For a decade now, we’ve been told that Dungeons & Dragons (and roleplaying more generally) rests on three pillars of play: combat, exploration, and social interaction. This was brought up throughout the D&D Next playtest and laid out most clearly in the 2014 Player’s Handbook.
I keep seeing these pillars discussed as separate activities, and even a category of encounter that might be designed. But to be frank, I’m really over seeing these elements as partitioned activities. I cringe when adventures present an encounter that explicitly intends the players to address it with a single, specific pillar. It’s actually not how play works in practice. What if I told you that nearly every D&D encounter should (and in most cases already does) integrate these pillars so that 2 or 3 of them come into play at once?
Integrating the Pillars
To fully explain this, I would probably need to write an entire article on the nature of the exploration pillar, and why it isn’t synonymous with overland travel. But that’s not why we’re here! So hopefully you’ll give me the benefit of the doubt when I say that “Exploration” is about characters interacting with the environment in ways that invite discovery and change the status quo. This pillar is often maligned as being underdesigned in fifth edition D&D, but that’s only if we don’t understand the core mechanic of the game:
The DM describes the environment.
The players describe what they want to do.
The DM narrates the results of the adventurers’ actions.
That mechanic is simple and powerful. It has no math, doesn’t require dice rolling, and can be understood intuitively by a child (even before that child can read in many cases). Exploration is where this mechanic shines brightest, but it has the incredible effect of integrating all three of the pillars. NPCs should banter while they fight. Players should discover something about the nature of the world or of the factions by engaging them in particular topics or conversation. Traps and hazards can be part of a battlefield. The party should often have the option of avoiding or winning a fight through subterfuge or social trickery.
“Rather than pillars of adventure, let’s talk about combat, exploration, and social activity as points of engagement that can and should be integrated.”
Players, not designers, are ideally the ones who decide how they address a given situation: negotiate, hide, boobytrap, or charge in for a brawl—all these choices should be valid, even if they can’t succeed equally in every scenario. There’s no such thing as an exclusively “social” encounter when you have the option of attacking. Overland travel is a chore when there’s no social interaction among players and NPCs to make it mean something more than resource attrition.
Look at any scene in your favorite adventure movie. You can find all three pillars there, working side by side.
To put it bluntly, what at first seemed like an intuitive way to think about the D&D gameplay loop has become an imagined hurdle for designers to leap as they attempt to prescribe player solutions and activities to every encounter in an adventure.
This phenomenon is most noticeable in official D&D hardcovers after 2018, and in Adventurers League modules. You won’t find nearly as much pre-determined pillar inclusion in Out of the Abyss, Curse of Strahd, or Storm King’s Thunder. Starting in 2018, Adventurers League started including sidebars titled “Playing the Pillars", in which the DM could change an encounter to emphasize one pillar over another. Useful, but in my experience it perpetuated the idea that the pillars are separate and players have one they like best and will want to focus on.
Rather than pillars of adventure, let’s talk about combat, exploration, and social interaction as points of engagement that can and should be integrated.
So What are the Pillars?
What defines a roleplaying game? How do we break apart the most dominant pieces of design and look at them as distinct elements of the game?
Obviously we’ve got the core mechanics. Most discussions of game design focus on this part of the game, but it’s far from the whole picture when it comes to how designers transmit the game’s procedures and style to the players.
Pillar One: System Design
How does the game provide a framework for players to act? What do they roll, draw, or choose when the game points to them? How do moments flow from one to the next, and what mechanisms do they rely on to manage resources?
These system design questions are familiar and fascinating, but let’s talk about how they interact with other major elements, which must be just as intentionally designed.
Pillar Two: Scenario Design
By default, fifth edition D&D tries not to opine on the topic of scenario design much. The D&D Next team was explicit that they wanted the game to have flexibility and broad appeal. Fourth edition made what the designers later thought of as a mistake in being highly prescriptive. In designing fifth edition, there was a change of approach: don’t tell a DM how to run their game! As a result, lots of design considerations were relegated to scenarios rather than built into the core system.
But of course, fifth edition also focused heavily on hardcover adventures to create common touchstones and shared experiences among the community of players. These adventures are absolutely integral to how fifth edition is perceived in the hobby. The scenario design on display teaches us how the team at Wizards of the Coast want us to play their game. And in cases like faction design or the overland travel rules refusing to agree from product to product, the results are very mixed.
Outside of D&D, roleplaying games (and especially indie games) have moved to a style where scenario design almost overtakes system design. Where Gygax and Arneson developed a core system that assumed DMs would invent the setting and events of the campaign, now the designers reach to your table and tell you what the session is about before it starts. Most TTRPGs occupy the amount of volume of design that one session of a Blackmoor campaign covered.
Games like Yazeba’s Bed and Breakfast choose incredibly specific niches:
Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast is played over the course of 48 chapters, each of which is a 1 to 2-hour scenario with its own unique but quick-to-learn rules. Players can take control of one of the 7 long-term residents of the B&B or choose from a cast of 50 quirky guests, each of whom has their own ongoing storylines.
In this game, the scenario design is a major focal point, and character creation doesn’t really exist in the way it does in other system-focused games.
On a deeper level, though, scenarios can influence major aspects of gameplay that we would normally associate with the core system design. Take ability checks. We don’t see a large demonstration of varied effects for failure on ability checks in the core rules. The exception is combat, where hitting and missing with an attack is baked into the resolution.
But there are many scenario designs where ability checks and saving throws have degrees of success, or create complications that the players then need to deal with. One adventure says that if a lockpick attempt is failed by 5 or more, the lock breaks. Others don’t, implying that a player can try again and again until they succeed. The scenario design influences how the system resolution plays out.
A game like Blades in the Dark or Apocalypse World bakes these complications into the core resolution mechanic (for example, a roll of 4 or 5 always resulting in complications). Here there’s a burden placed on the GM to define the complication—really, to provide scenario design that defines much of how the core system flows. That core simply lives in the improvisation of the people at the table. But it exists as a central aspect of the game.
Presentation Design
Blades in the Dark continues to be a useful example in our next pillar, because it has a sharp graphic presentation that strongly defines the tone of the game and teaches its procedures.
Surely we’ve all played games that are challenging to read, but become intuitive at the table. This is often a failure of presentation design, where not just the visual look of the book, but the choice of words and conceptual framing of the game mechanics influence how we learn, teach, and play it.
When Ted Bushman and I were putting together The Last Caravan, our most intense period of back-and-forth revolved around how we present the core rules of the system, including the questions:
Which terms are most intuitive to a reader?
In what order do we present the game elements?
What should be depicted in the art?
Which artists would best communicate the tone of the game (and could we afford to hire them)?
What goes on the character sheet, and to what extent do we expect a character sheet to teach important game concepts?
Which terms should be capitalized, bolded, italicized, etc.?
What sections of text should be broken into separate chapters versus a subsection of an existing chapter?
The list goes on. All of these questions are considerations of presentation design, and the smallest choice can have an enormous impact on how a game plays.
As an example of this last point, consider the D&D fifth edition rules for using skills. The rules say Wisdom (Perception) check because the any character can make an ability check. Perception is only involved if the player in question has proficiency in that skill. Yet, how many DMs do you see calling for Wisdom checks? Most say “roll a Perception check.” Then the player who isn’t proficient in Perception has to remember what ability that’s typically connected with (assuming the table isn’t using the common alternate rule where skills aren’t assigned default ability associations), and roll that check.
This is an artifact of presentation, and it’s my conviction that this happens because A) the last two editions just called for skill checks, and B) the character sheet presents the list of skills, with a space for the player to write their bonus beside it (even if they aren’t proficient). For utility, we just check the skill list and add the listed bonus. We don’t look at our ability scores when we make ability checks.
I fought this problem until around 2018, when I got into organized play and realized practically no one called for ability checks the “right” way. This is a consequence of presentation design, and it can totally dictate how the game is played, regardless of what the rules actually say.
Is this useful?
Ultimately, I’m not sure if it’s more useful to think of the points at which players engage with the game (combat, exploration, and social interaction) or to set our sights on broader aspects of design (system, scenario, and presentation). Either way, we should be thinking about how they interact at the table, and what an unbalanced consideration of those pillars can do to the experience.
I hope this discussion has been interesting to you! It’s my goal as a GM and designer to be intentional, both in how we integrate types of engagement into all encounters, and in how we consider the impact of various design elements within the games we love.
If you enjoyed this post, take a look at Hundred Dungeons, a free fantasy RPG I’m developing that finds the sweet spot between D&D, indie games, and the OSR.
