So like... what does everybody mean when they talk about "problem solving?"

14 Sep, 2026

Imagine you're exploring an old ruin in real life. You're somewhere deep within this crumbling structure, risking something collapsing on top of you or out from under you. Searching for archaeological finds or something. You reach a big gap in the floor that you probably can't just jump across, but you'd really like to get to the other side. So you take inventory of what you're carrying, what sorts of objects are around. Maybe you try to think of a way to jury-rig something to get you to the other side.¹

Whether that works or not isn't really up to you, or any consciousness at all. Either your contraption gets you to the other side, or it doesn't, but no amount of creative reasoning is going to convince physics to make it work.

RPGs don't really work that way, though.

Solving Problems in Adventure Games

Now you're in the same situation, but it's a tabletop RPG. You're imagining it together with some other people around a table. One of those people is in charge of sort of coordinating and adjudicating how you all imagine the world, and we call that person the referee.

In this case, physics itself is subjective. Whether something works or not depends entirely on what you imagine, what the ref imagines, and how the ensuing discussion can bring those two closer to overlapping. There's no objective reality to base your actions on. There sort of can't be, not really, not without dense enough rules and detailed enough prep that you couldn't run it without being an actual computer.

Let's look at it from the referee's side, too. (That's where I'm most comfortable, anyway.) In many places, you can find variations on the same advice: "Reward creative thinking", "Clever solutions to a problem should usually work". This is good advice. This is great advice! But it does ultimately mean that reality is subject to player creativity and referee subjectivity.

Are we really "solving problems" if our solutions involve inventing new parameters for those problems? I'm not too sure.

What Are We Doing Instead?

At the risk of being a little too cute about it, I don't really think this problem-solving thing is itself a problem to be solved. I'm happy to just embrace it.

I've been thinking about this for a while, but this particular post was spurred by Chris McDowall's recent post on "Realplay", which I thought was a characteristically great way to look at threading this particular needle. Our goal is to honor the reality of the fictional world, while also honoring the fact that we're playing a game together.

We can make this wholly subjective world feel real, while also making it fun to engage with. Be too generous with players' ideas and you risk undermining any sense of stable reality, but be too strict, and you also undermine that reality, because remember: the players are probably imagining things differently from you, and from each other. They each have their own fictional reality in their head. Dispel that too often, and the whole thing starts to feel like a video game: your idea doesn't work because the game just isn't programmed that way.

I don't think most of us want a referee who tries to create a perfectly objective reality, anyway. Who actually wants to play "try to figure out what the referee wants you to do" in every new dungeon room, right? Do any referees want to describe every single object in every room right off the bat? Does anyone want to listen to that?

My Favorite Kind of Player Skill

When I set a problem for my players, my ideal outcome is that I get to see them do something creative and clever. What I hope for the most is that the players will treat this subjective, imagined world as real, to poke at its moving parts and think about their characters' places in it, their abilities, the length and limits of their reach.

It's not really "problem-solving," at least not the way I run things. Instead, all of us, player and referee alike, are exercising the same kinds of "player skill": creativity, imagination, communication, and suspending our disbelief juuuuust right. Joining each other in a shared hallucination where none of us have complete control, and everyone knows something nobody else does.

That's a fun little space to play in.

Footnotes