Often when looking at tabletop RPGs, people start with the setting. Often the first things said will be along the lines of it’s a Fantasy or Science Fiction or Horror game and from there people focus on the specifics of the setting and attitude. While that is important considering RPGs are often played for the sake of telling interesting stories with friends, it’s often neglects the game portion of the equation.

Mechanics play a big role in how players and game masters approach a game. Often some sort of shorthand will be used in the description like referencing the kind of dice used or using a popular system with similar mechanics as reference. Often this enough for those well versed in the hobby. The problem is these make it hard to break out of a shell as it makes new games harder to visualize for those who may approach them. So here I’m going to talk about some of the more common types of games in a broad sense.

Resource Management

The most common style of RPG is the resource management game. As the name suggests, these games focus on a character’s resource pools. Usually players will spend some kind of resource to preserve others like drinking a potion to reduce the chance of taking damage to their health. Dice rolls and character abilities are all focused around how these resources get spent and the risks involved. Character statistics often add new options or make odds a little better under certain scenarios. Tension is generated by pushing that risk in interesting ways.

The most iconic example of this would be Dungeons and Dragons. You could have a situation where players are getting down a higher ledge to enter a dungeon. If they jump, can they afford the fall damage? How good is their character at climbing? Do they have a rope they can tie off that might have to be left behind? Or does someone have a spell slot to slow their fall to the point it doesn’t matter?

In the long term, players are thinking about which of their options best saves resources for other potential hazards. The example above may not have much tension in a bubble, but adding in some sort of time crunch or other threat can make even minor inconveniences seem like the path to snowballing into serious danger on a wrong choice.

When players work together, it is often to determine the best collaborative use of their resources and any synergies they have to minimize resource expenditure at any particular challenge. These games work best when a game master is tuned to the spending and refreshing of these resources.

Specialization Application

While much less common, specialization application games do have a strong presence within the RPG space. These games are much more heavily focused towards a character’s skills rather than something they have or even the dice rolls themselves. Players will build characters with a focus in mind and trying to make the best character to approach that type of challenge as they can. These games are often narrower in scope than resource management games and game play is closer to solving a puzzle.

In a game like Shadowrun, mechanics for each major subsystem are complex. They each encourage specialization and system mastery from players to get their characters to be among the best of the best at their thing. Often these systems use mechanics that mitigate the randomness to a point where risk still exists but a player can be confident in their character’s talent. A situation where players are trying to get to a restriced research lab could be solved multiple ways. A social character could talk their way through, a combat character could simply use force. Tension is often derived from layering types of challenges that no one character can defeat alone or putting characters outside of their comfort zone.

Occasionally wild dice rolls will result in catastrophic failure or an unexpected win but they are not the norm. They are opportunities to be celebrated by giving game masters a chance to let an unexpected character shine or turn a surefire situation into a story that will be remembered for a long time to come. Over the long term, players will be focusing on how best to anticipate upcoming challenges and what they can do to subvert or overcome it.

Players will be working on synchronizing their skill sets to find the best approaches to whatever problems arise, often branching into new areas as they are given the resources to do so. These games work best when game masters empower their character’s skill sets in complex and unexpected ways. Layering challenges or giving unexpected niche opportunities often make for memorable games.

Narrative

Narrative games are more loosely defined of the three. Often closer to group storytelling with a framework and dice than a game. Systems like Fate fit relatively neatly into this category. These games rely on the group to bring tension to the table themselves.

It is a bit trickier to framework how best to approach this kind of game as it becomes much more variable between groups. As long as everyone is approaching it with a similar mentality these can result in some of the most fast paced and memorable kinds of game. On the flip side, if there are wildly different expectations or agendas amongst those playing, it can devolve much more quickly.

Players looking to have a sense of mechanical progression will often lose interest in the long term but they can be great for those who are more interested in building a world with their friends.

These games work best for groups that like to play fast and loose with the rules and have a lot of respect for each other as players of the same game. Especially when they have complimentary ideas on how characters should function in the story they’re telling.

Most games contain some aspects of all three categories. Usually resources are necessary to determine the state of a character or give some form of progression. Characters specialize to make their actions feel more relevant in the contexts that they want to be strong in. If there is no player driven narrative, you are basically playing a board game. That being said sometimes things don’t fit neatly into one category or another. Blades in the Dark, for example, is a very narrative resource management game. It has a handful of values to keep track of for the players, but how those resources are spent often focus much more on changing the fiction than having a numerical impact on the opposition.

None of these in particular are any better than the others but can lead to very different types of games. Knowing what kind of story your group wants to tell and how they want the rules to impact it can make a big difference in how well a game goes.