I have been complaining about the sorry state of RPG theory on and off on this blog. It usually goes like this: Someone makes some classification or dichotomy about some part of the hobby, say Gamism/Narrativism/Simulationism, Fluff/Crunch, Railroading/Sandbox (although that one’s even worse), Character-driven/Plot-driven Campaigns and so on, which categories than get repeated until puking. And when someone tries to find some criterion to actually distinguish those categories, it is quickly found that those criteria do not actually distinguish the right things. At that point some very clever people might suggest that we are actually looking at a continuum, which is makes the problem even worse as for a continuum we would need some way to extract a single real number (as opposed to a list of criteria) from a particular object of interest.

In total, the whole process is wrong. If you want to learn something about your object of study, you need your criteria and methods of measurement first and only then take a look whether interesting patterns emerge that you can tag with a label. Otherwise you are just juggling your preconceived notions. If you are really scientific you would also hit the dataset with some statistics to find which if any variables are connected.

So let’s try this. One common problem is describing different campaigns or GMing styles. What can we even measure there?

…

I will now offer a method. If you find something else that is easy to check, feel free to comment or contact me in other ways.

We can count certain types of fictional objects that came up in play. Of course, that only works for past play, but if you never run a campaign, you likely have no developed GMing style whatsoever yet. We might count things like this:

• Number of named NPCs
• Number of kinds of monsters
• Number of instances where NPC made a request on or offered a job to the PCs. (Quests Given)
• Number of factions active in the setting
• Number of distinct locations visited (town size or bigger)

We could count things like fights, but that is harder. For once it is not totally dependent on GMing style. Players might decide to talk instead. And once you have a lull in the action, you have to decide if that was one protracted fight or two.

How does that look for my current campaign (6 sessions in):

• Named NPCs: 25
• Kinds of Monsters: 1
• Quest Given: 2
• Factions Active: 4
• Distinct Locations: 2

For comparison we might want to factor in the length of the campaign run. Just dividing by sessions is likely not meaningful, as campaigns tend to be front-loaded. So maybe square root of sessions is better? That would be 2.449 in my case.

• Named NPCs: 10.208
• Kinds of Monsters: 0.408
• Quests Given: 0.817
• Factions Active: 1.633
• Distinct Locations: 0.817

I will leave the interpretation of this measurement to you. If you want to comment some numbers of your own, I’m interested.