Time for some #ttrpg theory. Go watch this scene from Aliens. it’s 2 and a half minutes long and one of the most important scenes in the film.

The scene just before it is crucial exposition: they have lost contact with the colony on LV426. This scene is a character beat: Gorman is going, Ripley isn’t, Burke is negotiating to try to get the latter to change to the former. But forget plot and character for now. Look at what happens in this scene: Ripley makes coffee. Gorman declines, he’s all business. Burke is a softy, he needs more milk and he’s used to taking advantage of people so he goes to the fridge and gets it himself. It was Paul Reiser who decided to go get the milk. It’s not in the script and it doesn’t have to be. Some would say it shouldn’t be! (Most scriptwriting advice is reminding you that a script is closer to a blueprint than a description of the action happening on screen, and early scriptwriters often over-write description and acting instructions.)

The scriptwriting jargon for what’s happening in this scene is “business”. It’s not action because it’s not key to advancing character or plot or exposition. In this case it does establish character and in plot beats it will often colour the action and in setting beats it often helps highlight setting! But it’s not those things in itself. It’s things the actors can do while doing their lines so they aren’t simply standing in space and announcing them. And it’s not the same as stage directions, because theatre is different: movement is so important on the stage that these kinds of things are more tightly controlled. However, yes, theatre too will often have business. Let’s compare:

Actors and directors might suggest “Oh, when Estragon asks Vladimir about rope, Vladimir will pat his pockets” and someone else might say “No, no, Vladimir should look around on the ground.” And these are important choices! Business isn’t nothing. Sometimes business is everything!

And sometimes business is very much in the script, and described and laid out. It’s just not actually the action. It’s either in the foreground where something else is going on in the subtext or, as in our example in Aliens, in the background where something else is going on in the foreground. Here’s an example where the important part of the scene is Jimmy, the coach who until now hasn’t engaged, has an argument with Dottie about the right call. The business here is that baseball signals are funny, and it’s funny to have an argument indirectly.

The actual definition of what is business and what is stage direction and what is action is not going to be particularly clear, but the point is that there are lots of times in all kinds of media where what’s happening isn’t really what’s important. The purpose of business is to fill the scene, so that whatever else is happening – the action, dialogue, scene-setting, setting-establishment etc – has something to hang off and build on. Not every scene has business, because sometimes all you want to do is fill the screen with acting and dialogue or a kung fu fight. But particularly on screens, where we feel the need for there to be cinema-verite (that is, we expect film and TV to feel sort of like documentaries, capturing reality faithfully), there’s often a lot of business.

I’m going to argue that a lot of the time, a lot of what we’re doing when we play RPGs is like this: it’s business.

I think this is especially true in games where we are simulating things, and as such players spend a lot of time planning things or discussing strategy. I think sometimes buying equipment and levelling up is a kind of business too! We’re not entirely out of the story, but we’re not doing any actual storytelling. I would even say that for a lot of people almost all the mechanical parts of an RPG are “business”, and it’s just there so they can tell a story and act in character (and socialize in a way that’s half-in, half-out of character). I think different RPG players think different things matter! And I think we often don’t know how to talk about what matters.

Often, the way that TTRPG design evolves is in these moments of religious jerks. Someone will experience something bad in a game, and then go off and write down in a rulebook “Don’t ever do this”. Or even stronger, they’ll design a game where you CAN’T do that thing. And then other players will read that advice or rules and they will have a moment like “oh my god someone finally put into words the problems I’ve been having with my games”. And then those people will often make the error of going “this is the new milennium. All previous ways of doing things are inferior or wrong. This is the RIGHT way to game.” Or they’ll go “I want to play games that do it the way game X does it.” And the thing about those approaches is they often skip over understanding what has actually changed and why, and we never actually get good vocabulary for what’s actually happening.

One of the reasons Apocalypse World felt unlike any other game before it is that it has no business. One of the key parts of the design is you only roll the dice when it really fucking matters, and actions don’t exist. Nobody just “does” something in a way that involves the rules in AW. Instead we have moves and every move is important and has the power to drive the scene and the story in a powerful way. The GM advice says not to let players try to “do moves without doing moves” – players should commit to “yes, this is a Cause Harm check”. You can see a similar thing in the Trophy system: potentially, every single roll in that game can cause you to gain insanity, so every roll is REALLY important. Again, these aren’t ability checks. They aren’t “see if you can do a thing”. These rolls are always asking “in this scene, how much does your character embrace their dark side to get what they want or avoid suffering?”

In one of those games, the coffee scene above wouldn’t likely involve any dice. Or if it did, it would push the business aside, away from the rules. It might look like this:

Ripley: I invite them in, I make coffee.
Burke: I want to convince Ripley to go to LV426.
GM: Okay that’s a Change Their Take roll. Tell me how you’re doing it.
Burke: First I’ll imply she’s very safe and will just be advising (fails). Hmm. Can I add a die somehow? (looks at Ripley’s sheet) oh, can I trigger your Goal of getting back into space?
Ripley: Yeah, definitely.

But another GM might go:

Ripley: I invite them in, I make coffee.
Gorman: I think Gorman will accept the coffee but not drink it. Because he’s all about following orders but he’s also all business.
Burke: Is it good coffee?
GM: Ripley, make a roll.
Ripley: What’s the stat?
GM: Let’s say Intelligence.
Ripley: Fail.
GM: Sorry, it’s not good. Synthetic powdered stuff, and Ripley is sleepy from working nights.
Burke: I go get some milk from the fridge while we’re telling her about the attack.
Ripley: Hey that’s my milk?
Burke: What are you, the milk police? Anyway (drops into character) “We want you to come along as an advisor”
Ripley: Yeah nah. Why do you need me if you have marines?
Burke: I’ll roll Persuade, flattering her as the expert. (he fails) Can I try again?
GM: Yeah, but you’ll need to find a new angle.
Burke: (looks at Ripley’s sheet, sees Goal: Get Back to Space) I’ll hint that we can get her off loader duty and back as a flight officer, that’s a new thing.
GM: Sure.

Now here’s the thing. At some point, some GM in the second scene there might have gone “oh you fumbled? Yeah the coffee is so bad Burke pukes everywhere.” And now Ripley feels like she’s playing the wrong game. She’s a klutz, and now this is a sitcom! She yells at the GM that she wasn’t going to make coffee if that could happen! The GM says “no takebacks!”. So Ripley goes away and writes down “only roll when it really matters” or “say yes or roll the dice” or “always establish the stakes in every roll”. Or worse she says “old games suck because they didn’t understand that we were trying to tell a story”. Or “game X sucks because it’s too easy to fail”. Or “I want the system to be invisible until I need it, stop rolling dice all the damn time”. But what really happened is the GM (or the rules) took something that should have been business and made it into action – without telling the players that might happen.

All of those conclusions are valid, let me be clear. But thinking about how I GM, I tend to make a lot of business rolls, all the time, because I find that a) rolls keep players really engaged with the activity of “playing a shared experience at a table” and b) add tons of colour and story. Does that occasionally risk throwing off the whole story? Yes, if you’re not careful. But it has benefits as well! Some of the greatest moments in my games have come from business rolls. Also, I think it’s okay if sometimes business rolls do become important things. That’s fine with me. I think if we avoid a lot of that, we end up deciding too much what the story should be. You don’t want to wreck someone’s idea of their character or violate the contract of what the game is about, but it might be really interesting if Ripley’s coffee IS a plot point!

But also, making lots of business checks isn’t the only pro-business solution. Heck, sometimes the solution is “yes, the roll is for the key part of the scene, but other elements of the dice roll provide us with business and colour” – this is sort of what Genesys does. Games with lots of funny random tables like Mork Borg are kind of throwing out business options too (and secretly want you to take them and turn them into big plot points!) Mork Borg and Warhammer like rolling lots of dice and failing all the time because it helps build grim comedy as a mood, and so lots of rolls are going to be business. But rolling lots of business doesn’t have to be for comedy or grittiness. A lot of early game designs tend to assume you’re rolling business all the time. Call of Cthulhu, for example, is one. It loves business! But you can’t take that attitude into Cthullhu Dark (which became the Trophy system).

In a similar way, making everything an ability test with a chance of failure has lots going for it, because it means players never know how they’ll solve the mystery. But if you aren’t careful, in a system with low success rates, you can lock off the ability to move the plot forward behind information-gathering rolls that everyone fails. There are lots of ways to solve that problem, like using a system like GUMSHOE where information-gathering uses a completely different system! But you can also just use ability checks in a slightly more careful way. Often GUMSHOE advocates act like the solution in GUMSHOE is obviously needed, obviously better and obviously easier, when it’s none of those things. It’s just a question of solving a problem in a particular way; there are plenty of other ways to solve the problem. And the better idea is to also understand the problem better! Trail of Cthulhu uses the solution where there’s a forced disconnect between types of actions; Call of Cthulhu just understands not to gatekeep information when they write scenarios.

It’s perfectly fine to go “well, I think Game X is always better”, if you really want to. But it’s worth understanding what’s going on when you do. Players who don’t like systems that generate business are often players who find it easy to come up with business on their own! Generally the biggest problems in RPGs come when there’s a mismatch in player styles and goals, and almost always this happens because some players think that the way they do it is the way everyone does it, because it comes easily to them (or it comes easily to the person writing the game). Assumptions are so easy to catch us out. Hopefully this helps you understand things better and communicate things clearer, and thus have better games.