Mini-games and Fragmentation

This is the third essay in my series about metagames in tabletop RPGs. This essay is about mini-games and fragmented narratives. I wrote it in preparation for publishing Mousetrap: A cursed game-within-a-game that won't go back into its box.Mini-gamesWhen you think of mini-games, you may think of nested or embedded games that you can play through your characters. In D&D, for example, three-dragon ante is a canonical game nested within The Forgotten Realms with its own set of rules. A deck of three-dragon ante costs 1 gp for your character’s inventory (PHb 5e 154), or $24.99 for your player's personal collection. Seemingly distinct from these nested games is another sort of mini-game, integrated into the rules for diegetic tasks, like fishing and brewing potions. Errant, for example, has a mini-game for its lockpicking procedure: Lockpicking mini-game procedure in Errant.The line between these nested and integrated mini-games can be blurry. Many nested mini-games that characters can…