TTRPGs Need Genres

In Want of Proper Caterogies for Table-top Role-playing Games

Walk around a bookstore and you’ll see novels separated into different genre categories like Romance, Science-Fiction, Mystery, and so on. TTRPGs are not categorised so conveniently, and I wish they were, for several reasons. Perhaps the biggest one is that I think it would help the buying process. Genre categories would give consumers  a better idea of what they are buying. Distributors would more effectively be able to market the TTRPGs we publish. And we, as publishers, might actually have a common language—something we’ve been operating without, more or less, since the beginning of the industry.

Current TTRPG Genre Categories Mean Bubkiss

A recent article by Compose Dream Games’ Joshua Kitz (a very insightful fellow) made me realize that what we currently use as something-like-genre categories for TTPRG are super unhelpful.

What we do have are strictly marketing terms, like “indie”, “trad”, “OSR”, “storygame”, that are not based on what they do, or even what they are, but based almost entirely on slippery marketing angles and sales appeals that go in and out of fashion, focus, and relevance. What they are not, is informative.

Guessing what the play experience of a TTRPG will be like by these labels is a whole guessing game unto itself. It may be labelled as a “storygame” but that could mean you are expected to journal, or do story-stick exercises, or it could mean you’re spending your afternoon making prank phone calls in your underwear to earn watermelon points. One of the categories I subscribe to through DriveThruRPG to send me emails about each day is “Core Rulebook”, which is about as helpful as “New Movie”. As perhaps the most famous example of a non-functioning genre label in TTRPGS, publishers might be using “indie” to refer to their company’s size, or even just an aesthetic attitude they have adopted for market appeal, to communicate an attitude that they hope will boost sales. Let's not pretend universal industry agreement on the term "indie".

I think TTRPG publishers already express a need for better categorization of TTRPGs. This is why you see the backs of some TTRPGs with obnoxious run-on sentences of supposed contradictory terms to communicate the play experience, like “OSR wargame storygame rules-light pajama party”, which cancels itself out horribly and tells you nothing about playing the thing, when every little word is just trying to carefully planted to hook you just in case. Extensive run-on genre descriptions just to get part-way to establishing play expectations is another barrier to entry for the hobby, in an industry that already has many barriers to entry, even if all the gatekeeping went away tomorrow.

It’s a dangerous game we play with genre, every new term rolling the dice to try to mean something, and failing.

Genre Takes Time

Novel genres are not perfect. Anyone who works in a bookstore can tell you that a similar genre ambiguity does exist in the fiction section. My parents owned a bookstore when I was a teenager, and let me tell you, it does not always work. But, at least—while imperfect—those genre categories are functionally useful. You know roughly what you’re getting when you buy a trashy Romance paperback.

Or at least, you do now. I think it's important to point out that it was a process getting to that point. It took hundreds of years of discussions to give us the mostly-useful genre terms for novels we have today. Definitions shifted along the way. “Romance” once referred to what we would now term as adventure narratives, like Rob Roy or Treasure Island, closer to what we would now shelve as “Suspense”. Today, Romance as a term excludes high adventure, but does categorize a spectrum of fiction from relationship drama to smut. That’s fine, because at least we all share the same terms. We have our fence. We got somewhere with it. It just took time.

TTRPGs as a medium still are not, as of today, even 50 years old. We can’t expect to be in the same state of maturity with genre categorization as novels. We are at the beginning of that process.

This is not all one big gripe—I think it’s actually very important that we find our genre categories for TTRPGs. If we want TTRPGs to continue as a medium, and preferably also as an industry, we need to get on the same page with these genres, not just for solving Internet arguments, but to ease the publishing cycle in the industry and to help sales.

Workable Exceptions? Or, a starting point?

You may be thinking of examples of TTRPG genres that currently function as both informative and marketable. I think “OSR” is a term that signifies a specific and well-agreed experience, and functions relatively well for communicating play experience. It’s pretty much what it says on the tin, even if people can’t agree what the “R” stands for.

More likely what you are thinking of is something like “Power by the Apocalypse". It, and similar terms, are clunky, but they do help consumer understanding. However it has a terrible side-effect of creeping us towards a creative monopoly by a handful of systems, where games are categorised not by genre but by a few, very few, “marketable” rulesets. I therefore do not consider this a good starting point for building up genre fences within TTRPGs. To someone like me that wants to explore the depth of the TTRPG medium, this actually makes things worse by restricting the field of consideration, especially if it trends well. The pressure on publishers, feeling the need to slap a PbtA label on your game “or it won’t sell”, is the creative equivalent of all new fantasy books being Harry Potter sequels. “You’re trying to market a fantasy book that’s not Harry Potter? In this economy?" No.

We need genres, not systems to follow.

The Day the Music Died

With no better way to surmise all this, I’ll end with a story. The story is: Thank God we’re not the music industry. For many, many years I was the Programme Director at a small community radio station, and during that time I did about three or four live on-air interviews a week, typically with touring bands. The question you do not ask a band is, “What genre are you?” Because they all give the same answer, some variation on, “Oh, we defy genre. We transcend genre. We’re basically a (insert seven different genres) band.”

There were exceptions, certainly, people who knew how to define themselves within the space, but by and large if you want a good example of how messed up genre categories can get when being bent and twisted for marketing purposes, take a look at the music industry. Genre categories are so deranged by sales-motives as to be completely useless. Popular artists can win awards in seemingly any genre category by virtue of their popularity and not at all the content of their art. The labels exist, sure, but they’re bent and abused. As a result, the music industry runs exclusively on a cult of celebrity since its terms have largely ceased to function on an operational level. (Cult of celebrity is a big thing in TTRPGs, too, and that’s not a coincidence.)

What keeps the same thing from happening to fiction books, a business just as money-grubby and awful? I think it's the fact that the people working in fiction still have to shelve the physical rn books, and they’ll put them in the category they feel they belong to regardless of what’s printed on the dust-jacket. (We are not so organized in TTRPGs. Partly because we don’t have the shelf space in FLGS that fiction books have in stores wholly dedicated to them.) The music industry, in having lost the music store as a community staple, cut off their main avenue for discoverability. Commercial radio is in its death throes. So, how do you find new music? You don’t. You keep listening to old music. Or you have music passed on to you from friends who happened to discover it, and probably did through organic social media. On the whole, that’s uncomfortably like the TTPGs industry, but in the worst ways. That’s our future—undiscoverable. “Why would you make a fantasy story that’s not Harry Potter?”

This is why people think “There are too many TTRPGs being published” when they wouldn’t ever say, “There are too many movies coming out,” because they can’t find the stuff they like.

The music industry has only been employing genre labels for about 30 years more than TTRPGs, so, it might be a glimpse into our future.

Tomorrow’s Search Engine

Let me put on my tin foil hat, which, while it may look garish, is in fact a perfectly serviceable and real hat in this place and should be taken no less seriously for the fact that it's made of tin foil.

The need for genres in the TTPRG space is significant  because it’s the Harry Potters who want to control the message, corner the market, make a walled garden around their product, and create the illusion that if it’s HP brand, then it’s not fantasy. Just, Harry Potter is in our case, Dungeons & Dragons. We can even see this happening (but accident? By marketing momentum? Certainly not maliciously) with PtbA.

Meta tags are the exclusive purview (and under the direct manipulation of) Google, so they’re out as reliable anchors to the relationship between content and accessible market understanding. We need a through-line dictated by an awareness of the hobby, the TTRPG equivalent of practical shelf space considerations in a book store determining where to place the book.

Otherwise, we are letting more powerful people than ourselves dictate the games we get for their own benefit. The record companies determine what gets played on the radio.

The moral of the story does not have to be that capitalism destroys everything, that its ever-refining pursuit of the dollar strips the art out of the medium one fiscal quarter at a time. TTRPGS have always had a vibrant, creative, exciting, grass-roots industry, which has never especially needed to turn a profit to thrive. But the future is not safe. As we give more of our independence over to Internet algorithms with their own profit-driven motives, we risk the life of the TTRPG industry being refined out of search results and bumped to the bottom of lists. A new brilliant TTRPG that does not have a tremendous financial backing behind it will be like a tree falling in the woods—if no one can find it in the first place, does it even exist? Establishing genres, a category of search-ability and discoverability beyond rule systems, one that serviceably tells you what you can expect, just might give TTRPGs a chance to grow. That’s the future I want for our hobby.

James Kerr

Radio James Games

(See the follow up post to this, coming soon, one where I try to work out a kind of genetic makeup for what could be TTRPG genres. How that will shake down in the future is anyone’s guess, but you have to start somewhere.)