What is This About?
At its most essential, Open Role-Play Adventure – ORPA for short – is tabletop role-playing achieved primarily through open discussion and impromptu judgments, rather than through recourse to pre-codified rule systems, as it was done in the earliest days of the medium before such systems existed. Very often this style of play prioritizes the evocation of a world as a believably living place, experienced vividly through description and collaboration – representational game mechanics used only as discretionary tools in the cause of that, not as the focus of play in themselves.
Core Precepts
There’s no such thing as an ORPA rulebook – it’s a practice of play, through which one may approach any setting or campaign premise, not a category of product or a school of design.
When organizing a campaign by this practice, the main purpose is to convey a credible world and bring it to life through aesthetics and description, rather than by simulating it mechanically.
In play, the first recourse for resolving game events is discussion, negotiation, and judgment. Abstract or representational mechanics may be taken up to enhance those methods, but never to replace them.
Authority over play (both in terms of lore and rules) arises solely from the people at the table, directed by a fair referee trusted to make final decisions, rather than from the sanction of a third-party text or organization.
ORPA Step-by-Step
Much of the following section is based on writing by Alyx Ghazarian on their blog Underground Adventures.
Start with a world to explore, not a rules system. Take any book, movie, or show that excites you as your “sourcebook.” Even a setting from a traditional RPG if you like. Or make up a world yourself, on your own or brainstorming with your players.
Ask how things work in this world. What do people eat? Who would be met along a road? What do they celebrate? What do they mourn? Where do problems come from? Who’s expected to solve them? Draw maps. Make lists of interesting places, people, things. Note situations going on that characters may want to get involved in.
You’ll want oracles to help fill out small details when they come up. Make or find random tables on interesting subjects – cargoes a caravan might be hauling, names for spaceport taverns, villages with peculiarities, names of people, things to encounter in the wilderness.
Introduce the players to the world. Not all of it at once, only what’s directly relevant at the start of play. Then, make characters. Ask questions of the players, have them write down their answers. On simple index cards, not fancy character sheets. Where is their character from? How did they get where they are now? What are they particularly good at? What do they want to achieve? A bit of description, a few notable proficiencies, some equipment, but keep it brief. Use words, not numbers.
To commence playing the game in earnest, present the players with a situation that will compel them to respond.
As you play, prompt the players to ask questions about what’s around them and what’s going on. Answer in ways that expand the world. Convey information fairly so the players can make meaningful decisions. When you need details for an answer, use an oracle.
Don’t push a story to happen, don’t try to follow a plot. Explore where events lead naturally. Nobody knows what will happen next – that's what makes this kind of game unique.
When it comes time to decide how something uncertain turns out, ask yourself, “given the nature of this part of the world under these conditions, what most likely occurs? How does who the characters are and what they’re doing change that?” It’s good to open up discussion to the table, but don’t dither – settle the matter and get on with the action.
Be sure of the characters’ intentions behind what they say and do, and that they understand the stakes before you make a ruling on the consequences. Be impartial but firm.
Go ahead and roll dice if you want, it’s fun! But only ask questions of the dice you’re willing to let them answer, and commit to those answers.
Use dice in simple ways at first, just one or two six-siders – “The ancient text is really obscure, you’ve got a 1 in 6 chance to decipher it” or “it’s a big door, but you’re really strong, a 7 or better on two dice forces it open.” The simpler the rolls, the quicker the flow of the game. Don’t get side-tracked calculating exact odds or nailing down every variable. Stay fast and loose, fast and loose.
Do you want more detailed rules to help figure out what happens? Let them emerge naturally, making them up on-the-spot. But remember, the world and making it feel alive comes first.
Do you need ideas for rules? Ransack any game, not just RPGs – pluck whichever ones catch your fancy, but just those, don’t pull in whole systems you weren’t looking for.
Don't worry about fitting new rules together with old ones, that’ll sort itself out. You’ll forget the ones that don’t fit, and come back to the ones that do, and think up ways to draw connections between them when you need to.
When you think of a better rule, or find one somewhere, use it as soon as you want. If you feel you didn’t need a rule for something after all, drop it. You’re not obligated to keep to a set system.
Avoid “rules speak,” both at the table and in your notes. Refer to things how someone on the world would speak of them, don’t worry about nailing them down objectively – at the table, everything is subjective.
As the Referee, portray a credible world and convey the information needed by the players to interact with it in a fitting manner. Weigh all factors of events in the game, listen to the players’ reasonable responses to those events, answer their questions about them, and judge the outcomes in a manner that is fair both to the characters and to the validity of the world you’re playing in. If you use a rule to decide something, what it says happens is still your responsibility.
As a Player, you are responsible for your own fun. Express yourself, immerse yourself in the experience, encourage others, let the table know if something bothers you. Don’t look to your character sheet for answers. Imagine what you would do in the situation, and act on it. Pursue what interests you, go where the excitement is. Trust the referee and your fellow players.
Historical Context
Open Adventure Role-Play has hitherto been widely known as FKR, a term coined in 2015 by Mike Monard, one of the first ever players of D&D, in resistance to mounting assumptions that he identified with the OSR scene:
"I am not now, nor have I ever been, part of the "Old School Renaissance." This is because I've simply never stopped playing [Original D&D] the way I always have. No rebirth involved. However, one of the bases of Braunstein, then Blackmoor, then Greyhawk, was the concept of "Free Kriegspiel," where the referee's judgment is the supreme authority, not a set of written rules. This fine tradition has all but died out. It needs desperately to be brought back. Therefore I hereby announce the launch of the "Free Kriegspiel Renaissance," or FKR. And yeah, it's pronounced exactly the way you think. So come on, let's be a bunch of FKRs!"
Before Monard co-opted the term for a rude joke, "Free Kriegspiel" meant a type of war-game developed in the military academies of 19th century Europe – "kriegspiel" literally being German for "war-game." Originally, it was a tool to teach strategy, tactics, and logistics to officer cadets. But those cadets too often pursued technical victories through exploits of the abstract rules of play, rather than learning how real battles actually worked as intended. To remedy this, the idea of running the games entirely subjectively was introduced, Free as in "open-ended," the progress of the simulated battles determined not by blind rules, but by the moment-to-moment independent judgment of experienced officers overseeing the game as referees.
In 1967, avid hobby war-gamer David Wesely experimented with Free Kriegspiel approaches for a scenario set in Braunstein, a fictional Napoleonic-era town. The scenario’s opening preamble involved lone agents of different factions vying to influence circumstances leading up to the arrival of two armies, expected to be followed by a standard battle when those armies at last met.
At first Wesely regarded his scenario a failure because, rather than pursuing strategic goals, the characters became embroiled in petty rivalries and never got around to the actual battle. But the players loved the immediacy of playing distinct characters rather than military units and clamored for more. Soon further “Braunstein” games were organized by Wesely and his peers, leading to variations in other settings, including a medieval fantasy duchy named Blackmoor – run by a young fellow named Dave Arneson, who introduced the game to another war-game hobbyist, Gary Gygax.
The composer of this document feels the joke behind the name “FKR” has worn thin, and further that it leads too often to confusion with actual Kriegspiel, still played in the original Prussian style in many places. Thus the alternative title, Open Role-Play Adventure.
Not Necessarily “Rules-Light”
A prevalent assumption about ORPA/FKR is that it’s just another kind of “rules-light” role-playing, but Justin Hamilton, on his blog Aboleth Overlords, deftly disputes this:
"The FKR movements tend to primarily focus on very small rulesets – often stuff like “d6 roll for low” or contested 2d6 rolls, just because these kinds of rulesets allow the referee to really focus in on rulings..."
"So from the outside lots of people are starting to assume the FKR means nearly no-rules roleplaying games. But if you look at Kriegsspiel itself, or even the kind of rulesets Arneson seemed fond of writing – sometimes there are a lot of rules. And this to me is important to note. It’s not the amount of rules."
"FKR to me is purely a relationship to rules. If your table is composed of a referee who portrays the world opting to use rules as a tool however they wish, and players portraying characters responding with what they would do if they were in whatever fictional situation the ref is describing – that to me is FKR. It doesn’t matter if the ref is using a single coin flip, or if they decide to sometimes opt into Mythras, or their own hack of Advanced Squad Leader, or anything else. The amount of crunch doesn’t impact the FKR-ishness, it’s if the table is focusing more on the fiction over the mechanics. This is obviously easier with light systems, but if the ref feels like using something heftier “behind the screen”, that’s a perfectly valid approach."
It also doesn’t matter want kind of rules are used. David Wesely and his peers drew from war-games because that’s where their familiarity lay – thus why D&D had so many mechanics copied from old naval fleet games. If you’re more familiar with boardgames, draw from them. Or card games, or theater, or African storytelling traditions. Whatever works for you.
Appeals of the Style
It offers an escape from gamification – a chance to Play as in Celebrate, not Play as in Compete. Most anyone who’s run a typical role-playing game has known the frustration of seeing players respond to every situation, no matter how expressively presented, by numbly pouring over the numbers on their character-sheets like dull accountants managing cost-benefit ratios, looking for the “correct” mechanical solution (1). Even ostensibly narrative-focused role-playing games are vulnerable to this, often representing story elements through currency that players can still come to regard in transactional terms. To paraphrase Campbell's Law: when a quantitative abstraction becomes the primary means of interacting with an in-world factor, players will come to only think of manipulating the abstraction rather than engaging with what it originally represented. The immediacy of an assassin flashing a razor-sharp knife inches from your bare throat is dulled when that becomes merely a defense check roll with a -2 penalty against 2d8 damage.
(1 “Joe, the next time you answer What Do You Do? by looking down and showing us all your bald spot, I’m bouncing the biggest die on the table off it.”)
The experience is de-commodified. In a world straining under an increasing preponderance of commercialization, where once purely social practices are more and more assimilated into corporate revenue streams and advertising intrudes deeper into every spare moment of our time, ORPA offers a way to reassert the eminence of personal imagination. It’s home-crafted and self-reliant, a DIY folk-art experience. You don’t need any official materials – your worlds, adventures, and even rules are entirely yours to create and explore. Not to say that an ORPA table is purged of all flashy bits and convenient accessories – maps are useful, pretty dice are fun, and miniature figures are cool. But they aren’t the point of play – paper and pencils and your imagination are all you really need.
"The most stimulating part of the game is the fact that anything can happen. Nothing is impossible.(2)" The potential for tactical infinity is maximized. In nearly every other form of game – and mediums of expression in general – your potential interactions, and the responses of the work to those actions, is tightly curtailed. In a book, your point of view is rigidly controlled by the author, the progression of events preordained. In a board-game, your choices are delineated by your current hand of cards and the layout of the board or some-such. Even most role-playing games, despite their comparatively open-ended nature, impose such limits, often to focus creativity, but sometimes just to motivate you to buy the next book of power-ups. In ORPA, all things are negotiable and unscripted.
(2 Tim Waddell, The Space Gamer #2 1975, "Reviews of Dungeons & Dragons")
Challenges of the Style
This won’t appeal to everyone. There are several things otherwise common in the contemporary field of tabletop gaming, enjoyed by many, which ORPA doesn’t feature – glossy books and other branded knick-knacks to show off, the challenge of system mastery and mechanized character-optimization, the satisfying click of multi-stage rules interacting, the thrill of filling up a character sheet with incrementally unlocked powers. There’s nothing wrong with enjoying those things, but there are plenty of other styles of play, with games written around them, delivering them much better.
It requires a high level of mutual trust – besides being socially comfortable with one another, and recognizing communal responsibility for their own fun, participants must accept (and demand) that the referee is an emotionally mature adult capable of negotiating fairly towards justified decisions, and that the players are similarly capable of communicating reasonably and accepting compromises. This of course is the case for any TTRPG, but ORPA needs that as the first and over-arching priority.
Your ORPA will vary. Beyond the core precepts, there’s no one right way to play. Everything about it is subjective, up to personal preference, developing particularly per the circumstances of each table. Meaning it can be difficult to translate games in this style between groups. Cultivating your own take unique from anyone else is creatively satisfying and fun, but it can also be isolating.
Because the Referee regards everything on a case-by-case basis, and rules aren’t cemented, the game won’t allow players to settle into grooves of prompted decisions along paths laid out on their character sheets. For players whose happy place is self-reinforcing loops, this can become very frustrating.
Players coming from mainstream TTRPGs may feel adrift without numerically definitive traits to ensure their characters’ effectiveness, or obvious levers for pushing and pulling on the fiction. Some may even feel vulnerable without explicit protections against potentially domineering referees. The potential for abuse does exist, as it will wherever a level of trust is presumed. But that’s not unique to this style. Adversarial GMing habits are toxic regardless of the game or school of play – even the most well-designed rule can’t solve belligerence or turn a bad sport honest. In the face of that, every player always has the most fundamental defense – to leave the table.
Be wary of commercial games marketed under an FKR label. Though usually well-intentioned, they’re erroneous, mostly just conventional OSR-adjacent rules-light systems following a buzzword (3). Unfortunately, even while repeating slogans like “rulings not rules” and “play at the world” they come largely from the sort of “text-first” assumptions which proliferated following D&D’s initial publication. To reiterate: FKR/ORPA is an approach to running any table, not a product type in itself, and it doesn’t start with any rulebook.
(3 Heck, I’m no better, my first draft of this document was mostly a rule system, and it’s taken a dozen revisions to resist the instinct to present things that way.)
Ancillary Commentary
Explaining what to some seems an eccentric approach to role-playing games, my ever further move away from standardized rule systems, what this FKR thing is I’m always on about, and why I’m now calling it ORPA, was turning into an expanding lecture with a lot of “well actually I also need to explain…” Thus this relatively brief “How To” summary I can instead present to interested parties all at once.
How did I get here? I’ve never really been much interested in rules-mastery or min-maxing, always more excited by theme and immersion. I often experienced game rules as occluding presences, self-justifying intercessions into the campaign world, formalities to get through on the way to the actual fun of communal collaboration. To be clear, I'm not saying rules were always bad, but I ended up gritting my teeth through a lot of tedious play while the rest of the table insisted “the book says we have to do things this way.” When the OSR came about, its precepts of “world first” and “rulings not rules” struck a deep chord – and when the subsequent FKR followed those ideas to full adoption, of course I dove in.
Now some advice which seemed a little too opinionated to include in the main body:
In my estimation, people who read for lyrical pleasure are the best potential fit for ORPA, while those who pursue gaming mainly on competitive terms … not so much. Or to frame it more glibly: a good prospect for ORPA play can express well-considered opinions on several authors and has penned some decent fan-fiction. While a non-ideal one has cases upon cases of Magic cards but hasn’t read the flavor text on a single one. Keep this in mind when considering potential players from your local gaming community.
Though workable, I’ve found one-shots at conventions are not the ideal way to present ORPA. To shine best, the practice really needs a mutually familiar group of players in an ongoing campaign over multiple sessions where practices of the table have time to develop and accrue to taste.
As a referee, my most reliable tool for putting players into immediately engaging situations is the old adage, “Good, Fast, or Cheap, pick two.” Give them a chance to proceed but only by choosing from an array of potential costs. “You can power down the central core, but doing so means killing the main reactor. You can link your compu-deck to prevent that, but doing so will overwrite it. Or you can take longer to hack it all carefully, but those security-drones are getting close. Which will it be?” I particularly like time pressures, they keep the pace up. Over the years, I’ve gotten far more productive use from this informal approach than I have from any precisely formulated rule mechanic.
Remember, the Perfect is the enemy of the Good. Rules-hacking can be a seductive preoccupation, and its easy for a Referee, especially one with a long-standing interest in game design, to fall into fussing over fine-tuning systems towards theoretical white-room perfection far past their actual play benefit. In practice, simple, direct and immediate resolution informed by mutually clear understanding of stakes and consequences is always more useful than any alleged mechanical nuance or long-term pay-off.
Worlds Funsome and Free: Understanding Open Role-Play Adventure
version 1.0
Composed by Ethric T.S.
Plain Paper Gamer
