Perspective and POV in TTRPGs

POV refers to who is narrating a story. I’m going to focus on the types that are most relevant for TTRPGs. The “narrator” is anyone currently speaking: describing their character’s thoughts, actions, or the setting:

Perspective is how characters see their world. This is through their culture, their experiences, and their psychology. 

Most TTRPGs do not mention perspective or POV at all. Yet great novelists have expertly used POV and perspective in their creative works to add nuance and dimension. TTRPG Designers and players should think more about POV and perspective in their games, because it can create much more grounded and interesting stories at the table.

In many TTRPGs, the GM has a third person omniscient perspective on the world. The players have a first person perspective. The GM describes the world and its people, they know the interior lives of everything surrounding the player character. The player character just knows the thoughts and perspectives of their own character.

There is a common problem, however. The GM, as an objective camera of the world, describes everything in detail to the players. I have been in a few games in which I wondered: “Is this character knowledge or player knowledge?” When a novel describes a room, the reader is introduced to a few snapshots or key details. Yet when a GM describes a room, many games give an abundance of details that the GM then narrates. 

Even in GM-less games, there is often little attention to perspective. These games often use a third person omniscient perspective which is traded off from player to player. 

The big question is: does the character see everything? What do they miss? Are their aspects of their culture, psychology, or their experiences that cause them to overlook or miss things? What does one character see that another character doesn’t? Perhaps this is solved by the often maligned perception check, but this does not seem like the solution.

By taking a more writer’s room approach, we can design games that have players think about their characters with their POVs and perspectives in a more nuanced way. Here are some examples of games that do just that:

Dialect: A Game About Language and How it Dies is a GM-less worldbuilding game. For most of the game, players take a third person omniscient POV. They invent words, and discuss the culture around them. But players also embody members of this dying language community.

During the “Have a Conversation” round, players use the newly created words. The book advises: “In conversations, how you use language helps define your character. Think of interesting ways your character might use the word at hand based on what they believe. Shout it, avoid, repeat it, carve it into walls” (42).

The characters have different positions in society or beliefs about it. How might an upper class character think about a new word describing community? How might a working class character use it? 

The game asks players to embody a third person omniscient world building perspective, but then asks players to shrink their perspective down to an individual person. Games like Microscope do a similar exercise, and the game is so much richer when perspectives are shrunk down.

Decaying Orbit is a tragic storygame for 2-6 players about a space station falling into a star. It’s a game about the ship’s AI narrating the present and past. There are two mechanics in particular that I find inspiring, and it’s Recall a Memory and Corrupted Memory. These mechanics explicitly use POV and perspective at the table.

Each player embodies the AI by narrating a vignette from the AI’s POV and perspective. The central mechanic is “Recall a Memory,” which basically involves a player narrating a memory based on card prompts.

The game really wants the players to think about the AI’s perspective and POV, as we can see here:

“Computers see the world differently to humans. Their senses are not sight, touch, taste, hearing. Instead, they have other senses, such as dashboard readouts and security cameras…When you describe one of the AI’s memories, take advantage of all these unique inputs…Memories could be painted in infrared heat vision and audio recordings, wholly from the perspective of a static security camera, or consist only of readouts of crew vitals” (19).

How many games have you played as an AI, animal, robot, alien, as a nonhuman entity? Did this attention to the unique perspective ever come up? 

By grounding the game in the AI’s unique way of seeing the world, the drama and narration is much more intense and interesting. After a player character narrates, other players can “Enhance a Memory” by asking for more detail. But there is another novel mechanic here, “Corrupted Memory.”

By grounding the game in the AI’s unique way of seeing the world, the drama and narration is much more intense and interesting. After a player character narrates, other players can “Enhance a Memory” by asking for more detail. But there is another novel mechanic here, “Corrupted Memory.”

“As the station draws closer to its end, not all of the AI’s memory banks are in working order. You can use the Corrupted Memory tile on any player’s turn (including your own) to skip over sections in a memory or bring it to an immediate halt” (21)

When we played, we said things like: I don’t remember, I don’t want to think about that, I don’t know anymore. It was dramatic, melancholic, and tense.

When player characters see and remember the world from their perspective, not an objective GM’s, there is much more room for unreliability. A hallmark of many novels, unreliability shows when our perspectives of the world (our psychology, culture, background) do not match up with other’s. And this mismatch is a fascinating thing to explore through play.

There was a moment in our Apocalypse World game in which I narrated my character seeing shadows burst from the hands of her cult leader mother. I described how my brother (another Player Character in the game) shielded my eyes and protected me. The GM then described how actually it was fire that came from her hands, but because my eyes were shielded, I saw shadows.

This was a literary moment, in which we saw how my limited POV was at a mismatch with other characters. And it was all the richer for the attention to perspective.

Not every game needs to be like Decaying Orbit. Lies and unreliable narrators are hallmarks of storytelling, but they can be difficult to pull off at the table. 

But more games should interrogate perspective and ask players: but how do you see the world differently?

Chase is currently kickstarting Diabolic Dialect, an oops all wizards game with plenty of linguistic hijinks and fun. I’ve never laughed so much during an RPG than I have during Diabolic Dialect.

The game is built around one simple core mechanic: You can cast any spell you want. Speak a word, phrase or sentence and roll as many dice as words spoken. These dice determine your Successes, Failures and Mishaps. But this freedom can come at a cost. Mishaps, harm and arcane forces from the world can place Restrictions on you!