I’m still reading a lot about the upcoming D&D edition, and I’m noticing something interesting about the “role-playing” part of roleplaying games. When I was younger, it was commonly accepted among gamers that D&D — or rather AD&D — wasn’t a real roleplaying game, because it didn’t have rules for roleplaying. There were reaction checks, and Charisma stats, but no mechanics to govern fast-talking a guard or bluffing an ogre. Clearly it was actually a ROLL-playing game! What a piquant pun!
So D&D 3rd Edition came out, and it had some basic rules for social interactions: actual skills for diplomacy, intimidation, and bluffing, and specific ways that those skills could be applied. The reaction? Well, for a lot of people this proved that D&D wasn’t a real roleplaying game. How could it be, when bluffing an ogre was a die roll, just like hitting him? Now you don’t have to role-play at all! Just roll the die! It’s as if it’s some sort of, I don’t know, ROLL-playing game!
Now 4th Edition is on the way, and we’ve seen a bunch of the combat mechanics, but none of the social mechanics. Some people have inexplicably decided this means that there aren’t any social mechanics, in spite of announcements to the contrary, and they’re back on the old-school complaint that everything in the game is designed for killing things and while it’s some sort of game, one perhaps involving rolls rather than roles, it certainly isn’t a roleplaying game.
However, the developers have said that there are going to be rules for social encounters, including experience points for them, and that the rules are going to have more depth than the equivalent rules in 3rd edition. And when they’re revealed, people will of course return to the other side of the teeter-totter and complain that by making social interactions governed by an in-depth set of mechanics, they’re just making social interactions another form of combat. These people will suggest pointedly that perhaps this so-called roleplaying game is actually something homophonic, but not at all identical.
My take is that the system is, at best, tertiary to roleplaying. The first and second factors, or perhaps second and first factors, are the gamemaster and players. The gamemaster can encourage roleplaying by creating situations where roleplaying can take place, and by making roleplaying count. But in the end you need players who want to roleplay. The guy who pulls out his best Scots accent for his dwarf would do that in any fantasy game, possibly including World of Warcraft. The person who’s just in it for the die rolls and the loot might be shoved into occasionally saying “I hereby proclaimate thy curse,” but it’s not going to make anyone happy.
Actually, I think one of the underlying difficulties in discussing the subject is that most people use “roleplaying” to mean “playing the way I want to play.” I’ve seen people seriously suggest that if the wizard isn’t much, much more powerful than the fighter, you’ve taken out the roleplaying. More common is the idea that fighting is never roleplaying, and talking always is. Some people equate roleplaying with accents, props, and candles. Some say that if characters don’t have a good mechanical chance of dying permanently, you’re not roleplaying. Others say that if they don’t have control of their characters’ destiny, they can’t roleplay. I could go on and on, the point is that even if there aren’t as many types of roleplaying as there are roleplayers, there are at least as many as there are roleplaying games.
Gary Gygax has died. Raise your d20 and remember the original DM.
Lore, you should turn this into an essay. Maybe for the Escapist, or the WIRED site if they let you.
I saw this post right after reading the unconfirmed reports on Gygax. Weird. Eerie. I’m sort of hoping that Order of the Stick doesn’t something akin to Chris Onstad’s “Achewood Calling” when Joe Strummer died.
Maybe we could call D&D “summarized roleplaying”. How many players attempt to speak in character? Sitting around a table looking at fellow geeks and an empty pizza box, it feels pretty silly anyway. So we end up describing our actions rather than acting.
I’ve done a lot of RP in Second Life, where you get the visuals right, at least. If you’re a dark elf fighter with badass armor and a sword bigger than you are, well, that’s what you and everyone else sees. So people will actually speak and act in character.
On the other hand, combat in SL sucks, so the ideal RP environment is still to come.
This sort of reminds me of Gygax’s appearance on Futurama:
“Greetings! It’s a (rolls 20 sided die) pleasure to meet you!”
Gygax’s death: Yeah, I’ve been working on an obit over at Wired all morning. It was a real bummer to hear, but I’m very pleased that my story includes the word “grokked.”
Sorry, I hope OotS DOES do something about his death. That was pretty much the worst typo possible in my previous comment.
D&D is not a “roleplaying” game, but neither is Final Fantasy, World of Warcraft, or any of the activities fetishists play out in the bedroom. It’s still a game, though, a pretty decent one that may be guilty of trying to jerryrig in processes for an audience that doesn’t even play the game.
True “roleplayers” have many, many other games that they can play; if they can find somebody to play with. D&D, however, has evolved into a hack-and-slash tabletop game with extreme customibility that also allows you to pretend you’re a dwarf, if you want. It has been crafted to be whatever game you want it to be, and to be truthful, more people want to stomp face than exchange pleasantries with an ogre. Don’t blame the maker if the businessmen at Wizards realized this and transformed it into a overly-complex fantasy battlefield simulator, and left the trappings of the royal court aspect lacking.
So I agree, pretty much, it all comes down to the players and the G-man. If they want to “roleplay,” they can play White Wolf. If they love systems and combat, well, D&D’s got all that and a pound of cake. And if they are hardcore roleplayers, outfits and all, they should stop getting mad that RPG is such a convenient acronym for any game that has numbers.
Also, rest in peace, Gygax.
Good essay. We’ve been seeing a lot of this over at enworld, including the claim about how it’s “just not D&D” unless high-lvl wizards can spank fighters by quintupling their damage. Silly stuff, sometimes.
I’m glad you quoted Mearls in the Gygax obituary. Nicely done.
Sounds like the exact thing I was talking about in my essay, Taquelli. Right when you put the word “true” in front of “roleplayers.” It’s just another form of “roleplaying means playing the way I like to play.”
Piratecat: Yeah, the wizard example was straight off the EN World boards. That’s also where I heard about Gygax.
I found all the complaints about “roll-playing” pretty ridiculous too. None of the ones I read explained what the hell the term meant, and they seemed to contradict themselves.
4E appeals to the people it’s trying to appeal to. All the crying in the world can’t change that. The folks slinging around the term “roll-playing” remind me of the people who used to complain that World of Warcraft wasn’t a virtual world. They acted like that was a failure on Blizzard’s part, despite the fact that the game was clearly designed to follow pre-determined story-lines, not to simulate a real world. They might as well play Heroscape and complain it isn’t Warhammer.
*Sigh*
Remembering stuff from decades ago. EGG was a frequent guest of I-CON, a college SF convention I once helped run. Drove him around one weekend, and got to hear some interesting stories about his brief pot-smoking burnout days in Hollywood (the D&D cartoon). He’d been through some really (really) bad times personal-life-wise, but ended up in a happy second marriage, becoming a daddy again, and much fame.
Whiners. D&D is what it is. If you want a “pure” roleplaying experience, there’s always Plaything, right?
There was actually quite an interesting group for talking about RP theory on the Usenet. I think it is stilla round, but the discussions have dwindled to almost nothing.
It’s called rec.games.frp.advocacy, if I remember right. I think it was supposed to be a sink for the flame-wars about the One True RPG System, but somehow they ended up talking about all kinds of interesting ideas in a civil manner instead. On Usenet. Who’d've thought?
During the best times it had a lot of insightful things like what Lore just wrote. Oh my, maybe I’ll have to look at the Google groups archives now.
RSS feed for comments on this post.
Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>