Jouer sans Jeux, Part III

04 Feb, 2026

Reification

By way of a case study.

When a character arrives at an inn with the intention of renting a room for the night, the innkeeper presents them with two options. They could take an inexpensive bed in a common room, or they could pay significantly more for a bed in a private room. The player then turns to the referee and asks, "Why would my character pay this higher price for a private room? What benefit does it offer?"

Perhaps this strikes you as an odd question (it does me). The answer seems obvious: some variation of "Because that's what your character would do." We can, of course, make that answer less glib with details. We might insist that they would choose more expensive private accommodations for approximately the same complex of reasons that we ourselves would likely choose to do the same in our real-world lives—at base, because the added expense, such as it is, is sufficiently outweighed by additional comfort and privacy. This is merely part of roleplaying a character, that we trust that they have motivations as simple and mysterious as our own, and that on some level those motivations are constitutive of some portion of humanness. After all, if you're asking why your character should pay for private accommodations, then you already know the answer. You've assumed, as a precondition of asking the question, that your character should want to rent a private room, but then you're asking for some additional justification for that. The insight here is that you do not need further justification—your character should book a private room precisely because they want to, for all the reasons that led you to ask this question in the first place. This answer does to some degree refuse to actually address the reasons why a player would ask that question in the first place, opting instead to point out that they shouldn't ask the question.

To further get at what I mean, let's look at another way of answering this question: with rules. We might, as many designers have done, look at the situation this question presents to us, and decide to fix the game book instead of fixing play. Instead of insisting that the player adjust their relationship to the fiction, we might attempt to simply provide the player with a satisfactory reason to spend their character's money on a private room. And here we've hit the contradiction on the head—it is the player who demands justification for the character's actions. These are not the same persons, player and character, and they do not have the same motivations. While it may make sense for the character to spend the extra gold on a private room, the player gets no special benefit from doing so. After all, the player doesn't have to sleep on an uncushioned bench in a tavern hall, and the player doesn't have to spend the next day groggy from getting a bad night's sleep as a result.

This casts the question in a new light. We might ask ourselves instead how we can represent the character's subjectivity to the player in such a way that the player can immediately understand their character's motivations (vis-à-vis their choice of accommodations) experientially. That is, how can we allow the player to feel the same way about private rooms that their character obviously should, given the fiction? And of course we do that with rules. There are any number of options. For instance, The Nightmares Underneath arranges accommodations into tiers that come with differing probabilities of having your possessions stolen, or rolling the following day's HP with disadvantage, among other consequences.¹ Other game books have other rules along similar lines. This approach is one that understands the question "Why pay for private accommodations?" as a question about the interface of a character's experience of their world with the player's experience of their character's experience of their world. It's a question of moving the fiction across the abstraction-divide that separates players from characters. And we generally do that with rules, because rules are inherently abstractions.

This brings up a new concern. If we admit that the issue at hand is a fundamental disconnect between the player and their character, one that makes it hard for the player to integrate their character's actions, then perhaps we should take a moment to understand the potential causes of that issue before we jump immediately to treating its symptoms. So we ask, what might necessitate the kind of supererogatory justification the initial question about accommodation seems to be asking for? The most straightforward answer is our own expectations: we expect that our fictional decisions for our character can, should, and even must be allowed and justified by rules, to the extent that anything that isn't justified by a rule feels on balance false and arbitrary. This is not merely a "But what's in it for me?" demand for reciprocity—an expectation that the system will reward us with better integers for making sensible decisions for our character—though that's likely part of it. It's larger than that, it's a kind of reverse-reification of the fiction by way of abstraction through rules. This is how perverse we have become, that we demand abstraction and call its absence unrealistic. It's not that our characters cannot do the things we think they should do without rules, it's that it feels fake without rules, it feels arbitrary. Systems, then, have become more real to us than our own stories, than our own characters.

Should this then be acceptable to us? Is this something we are to accept and indeed indulge, systemically, by providing alternate methods of integrating our characters' actions into our play? If role-play is simply that, playing a role, then shopping that task out onto rules is perhaps counter-productive. We can thus understand this process in which character actions are abstracted into game mechanisms in order to make them more digestible as ultimately an elision of role-play, rather than a reification of fiction. "Simple player," the rules say. "No need to understand your character's internality, no need to feel the weight of narrative on its own terms. Simply roll these dice instead, allow their indifference to imbue your own indifference with meaning. This, too, is play." And indeed it is play, in ways familiar perhaps from Yahtzee or Doom, but is it role-play in the unique formulation offered to us by tabletop role-play? Is it something to aspire to?

Elision

And perhaps here we've hit on a differing conception of the function of rules: not as a way to make the fiction legible to players, whose play rightly serves that purpose in the first place; but as a way to elide certain elements of play that we find undesirable for one reason or another. With this example regarding the price of accommodations, we can understand the function of a rule not as a way to create in the player a desire to choose the option that their character would appropriately choose for themselves, but as a way to remove the local responsibility of role-play from the player entirely, allowing them to ignore that portion of play in favor of other (presumably more interesting) things.

Let's take two differing examples of how a rule might approach the question of accommodations. These rules are something of my own invention. First:

When purchasing accommodations for a night, players must first pay for their room and board. They may further spend an amount of money such as may indicate the cost of food and drink and other miscellaneous merriment. Having done so, they roll 1d100, adding to the total the amount of gold they spent, and reference the result on the Accommodations Outcomes Table.

From there we could imagine, for instance, an Accommodations Outcomes Table that has results arranged from terrible at the low end ("You die of exposure," perhaps) to good at the high end ("You meet a wealthy businessman at dinner named M. Gregory who offers you stewardship of a three-masted sailing vessel loaded with saltfish," say).

We could still understand this rule in terms of reification: the existence of the rule reassures the player that, by spending more money on accommodations, they are correspondingly more likely to avoid bad outcomes. However, as before, the player knew this already. The absence of the rule does not imply the absence of bad outcomes at cheaper accommodations, nor does the existence of the rule create bad outcomes. Indeed, the rule has severely limited the potential bad outcomes in both kind and number—after all, without such a rule, the bad outcomes could be nearly anything the referee might find appropriate, and not merely those listed on a 1d100 table. And so we arrive again at elision: it must therefore be that the rule serves to preclude the player's need to think at all about why their character might purchase a given type of accommodation, or what the specific fictional consequences of their decision might be. If this is a desirable effect, then this is perhaps a desirable rule. If the desired effect is to engender deep narrative engagement on the part of the player, allowing players to play in the narrative space around room-renting, then the rule would seem to fail.

Now a second type of rule:

When you ask around town for a bed to rent, roll 2d6+SAVVY. On a result of 7-9, choose one: the accommodations are cheap, or the accommodations are safe. On a 10+, both. On a 6-, neither.

Even more than the previous example, this rule completely releases players from the need to choose any particular accommodation over another. Instead, the result of the dice implies what type of accommodations their character ultimately acquires: dangerous and cheap or safe and expensive (on a 7-9), safe and cheap (10+), or dangerous and expensive (6-). The player sees their character—in this one, limited moment—behave as if on their own, largely unguided by the player. At the same time, because it provides nothing at all by way of specificity or detail, the rule requires a rather large commitment of the player's attention to incorporate its results back into the fiction. The rule tells the player the quality and price bracket of the room, but nothing else that might be necessary to actually understand how the night plays out. If the room is unsafe, it does not say in what ways. If the room is expensive, it does not give a price. It provides neither the name nor temperament of the proprietor, nor the appearance of the decor, nor even what's written on the building's sign (should it have a sign in the first place). Some of these details, as well as many others that are left off here, might prove necessary in the process of applying this rule to the fiction at hand, and so the player is left to do that work themselves, as they would have done regardless, and with the additional burden of conforming to what vague information the rule provides. If the goal of this rule is to ease a player's engagement with the fiction, it seems in truth to demand most all of the same efforts the player would have had to expend in the rule's absence, providing only additional requirements, more balls to juggle.

What's more, there's a fundamental contradiction hiding in this type of rule. On the one hand, we can, as players, feel its elisionary effect on play. Having reached this issue of accommodations, the rule steps in presumably to take the player through the issue and provide some solution, some way for them to move past this precise moment of play and on to the next (hopefully more compelling) one. And indeed the rule wears its elision on its sleeve: its first effect is to completely remove the player as an agential actor in choosing accommodations for their character. On the other hand, in doing so, the rule doubles back upon itself. Having made this initial elisionary overture, it then provides some half-formed truths about the world—truths that the player will inevitably be forced to complete. Having provided a structure that should by rights allow for the elision of the choice of accommodations, the rule then demands that the player indeed invest more attention into the issue. If the player had the energy and inclination to do this work themselves, as the rule requires, they presumably would have done so already. What good has the rule done them? It has taken them out of their character, and put them into the writers' room, relegated them to a different kind of participation in the fiction that is more abstract and ungrounded—things that video games and board games do very well, but that undermine the form-specific strengths of tabletop role-play. Indeed, things that don't look like role-play much at all.

So we see how the idea of reification deceives us as writers and users of rules. We see that rules are capable of mitigating those moments of play where things are difficult for the player to engage for one reason or another, and so we imagine that rules do this work directly, by forcing or incentivizing players to engage the fiction, or by providing some novel pathway into the fiction. But rules do not do this duty directly (when they do it at all), by providing some positive or novel kind of play—they do so indirectly, by eliminating some or all of the infinite field of play, by requiring less fictional engagement from the player, and ultimately by weakening a player's immediate connection to the fiction. It is not always wrong to do so, of course, but by first understanding the inherently elisionary nature of rules, we can more readily avoid expecting players to both ignore and belabor the same moment of play, asking them to engage a moment we have also primed them to pass over.