The Sacred and the Profane

Before you start in on this piece, let me put forth three caveats:

Caveat 1: The terms “sacred” and “profane” are not meant to be religious in any way. Nor are they value assessments.

Caveat 2: I am only concerned with “sacred” and “profane” in fictional worlds—specifically, the ones we create around the game table. Someone’s actual worldview doesn’t come into play here.

Caveat 3: My intention here is not to interject more jargon into the already jargon-heavy world of TRPGs. The importance here isn’t the precise definition of the terms “sacred” and “profane” but rather recognizing the concepts. I don’t find it too interesting to try to find the fine line between the two, or think too much about categorizing all the games that already exist.

Okay. All that out of the way, let’s dive in. 

There's this idea of the sacred and profane in both the real world and fiction. Some, for example, might consider the setting of a novel as being potentially a sacred space. Or perhaps a profane one. But what does this mean, and more importantly, what does it mean for the design of TRPGs?

Consider a fictional world where the concept “good wins in the end” isn’t just  what people hope for, but is an actual governing principle. That’s the kind of meaning we’re talking about when we think of the sacred—a setting where intention, desire, and ethics affect the physical world. If some people have important destinies but others do not (PCs having different—and likely better—stats than NPCs, say), that’s an indication that we’re talking about a setting at least in part governed by the sacred.

A profane setting, on the other hand, is one where science and logic tell us how the world really works. An astronomer can tell you about the movement of the planets, but won’t have much interest in how those movements affect our lives and our future. Likewise, no physicist is going to agree that a storm is caused by chanting a particular chant and bringing special stones together in a cairn. Instead, they’ll tell you that it is caused by high and low pressure systems moving across the world and other predictable forces indifferent to the effects the storm might bring.

Sacred and profane in this context reflect a way of looking at the world (including a fictional world). A sacred fictional space is one that has meaning. A profane space is one guided by logic. You could almost use the terms “magic” and “science” here, or perhaps “wondrous” and “ordinary,” but neither would quite explain the concepts.

You can, of course, have both in a setting at the same time. The sacred can be seen as an occasional but significant interruption of a profane space. The stars align, a prophecy is fulfilled, or the spirits move and those things actually, literally affect the world in some way, changing what would otherwise be the normal course of events.

So, okay. It’s clear how this can be a worldbuilding issue, and it’s absolutely worth considering just on that level when we create our game worlds, but how does it apply to game design? 

It’s a big picture question a designer has to think about before the first mechanic is put on paper. Are the PCs and their actions more important than those of the rest of the world in some meaningful way? If a player describes a brilliant action, do they still need to make a die roll to see if they succeed? Is an outcome influenced by how badly the players want it to happen? Are the PCs going to win in the end simply because they are PCs?

There are no right or wrong answers here. You can make a perfectly fun game either way, and I personally enjoy both kinds of games. But depending on how you answer those questions, they will be very different games.

In a way, you can say it boils down to the familiar debate of, “should the GM fudge die rolls as they facilitate the game?” But in the context of sacred and profane in game design, this question gets a new answer: If you’re fudging dice rolls to get the game experience you want, maybe you’re not actually playing the right game. When a game’s mechanics are not giving you the kind of story you want, perhaps you should be playing—or designing—a more narrative-focused game. On the other hand, if the game encourages or forces the players to make decisions based on what would make a great story and yet what those players really want is to let the dice fall where they may to allow a surprising story to emerge on its own, a more mechanically-deterministic game is really what’s needed.

Every game needs to have a philosophy based on one of these concepts, and that philosophy (or paradigm, or design intent, or whatever you want to call it) needs to be clearly communicated. The players need to know what to expect and the game should meet those expectations. A player losing their character to a bad die roll in an insignificant encounter is going to be unhappy if they thought that they were a meaningful part of a sacred space. Or, to put it a different way, if they had known that they were in a profane space where dice rather than desire rule the day, they may have made different choices or avoided the encounter altogether.

It is possible to mix the sacred and the profane in a game’s design, but it’s very difficult to do well. In small doses, the sacred can intrude upon the profane by granting the GM a sort of override power to say yes or no without consulting a mechanic. The reverse might be an occasional moment where the GM is encouraged to adhere to a random result no matter what, to inject the excitement of the unknown or the dangerous. In either example, however, everyone at the table should know what’s going on. Because mixing the sacred and the profane haphazardly takes away the players’ understanding of how the world works. And that’s really what these concepts are all about: an understanding of what kind of foundation the (game) world is built upon. Is gameplay purely about making decisions based on probabilities and logic, or about telling an exciting story?

So then it becomes evident that rather than “sacred” and “profane” we could also almost call these “story” versus “game.” And if you’re a frequent reader here, you know that’s the juxtaposed space where a lot of my topics lie. But in this case, even those terms can be misleading, because in both cases you’re playing a fun game and in both cases you can end up with an entertaining story. Sacred and profane are really about how you got there.

If you want to explore more about the sacred and the profane in fictional and (video) gaming spaces, try this video from Tom van der Linden’s great YouTube channel, Like Stories of Old: