The Familiarity Ratio

The Familiarity Ratio is a concept that you may already be familiar with. I first learned about it from Brandon Sanderson on his podcast Writing Excuses. Since then, I have considered the ways that it can apply to different media, and especially its importance for TTRPGs. In this article, I will discuss what the Familiarity Ratio actually is, before talking about its specific importance for TTRPGs.

What is the Familiarity Ratio

The Familiarity Ratio emerges from genre literature, and states simply that a reader requires a certain amount of familiar content to balance out the unfamiliar. The familiar in this case could be common genre conventions, recurring genre cliches, or non-genre material. To the average reader of fantasy, elves and dragons are as familiar as parental disapproval and the societal pressure to conform.

By loading up the early parts of a narrative with these familiar elements, it grounds the reader in the understandable, allowing for wilder plot twists and less conventional setting elements to occur later in the narrative. This is part of the appeal of the isekai narrative, where a person from our world is transported to a fantastical one. By grounding the narrative in a relatively normal person’s lived experiences, the fantastical then is all the more prominent but still approachable.

Throwing less common elements directly into the narrative without an initial grounding tends to lead to confusion and an inability to connect with the story being told. A prominent example comes from Sanderson’s own The Way of Kings. The prologue of the novel includes a fairly detailed breakdown of the perspective character’s magical abilities, and while we have some understanding of the idea of the world as one with knights and kings, the less familiar nature of the magic used threw off many readers.

While one might argue this is due to the dryness of the descriptions, I suspect it has more to do with the ratio of the familiar to the unfamiliar being off. Contrast this sequence with the opening of Mistborn, where we get a much slower introduction to the powers and from the perspective of someone that doesn’t understand her abilities. This slower rate of reveal, with the fullness of the magical system taking more time, allows for the audience to adjust to the unfamiliar nature of the magic.

The Familiarity Ratio and TTRPGs

Now, most concepts cannot be applied across media without some degree of translation for the requirements of the new media that the concept is being applied to. The Familiarity Ratio does have a role to play in TTRPGs though one that might be different from expected.

First, it is important to consider TTRPGs as having both content and formal elements. The formal elements of a TTRPG are its mechanics, the way that they frame and position narrative, as well as providing the tools with which to approach its content. A TTRPG’s content, meanwhile, is what the narrative is about: the characters, the settings, the plots, the themes, and so on. A TTRPG’s content is, perhaps uniquely, not subject to the Familiarity Ratio.

While the text of a game may provide some guidance to the content in play, ultimately the act of playing a TTRPG creates content. Even if the content present in the text of a TTRPG is wildly unfamiliar, players are then able to self-select what elements that they want focused on in the act of play, therefore creating specific content that has a sufficient degree of familiarity. Anything created by the self is inherently familiar, even if it does not appear so at first glance.

Now, where difficulties might arise from is a lack of familiarity with the process by which that content is generated in play. That process, of course, is the formal elements of the game, its mechanics. Here the Familiarity Ratio is especially strict, as playing a game where the rules are not understood leads to a generally poor experience, one where the players feel disconnected from the play and are unable to fulfill any promise extended by the game.

Of course, there are other reasons for a game’s mechanics to fail to fulfill that promise, but for the purpose of this article, I am assuming that the game is actually well designed. I’m also assuming that the rules are laid out in such a way to be comprehensible to a reader. To learn more about how to design a game that serves its role in helping the players to create the promised content, please read my previous series on Game Feel.

Even for a well designed, well laid out TTRPG, the issue of familiarity is critical. Players will more easily be able to understand mechanics and mechanical frameworks that have elements in common with games that they are already familiar with. Many players state their refusal to play games other than D&D based simply on the difficulty of learning new games, even games that are significantly easier to play than D&D.

This, of course, underlies a deeper issue that is fairly widespread through the hobby: a lack of mechanical literacy.

Mechanical Literacy

To begin with, it is not any one person’s fault that there is a general lack of mechanical literacy. TTRPGs are almost always communal activities and without a community that encourages the playing of a wide variety of games, it is very difficult to play more than a handful of familiar ones. Most discussions of games from a critical lens do talk about mechanics, but only as a part of a broader analysis of a game, an analysis that too often can prove impenetrable to those without the required background knowledge of the industry. And with so many new people entering the hobby in recent years, there simply isn’t the foundation to help spread this knowledge.

That said, there are core problems that emerge from a widespread lack of mechanical literacy. It reduces the ability of games to innovate; it reduces the ability of individual players to critique the games they play or read; it encourages players to stick with the same games that they’ve always been playing, even if those games are not ideal for the stories that they want to tell; and this in turn leads to a limitation of the kinds of stories that TTRPGs focus on.

Mechanical literacy is a problem without a simple solution, but any steps taken could yield broad results.

Outro

So begins the Beginner’s Guide to Mechanical Literacy, which will serve as a catalogue of game mechanics. I will break them down for both players and designers, to help enable both better play and better games.

Join me next week for our first mechanic: the Roll-Over.