Cycles And Loops In Tabletop RPGs

This is a primer – a basic 101-level document - on what ‘game loops’ are, where they’re from, and how tabletop roleplaying games can be viewed (especially in regards to their design and structure) through the lens of “everything’s loop-like!”.

The ideal case here is that the reader will begin to see cyclical components in their own work and that of others fairly easily after reading here – like an artist identifying the line of action in a figure.

The title here is “cycles and loops” because, in many cases, tabletop processes are cyclical, but in a way that feels odd to call a loop, so both words are used as needed, with “loop” for fairly direct bits and “cycle” for more complex tangles