(Header image by Leo Liu on Unsplash)
Your available effort is a scarce resource, and you are constantly making decisions in an attempt to maximize value from that effort, whether you consciously consider it or not.
Effort, in this case, includes time spent on an activity, but also the physical, mental, emotional load that is required during that time. These are all variable, and at any given time you may have more or less of each which shifts your decision space. No matter how much I might enjoy running Slugblaster for my friends tonight, if I do not have the available time to play and mental energy to set up the game, it will not happen, so the option is removed. Right now, in my limited free time, I am choosing to write this instead of going to the gym even though I have the available effort for either, because I expect this will generate more value for me.
Available effort also varies massively from person to person. Wealth, mental and physical health, upbringing and a host of other variables often randomly assigned at birth result in different possible ranges of effort for any given person.
Value1 is trickier to define and is just as variable. I enjoy playing video games, but not nearly as much as I enjoy playing role playing games and it is hard to define why. Is it all a chemical reaction and the social nature of rpgs creates a longer lasting dose for me? And value isn’t even based on pure enjoyment! I don’t really enjoy working, but it allows me to provide shelter and food to my family which I value very highly, so I am willing to spend a significant amount of effort on it. I will leave value vague in hopes that you can compare two activities of similar effort and determine which you would value more.2
Role playing games, at their basest form, are machines that turn effort into value.3
Effort multiplication in rpgs
I often see, even in my own opinions, the quality of a game conflated with how little effort they take to play. Prep-less systems are lauded for their ease of getting to the table, prompt games are life savers for people who only have an hour to game and no time to read rules beforehand. That is clearly only part of the picture. Two prompt-based games could have the exact same amount of required effort and one is likely generate more enjoyment, more value than the other. The difference is due to each game’s ability to multiply effort.4
Comparing only the effort to play two systems misses the value generated, and comparing only the value generated excludes the effort required. With some abstract maths we can combine them as the ratio of value to effort: the Effort Multiplier (EM). If one game generates 5 value but requires 4 effort, it has an EM of 1.25, and is less efficient at generating value than a game that generates 3 value but only requires 2 effort (EM = 1.5).
This is all very abstract and I won’t be assigning any actual values to games, but the framework is extremely helpful to me in how I consider games and review games. In essence, it is a roundabout way getting at the question I often wrestle with: “I had fun playing this game, but I have fun playing most games. How do I know if the game is good or if it is really really good?” The more it multiplies my effort, the better the game is.
What is effort in an rpg anyway?
There are so many different types of effort for rpgs. Reading the rulebooks, prepping the adventure, making a character, scheduling, overcoming social anxiety, etc., etc.
For concepts’ sake, I have broken it down to four types of effort: system mastery, effort to prep, effort to play, and indirect effort. Importantly, all of these apply in some form to everyone playing rpgs, regardless of if you are a gm, player, or if the game is gmless.
System mastery covers all the trappings related to the rules of the game, how much reading of game text or watching of video tutorials will you be doing to seriously play. Games like Lancer require high amounts of effort to become fluent in the rules. Roll for shoes requires almost no effort on this front.
Effort to prep is anything non-rulebook reading related that is necessary before the game starts. This includes creating characters, setting up maps, choosing playbooks, and session zero type activities5 like settling on tone and themes. This also includes administrative loads like scheduling, a 30 minute one-shot duet game of Before the Bog God takes less effort to schedule than a 6-month long campaign of Break!!.
Effort to play is how hard it is to actually play once you get to the table. This is emotional energy spent on stabbing your character’s ex-husband in the back or trying a silly character voice in front of your friends. This is mental energy doing damage calculations and while keeping five narrative plates spinning. It can be exhausting.
Indirect effort is any effort that isn’t directly related to roleplaying, but can improve your rpg experience. This includes things like joining an improv troupe or taking writing classes or getting really into cartography or history. None of it is strictly necessary to have fun playing rpgs, but they may improve the skills used in certain games. For example, improving active listening is vital for improv, music and rpgs.
To give a few examples, Shadowdark takes a decent amount of effort for system mastery and prep, but once you get to the table it is fairly low effort. The Quiet Year is very low effort required on all fronts (it is an extremely efficient game!). When I ran Prince of Hounds, learning the system was low effort and there was almost no prep beforehand, but I was sweating bullets the entire time we played. It felt so different from any other game I had previously played, and I would have benefited from additional indirect effort in improv and story telling.
Effort reduction tools
There are a lot of ways that games seek to reduce the effort for you and your table, and any reduction in effort for the same value results in gains to the Effort Multiplier. These include character creators, virtual table tops and dice rolling apps.
Pre-written modules might not actually reduce the time required to prep for a game since you still need to read it, but it can potentially transform the load to something that is easier for you to do, reducing the effort. Buying maps from CzePeku trades effort at your job for effort that would be spent map making.
Families of games such as Powered by the Apocalypse and Borg games reduce effort by leveraging the same base systems so system mastery only has to be acquired for one, then dozens of other games within that family are unlocked and can be learned with significantly reduced effort.
The other players at the table are likely the biggest effort reduction tool.6 Relying on each other’s strengths and covering for each other’s weaknesses reduces everyone’s overall load and maximizes the table’s total value.7
Enjoyment under scarcity is the goal
As I wrap this up, I want to be super clear that I am not suggesting that the higher effort expended to play a game, the better it is. This is not a puritanical call for performative labor. This is a framework that helps me consider how some games do take more work to play, but that is okay if they generate sufficient value to the people playing. The end goal is not to optimize for maximum or minimum effort, it is to have the best time with your friends given the available time and capacity.
I don’t expect to write many theory posts like this, but the act of writing helped me flesh out a concept I have been contending with for some time and I thought it may be helpful to pull back the curtain a bit and show some of what I am thinking when I write reviews. This whole idea is still in flux and I reserve the right to revisit and rewrite my thoughts as they grow.
A few other blogs on similar topics written by smart people include:
- The Activation Energy of a Game by Seraphim Seraphina
- Why Didn’t Silent Titans Change the World? by Valeria Loves
- Very specifically, I am not considering value in the monetary sense. ↩︎
- I am sure someone with a stronger background in philosophy or psychology could provide me with a better definition of value. My economics background uses utility, which is more or less just as vague. If you have suggestions on good books or other media that might help me wrap my head around the concept of value, please email me at brett@birdmilkcafe.com. ↩︎
- As I write this I realize I have tricked myself into indirectly entering the “system matters” discourse. Obviously it does. Yes you can have fun playing games with your friends using any system, but the effort required and the amount of fun a system generates differs system to system and person to person. ↩︎
- As previously mentioned, both value and effort are highly personal, so two people could view the same game’s ability to multiply effort very differently. ↩︎
- I consider this prep even though it often happens at the table. It could be argued that it is part of playing the game. ↩︎
- Well, besides having a lot of money which is unfortunately the main effort reduction tool for like everything. ↩︎
- In economics, this concept is called comparative advantage and proper use is very efficient. ↩︎
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