• 10 Dec, 2025 *

A cliche when talking about tabletop roleplaying is that "unlike other games, there is no win condition; you win if everyone has fun." I’m a splitter not a lumper here - I’m reluctant to view tabletop roleplaying through the game lens in the first place - but this distinction seems to me to be wrongheaded.

goals of vs goals in activities

Let’s say we sit down to play Pandemic. We all attempt to scour the earth of the titular diseases, and - not having a great deal of system mastery - absolutely fail to do so. It was a real nail-biter, down to the line, and one mistake cost us the victory. Afterwards we agreed it was an awesome time and that we’ll play it again.

When we do, we return having read some strategies and go in with a lot more system mastery, and proceed to a sort of comp stomp. It’s obvious that we’re going to win most of the way through the game, and we get bored. We agree that if we’re going to play again, we’ll have to choose one of the higher difficulty scenarios.

In each of these, there was a goal of the game, which we achieved only the first time, and a goal in the game1, which we achieved only the second. These goals themselves didn’t differ between games - each time we wanted to enjoy a bit of collective frotz, and part of our methodology for achieving that was constraining ourselves to the activity’s procedures and adopting "achieve the internal game win state" as a goal - just our ability to achieve them.

When you are playing a game, you are trying to win the game; when you are deciding whether to play a game or how to modify it, you are trying to cultivate an experience where trying to win the game tends to produce fun, however defined.

I chose Pandemic to make irrelevant the difference that in most tabletop roleplaying, the default stance is cooperative, whereas in most sports and board games, the default stance is competitive. But obviously this distinction applies just as well to competitive games. If you and I play chess one of us will win (probably), but we either successfully have fun together or we don’t. In the sense of the cliche, we "win if everyone has fun."2

Likewise, it’s perfectly possible to play tennis without keeping score; I typically play tennis in this way. In this case, there’s not a distinct win and lose state; your goal is simply to serve back the ball each round.3 However, the distinction between the goal of the activity and the goal in it remains.

varying goals-of

In the broadest possible sense of fun, you could say people are having fun if they’re satisfied with how the activity turned out; in this sense the goal of all activities is having fun. In the narrowest sense, it may be a particular qualia of unserious positive affect inclined to exclaim "whee!"

You might play Model UN with the goal of "whee!," or developing historical understanding or empathy, or burnishing your college applications, or some combination of these. What counts as "fun" is a semantic question, so this isn’t really an objection to the cliche, but it’s worth noting that "fun" is typically a placeholder.

varying goals-in

It’s an ancient model but I do think the ancient one, RPGA GDS, does usefully break down the major goals-in that players adopt at a table:

• overcoming challenges (gamism)
• producing an interesting story (dramatism)
• having experiences and making decisions as another person and having the world react as if it were a real place (simulationism)

Within simulationist play, there is a further level of hierarchy: having decided to adopt the viewpoint of a pretended person in a pretended world, you now have the sub-sub-goal of whatever your character’s goals happen to be.

If you want to get really complicated, you could say something like: I want to have fun with my friends, in order to do that we want to have a mix of overcoming-challenges and dramatically interesting character moments, in order to do that we are pretending to be people with goals that are hard to achieve and the GM will neutrally portray the world as if it would happen, and within that we are trying to achieve the goals that our characters have, for they are our goals insofar as we are them. This sounds convoluted when written out, and each level of indirection produces possible frictions, but can be done reasonably effortlessly because, much like walking, this kind of playing-pretend is something we naturally start practicing from a very early age, and the actually weird parts of tabletop roleplay are elsewhere.4

joesky tax

The next time PCs start off by meeting in a tavern, have them play never have I ever, or two truths and a lie.

C. Thi Nguyen calls this a "submerged" goal; his excellent Games: Agency as Art is what clarified the ideas in this post for me.↩ 1.

to be "sporting," broadly, is to play with this distinction in mind; and to have just as good a time whether you win or lose, even though you are genuinely trying to win when you play.↩ 1.

in principle you could play Magic: the Gathering this way, with each of you trying to deal as much damage to each other as you can until the game state becomes uninteresting. Why tennis and D&D (even the very gamist kind - say you are trying to recover as much treasure as possible, but without a cutoff that counts as the win state) are better-suited to this than M:tG is an exercise for others to work out.↩ 1.

there’s a post to be made later about how the distinguishing feature of tabletop roleplay - if its closest cousins are not videogames or linear narratives, but House, Jubensha, and Model UN - is its relative disembodiment.↩