Of Games & Sub-Games

Many games, such as chess, have just one level. But you could imagine a chess variant where each time a player moves a piece the two players resort to a Street Fighter bout to determine which chess piece takes control of the space. In this chess variant chess is "the game" and Street Fighter is the sub-game.

Most role playing games have a number of sub-games, but to know what the sub-games are you first have to identify the "highest level" of the game. In my chess variant the highest level of the game is the chessboard, and we know this because when Street Fighter concludes the player's attention returns there. So I propose that the highest level of a game is "the gameboard to where the player's attention returns when all temporary distractions are resolved." Using this definition I suggest that "the game" of Dungeons & Dragons is the in persona role playing of the life of an adventurer, from birth to death (even if childhood is either hand-waived or handled with a paragraph or two of back story). What is so fascinating about this is how few rules there are for D&D's primary gameboard. Almost all of the rules in D&D deal exclusively with sub-games, particularly combat. There are a number of rules which effect the primary level of D&D, such as rules for aging, but for the most part it is free form play mediated only by the participating group's ability to form a consensus as to cause and effect within the game world.

I think this is why D&D lends itself to so many worlds and settings (official and homebrew), and why it became as popular as it did. The core game has almost no rules at all holding it back, and what few there are (such as aging or equipment price lists) are so ancillary to the real action that they can be ignored or rewritten as needed.

This is probably also the reason so many people think D&D is about combat encounters the way Diablo is. Due to the "invisible" nature of D&D's core game (it is not written anywhere, but can only be experienced through play) many have mistake the D&D's most prominent sub-game for the game itself.