstyles

I was wrong last Monday.

So in last week’s blog I made a fatal error: I didn’t carefully define my X and Y axes. If you didn’t read, I was positing that the OSR division of games into traditional, story games, and OSR/NSR was not nuanced enough. Instead, I presented an X/Y axis along which RPG systems and GM styles could be plotted. But I made a terrible error by not carefully stating what my X and Y axes represented. I realized this after some beneficial discussion on Bluesky that led to @flintlock making this statement:

I actually find I can have more player agency in simulationist games than in ones that emphasis player control over the narrative. Because I can intuit the likely result of character actions via the details of the game setting. I find it harder to judge “is this an exciting narrative decision?”— Flintlock (parody account) (@flintlock.bsky.social) July 9, 2025 at 10:32 AM

Upon reading that, I thought, “If player agency can indeed exist within a simulationist game, what am I even measuring here?” So today, I am presenting an adapted and much fretted-over revision of last week’s paradigm. So let’s try again.

In this new X/Y axis, let me clearly define my X and Y axes:

• X: player radius of influence
  
  In short, how far can the players’ actions impact the world? How far do those ripples go?
  
  
• Y: GM radius of management
  
  Conversely, how much does the GM need to manage the game and game environment?

One might think that there’s an absolute correlation between these two, but I think you’ll see that’s certainly not the case.

X Axis: Player Radius of Influence

If you remember seventh grade math, the center of the axes is 0, 0. As you go further to the left on the X axis (or down on the Y Axis), your value goes down. So also with this graph: the further left you go, the smaller the impact players have on the environment around them. The ripples, so to speak, don’t go as far.

A theme park is like that. When you go to a theme park, you have agency–you make choices–but it’s all within fairly well-prescribed parameters. A theme park (like most video games) is all about the experience, as designed and presented to you. It’s your job to enter the space and enjoy it. Now–there are different kinds of rides and experiences in a theme park! And in different types of experiences, a visitor can affect change in differing measure. For example:

• One-seater roller coaster: you can yell your lungs out, close your eyes, wave your arms. These actions will have an effect on you and perhaps those nearest you, but your actions are fairly limited in impact.
• Multi-seat ride: imagine a water ride where 3-6 people get into the same log or float. The way you lean, splash, and engage with one another has an impact on the others. But still, the environment around you stays fairly unimpacted.
• Large gathering: many theme parks have large gatherings to watch a musical, a competition, or even perhaps a game show. Once again, your ability to impact others by your engagement (or lack thereof) can have a greater impact on the people around you.

Regardless, in a theme park, unless you get particularly revolutionary and dodge security, it’s going to be hard to make serious changes to the environment. It’s just the nature of a theme park.

Theme Park RPGs

Now what TTRPGs could possibly fit into this left side of the X/Y axis? Theme Park RPGs are intended to provide players with a prebaked, designed experience. The absolute best example that I’ve read of this is Pendragon’s The Grey Knight. As I said last week, Pendragon is all about experiencing the Arthurian mythos. The story is set in stone and you’re supposed to experience it in certain way.

Mind you, just because it’s designed and written that way doesn’t mean you have to play it that way! A Game Master can violate those rules, if s/he so desires. But that’s how the module (and the system) are designed to work. Players’ choices may impact themselves and one another. They may impact non-canonical NPCs and storylines. But there’s a sacred timeline in the center that cannot be violated.

As you move further right on the theme park side of things, you pretty quickly find big hardback adventures for games like D&D 5th Ed., Pathfinder, and even Edge Studios’ Star Wars RPG (which is known for player agency as a system). These games allow for a broader theme park experience, but you’re generally fairly still “on the rails.” A few weeks back, I went to a water park near my home. My son and I climbed a water slide to find two different slides we could choose at the top. Whichever slide we chose led to a different end result. But once you picked it, the path was chosen!

A lot of these larger published adventures have that sort of choose-your-own-adventure tone to them. But it’s still something prepared/prescribed to be experienced by the players. Again, players have agency within it, but their radius of influence is fairly reined in.

As we continue moving away from the Theme Park experience toward a Malleable World, you find published Gygaxian dungeons á la AD&D 1e. You enter the dungeon, where you find rooms that are frozen in time until you enter them. Maybe random encounters give the illusion of a living world, but the reality is that troll isn’t doing anything until you trigger it. This reminds me of theme park rides, where you ride a car through a narrative, entering rooms and engaging the animatronics there, until you move on to the next one. It’s still a prepared world that you’re experiencing with a limited impact on the world around you.

I hope my descriptions don’t make it sound like I’m against this kind of gameplay. I’m prepping to run Pendragon later this year! A Theme Park RPG is simply different from a Malleable World RPG. The GM presents players with something to experience…it’s a meal already prepared and ready to be enjoyed! But what about the other side of the X-axis? The other extreme of players’ ability to influence the world?

X-Axis: Malleable World

On the right (net positive) side, the players’ radius of influence on the world is growing signficantly. On the theme park side, they can affect themselves, one another, NPCs, and the like, but the world is being presented to them as a fairly solid entity. It’s all about experiencing a preconceived world.

On the malleable world side, it’s not about enjoying a prepared experience; instead, it’s about the world that emerges from player and PC actions. This is the world of “emergent narrative,” procedures for shaping the world as a player or GM, and GMs who prepare little to nothing. If the other side of this axis is a Theme Park, this side is a playground, a sandbox, or a black box theater.

• Playground: a playground is not terribly far removed from a theme park. There are rides and experiences provided, but there’s little to no direction on how to enjoy them. Children make their own fun with the playground equipment provided. Metaphorically speaking, I like that the slide and swings are often nailed down. So there’s still some limit to how much the children can affect change. Their radius is still somewhat limited.
• Sandbox: in the sandbox, things are not nailed down. You’ve got floating shovels, buckets, and toys to be played with. And the world is fully shapeable. Build sand castles, dig tunnels, or bury your friend. The world is fully malleable by its nature. The sandbox is proto-Minecraft.
• Black box theater: I lived with theater nerds in college, but maybe you’re not familiar with black box theater. Often college theaters lean in this direction, because these theaters tend to be small. But it’s a small black room, usually square shaped, where the audience sits around the actors on multiple sides. Often, there are very little props–everything is imagined. So you don’t even have all the props you might have from a sandbox–your imagination is the resource.

So in each of these malleable worlds, you get an increased ability to shape the world, based upon the tools at your disposal, whether a swingset, a bucket, or your imagination.

Malleable World RPGs

I will confess that my exposure to this world of RPGs is still new and limited. My best points of reference would be Beyond the Wall and FIASCO Classic. Both games provide some loose procedures and inspiration to help the players create the world. Both have very little mechanics in-game and rely on improvisational engagement with one another to create the world as it goes.

I can’t pretend to have any expertise in story games, though I’ve been reading about Dungeon World 2 (an upcoming PbtA fantasy RPG). However, I do have piles of experience with Edge Studios’ Star Wars RPG. What I enjoy about that game is that there are mechanics that allow players to directly influence–and even change the world. With the flip of a force pip, there’s a door that wasn’t there before!

I feel like that game and its mechanics are very close to the middle of the X-axis. The players’ radius of influence is quite limited, especially when you’re running a published adventure. But the extent of player influence is much wider than most RPGs I’ve played. When my group first played it, it seemed like a revelation. Little did we know how far deep the rabbit hole went!

Of course, there are games out of the far right end of this axis wherein the world functionally generates itself, as players explore unplanned hexes. And there are procedures provided in the game to help players shape the world. In fact, I have some untested homebrewed rules for Star Wars RPG to give this a shot, if I can get my players to stop smuggling for a session!

For those who have more experience with these emergent world games, it would be useful to me for you to sound off in the comments or over on my BlueSky. Educate me more on the Malleable World games that you have played, where players have a more direct, causal relationship with the game world–where their radius of influence looms large.

Why does any of this matter for my game?

If there’s not a practical reason for this, there’s no reason to have read this far. However, there are two extremely practical points I’d like to make:

First, this X axis is all about the trust shared between GM and players. As players, you need to trust your GM more the further the game gets to the left on this axis. We’ve all had bad GMs who railroaded us into wondering why we were even there. That’s not fun. But Pendragon can be done well. A 5e hardback can be done well. But players will need to be able to trust their GM to make it an enjoyable experience. The GM is the theme park designer on the left side of this axis! They better know what they’re doing.

But on the right side of the axis, GMs need to be able to trust their players on two fronts. To begin with, GMs need players who are comfortable taking on the role of a world-shaper. They didn’t come to eat a meal–they came to get in the kitchen and get chopping! But that means GMs must be able to trust players to play along. While we’re all whipping up a batch of Cthulu, we don’t need you over there baking up a soap opera. On the malleable world side, the GM needs players who are quite literally team players. They commit to it just to have fun, like kids at the playground.

Second, any system can be hacked to move your game in a different direction on this axis…or you can just swap systems. As I said, I’ve got a hack of Star Wars to allow for a more emergent narrative. That’s not what the game designers intended, but who cares? Every game designer worth their salt will tell you to make the game your own. Gygax set that standard in the AD&D DMG. So you want more player influence–or more of a theme park experience? Get rid of rules or make some up. Bend things to the kind of game you want.

But there’s also the option to just use a different system suited to the type of gameplay that you want. It behooves Game Masters to explore other rulesets and ask the question: do I want to present a packaged experience? Or do I want a world to emerge through our interactions together? Both can be insanely fun. But they’re simply different kinds of games.

In the end, I appreciate all the feedback on BlueSky, especially the constructive criticism from @flintlock. Let me know your thoughts and come on back next week, as we explore the Y-Axis, which considers the GM’s radius of management over the game and the world.

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