Ruin Explorer
Legend
Mostly I'd say "small experimental games" for these, but there is a sort of subset where the win condition thing is quite a major part, when it's generally absent from other indie and mainstream RPGs, and that honestly strikes me as something different and worthy of a name.I've bought a bunch of charity RPGs bundles on Itch.io and have finally organized the games I've downloaded neatly into folders--and am now facing the daunting task of actually reading all thousand+ games. In order to make myself do it, I'm writing short reviews for my group's discord, on the grounds that hey, we might want to play them one day. My reviews aren't "professional quality," but at least they convey what the game is about and how to play it.
A lot of the RPGs I got are, IMO, somewhere between what I would consider a typical TTRPG and a board game. There's a fairly narrow purpose and win condition and while there's room for RP within those confines, there's very little to support it outside of them. For instance, I was just looking at one game called Another Face in the Crowd, a cyberpunk game wherein you have to perform a certain number of actions before the BBEG progresses a certain number of steps on a track. This feels very board-gamey, but you're also supposed to RP the actions you take.
Another game I got was called Arcane Academia--why yes, I am sorting through these games in alphabetical order--which is a "student at a magic boarding school" game. It consists of a series of mini-games, each one representing a class you take or something like mealtimes. Things like "write down your favorite quotes or lyrics or poem on a card, and describe the spell this created based on what you wrote down and the way you recited it" or "open up a real book, pick a specific passage, create a Rumor based on it, and then turn it into a worldbuilding element." This feels like a solo journaling game, except there's a GM, multiple players, and something akin to leveling up.
So, what's the name for games like these?
There's a guy on Twitter - NOT Grant Howitt, who writes very small but normal RPGs as 1-pagers - who does 1-page RPGs, but they're all basically win/lose focused and don't innately require any role-playing, nor, to my mind, really encourage you to RP much, and I think that's quite representative of a subset of these. Like basically it's just rolling some dice to see if you win, but you have few choices, if any, and your roleplaying is post-facto - i.e. you roll the dice as the game demands, and you could RP out what happened, but the roll isn't really happening because of your choice.
I don't think that's really generally right, because some of these have stronger win/lose-type stuff than "normal" RPGs.If the game doesn't have contested propositions in the traditional sense, my general term for them is "story games".
I've actually see several go the opposite way, and not just end up at "normal RPG", but blow past that and basically end in "almost a board game".If they go much further into unstructured play than that in that they have no real way to determine a winner or loser (except maybe by an Apples to Apples style vote) and you play just for the joy of roleplaying, then I tend to think of them as "theater games".