How fragile is your game design?
Exploring the concept of "fragility" in tabletop game design, and why it matters
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Last week we were solving emergent murder mysteries with The Locked Room Murder Mystery Game.
This week we are exploring the concept of “fragile design” in games. What does it mean if a game’s design is fragile? Why is this concept so critical for game design?
The choice of Tollund
I released Tollund last week. Inspired by the Tollund Man of Denmark, Tollund is a 60-page solo journaling game about impossible choices in Iron Age Northern Europe.
In the game, your village is starving. The crops have failed, and the gods demand a sacrifice to restore them. The council has chosen you as the one to die, but you must be willing. Over four days, you experience events that will push your fate toward Acceptance (i.e. death in the bog) or Rejection (i.e. refusal to be sacrificed).
In the course of a game, players will typically draw 12 of the 52 available events. Because the events are crafted to be a mix of bias between Acceptance and Rejection, the final outcome is always influenced by which cards are drawn.
But what if I just refuse?
In the course of testing, one of the playtesters asked, “I just reject the idea of human sacrifice. What happens if I’ve already decided to refuse?”1
At first glance, it seems like a silly question. What happens? Well, the game won’t work. It’s like asking what happens in Risk if everyone decides to just live in peace!
If you think about it, however, it’s a really interesting question.
Nowhere in the rules does Tollund say you must choose a mixture of moving Fate Tokens to both acceptance and rejection. In fact, if I were to make this an explicit rule (e.g. “You must move at least X tokens to Acceptance.”) it would break the immersion of the experience, and potentially break the entire game.
I have another example from MEPACON. The booth next to me published horror TTRPGs and was running demos of them throughout the weekend. During one of the games, the players all refused to have their characters leave the initial room at the start of the game. They decided it was too risky, so they just locked the door and stayed there. The GM, to his credit, did everything possible to get them out of that room and to experience the full adventure. Yet they still refused.2
Implicit in the horror TTRPG was the idea that players don’t just barricade themselves in a room and hide for the entire game.
So what do we call these things that are requirements of a game, and yet can’t be explicitly written in the rules?
Fragile game design
I happened to listen to the January 2023 “Interview with Cole Wehrle” episode of Game Design Deep Dive recently, and was fascinated by discussion in the first five minutes.3 It talked about exactly what I was pondering with Tollund.
In it, Cole Wehrle describes what he calls fragility in game design:
Different than victory points: The game demands something other than simply “playing well” from the players.
Unspoken and unwritten: These demands are “guidelines” that float above the rules, and are unspoken and unwritten. In fact, making them explicit might detract from the game.
Just as important as rules: The demands, although unwritten, are just as important as the rules themselves. If the players don’t opt into demands, the game falls apart.
Cole gives the examples of Northern Pacific (Holland, 2013), Turncoats (Simonsson, 2021), and Dune (Eberle, Kittredge, et al., 2019).
He notes that in Dune, the game demands that the stronger factions must each act in a “selfish” manner and try to gain victory. The players need to believe they can claim victory themselves. If the strong factions form an alliance instead, it brings the game to an early and unsatisfying conclusion.
The rules don’t explicitly prohibit long-term alliances, and yet that prohibition is required for the tension and drama of the game to work.
Examples of fragility in tabletop games
Once you start to think about fragility in game design, you will notice it everywhere. It exists in almost all games, except perhaps for some of the most abstract ones:
Negotiation games: Games like John Company: Second Edition (Wehrle, 2022) rely on negotiation between players to work. Negotiation is never, however, explicitly mandated by the game. The rules only give broad instructions on how negotiations are to be conducted. If all players refuse to negotiate, the game has significantly less drama and can fall flat.
Social deduction games: Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game (Konieczka, 2008), The Resistance (Eskridge, 2009), and other social deduction games rely on players lying, bluffing, and negotiating during the game. While the rules never explicitly say you must lie X% of the time, if players always tell the truth the game will fall apart.
Limited communication co-op games: In games like The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine (Sing, 2019) and The Mind (Warsch, 2018) the rules explicitly say that players may not talk and may not openly coordinate what they are doing. Yet the games won’t work if there is absolutely no communication. So players end up developing their own ways to communicate without explicitly communicating, using subtle hints or body language. In this case, the players must almost act contrary to the explicit rules to have the game work as intended.
Wargames: Conflict simulation games provide a clear example of fragility in design. Wargames will often have pages of rules defining how units move, interact, and battle. Rarely will they explicitly outlaw long-term alliances or peace agreements. If all sides decide to stop fighting and just get along, however, there isn’t much of a game left.
Open world TTRPGs: The implicit expectation of most TTRPGs is that players will actively engage with the world and make meaningful choices. As with the example of the horror TTRPG above, players are expected to leave the starting room and go explore. Dungeons & Dragons is a very different game than intended if the players never accept quests, never explore, and instead just decide to spend their days fishing in a safe location.
In all of these examples, there are two different types of demands presented by the games: (1) explicit rules that must be followed, and (2) unwritten rules that are required for the game to work as intended.
How fragile is your game?
I had built some fragility into Tollund without really thinking about it. There’s nothing wrong with that, and in fact it is the fragility of TTRPGs that make them so immersive and fun. It is worth some time as a designer, however, to recognize the fragility in your designs.
What are the unwritten and unspoken demands that your game is making?
Here are a few ways to identify fragility in games:
Playtest with diverse groups: Players bring their own history, styles, and expectations with them to your game. If you playtest your wargame only with historical wargamers, you will see one aspect of play but not as wide of a range as possible. Using a broader group of players will allow you to see some players who prioritize strategy over negotiation, or others who rely on social interaction rather than tactics.
Look for gaps in the rulebook: If the game relies on negotiation, bidding wars, or backstabbing, see where those are described in the rulebook. Some games might not explicitly recognize them. Others might give a broad framework, while still others might have explicit rules. Identify what makes the game fun and then see if it is in the rulebook or if it is an unwritten part of the game.
Try to break the game: When playing a game, try to choose an extreme strategy that is allowed under the rules as written. For example, refuse to negotiate no matter what, or refuse to make any alliances. You could also try to have everyone team up on one player, or have everyone turtle-up in a corner. If the game is significantly less fun when someone uses one of these strategies, it is a sign of fragility.
Just as understanding the kinds of fun and the layers of thematic design can fundamentally change the way you think about games, so too can understanding fragility in design.
Once you see it, it’s hard to unsee in every game you play.
Exercise
This week, instead of a poll, let’s try an exercise!
Pick any tabletop game that you enjoy. It can be a board game, TTRPG, or anything in between. Think about the game and answer the following questions:
What are the “fragile design” elements of the game, and what do they implicitly demand of players?
What happens to the game experience if players do not follow the unwritten rules?
How would the game be different if the unwritten/unspoken rules were made explicit and written down?
I’d love to hear some of your examples. Please post them in the comments below!
Conclusion
Some things to think about:
Fragility is everywhere: It’s hard to think of a game that doesn’t have fragility built into it. Almost all games come with demands that the players must fulfill to get the most out of the game. Explicit, written rules and implicit, unwritten rules work together to create the overall play experience.
Fragility is a good thing: If we removed all fragility from game design (i.e. everything is explicitly spelled out in the rules), we would lose the magic of the play experience. The best gaming experiences come when everyone at the table understands the unspoken demands and fully engages in the game.
Understand where your game is fragile: The goal is not to remove fragility from your game, it is to understand where it exists. Fragile game design is another tool to be used to increase immersion, create tension, and enhance the drama of a game. The first step to using that tool is understanding where it exists.
What do you think? Is fragile game design good or bad? Where do you draw the line in what should be explicit in the rules and what should be implicit and never spoken?
— E.P. 💀
P.S. Face an impossible choice in TOLLUND, a solo game from Exeunt Press.
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It is the official position of Skeleton Code Machine that we are against human sacrifice in bogs, swamps, and other marshy areas.
It’s a sign of solid game design that the players still said they had a good time by the end of the session. It did, however, require a lot more work and fast thinking on the part of the GM.
I only recently discovered this podcast, but the interviews seem to be really interesting. If you watched “The Games Behind Your Government’s Next War” about wargaming, be sure to listen to the Game Design Deep Dive interview with Volko Ruhnke.
I actually think war games are among the least fragile designs. Tactical and operational games will generally have explicit objectives a player must achieve for victory as a matter of course (e.g., the attacker must seize hill 314 by the end of turn 10 without suffering 50% casualties. Attacker also wins if there are no enemy units on the board at any time, etc.). These sorts of explicit goals prevent the situation of two players staring at each other across the board and refusing to do anything, or of one player retreating off-board to deny victory to the other player by ending the game early. The fragility of strategic or grand-strategic games, where there may be limited or no explicit conditions for victory given, are mitigated somewhat by the design and nature of the game itself. Players who take the time to set up this type of game and then refuse to engage each other wouldn’t feel too satisfied with how they had just spent their afternoon. Conflict is inherent in the game design and so players choosing to play that type of game will likely engage one another instead of doing nothing.
With TTRPGs, I think the same can be done without breaking the theme or immersion of the game for players. For instance, in the example of the players barricading themselves in a room and refusing to move, the designer could have set the condition that the players win by finding the exit from the building, or by finding the amulet that breaks the curse, or that the room they are in is slowly filling with water, etc. Pretty much any thematically appropriate device that would get them to leave that initial space after a period of time.
I can see from the examples you list places where I think the fragility is a failure in design. For example, when I created a horror RPG, one thing built into every character is a reason the character will do foolish things like investigate scary mysteries - because I've run into the exact scenario where a player just nopes out of the scenario because it is scary and dangerous.
In reflecting on fragility, I find that my design approach is to have as little fragility as possible while still having strong themes and flexibility. But if something is necessary to the game for it to function, I very much believe that thing should be in the rules as written. You can hide them cleverly, maybe, or strongly imply them with character sheet design or card design or whatever, but there needs to be an in-game reason for the game to be played.
A game I recently Kickstarted, Fangelsehala, comes to mind. It is crystal clear framing - your community needs money to survive. There is no way to raise or earn the money in time. But there is a nearby dungeon that might have treasure that's worth the money you need. I suppose "We let our community perish" is an option, but it's one that's outside the clear purview of the game. It would be like playing Terraforming Mars, but at the outset saying you refuse to terraform Mars. At that point, it isn't fragility, it's just players declaring they refuse to play the game. (That's how I'd frame someone playing Tollund and saying at the outset they refuse to be sacrificed no matter what - not fragility, just the wrong game for that person)