Tony Vargas
Legend
It still sounds like "let's draw some battle-lines" to me.The poll doesn't ask "What is role playing?" It asks "How do you primarily think of roleplaying?"
It still sounds like "let's draw some battle-lines" to me.The poll doesn't ask "What is role playing?" It asks "How do you primarily think of roleplaying?"
Meh, kind of. Gygax was explaining how to play a game. He was also a very tactical thinker. Thus, he focused on the gamist and strategic bits. He was also more inclined to favor DMs creating home brew worlds, so he wasn't inclined to throw tons of coherent fiction at the reader.As I read Gygax's AD&D rulebooks, the key elements of the fiction are "You're in a narrow dungeon corridor", "You're in a dark room with a stream flowing through it", "You see a corroded tube in the stream", etc. Not "You're wearing yellow and are afraid of spiders".
The bolded part really confuses me. Are you saying that, because my character swings a sword, I'm now engaged in a "functional role"? I've read that line several times, now. I keep thinking I have to be reading it wrong, but I don't see any other way to take it.But we get a lot of interaction with the shared fiction - poking things, climbing things, looking at things, trying to grab the spider and hurl it to the ground, etc - it's just that all that interaction is defined in functional terms: activities to which the players turn their characters.
Agreed, which is why I said they can't really be separable. The interaction with the fiction only exists because of the persona.But in D&D the game doesn't contrast with the fiction. Playing the game is engaging the fiction. If you can define your game moves in purely mechanical terms, without reference to the fiction at all, then it's not RPGing. D&D combat sometimes comes close to this (attack, damage, AC, etc are all defined in purely mechanical terms) but its terrain and movement/positioning rules involve adjudicating the fiction.
True. In that case, I still think of roleplaying as being about the persona. Any functional roles are purely a consequence of the persona.The poll doesn't ask "What is role playing?" It asks "How do you primarily think of roleplaying?"
Most of the "detail" involved an "appeal to authority" vis-a-vis quotes from Gygax. I provided some opposing quotes, and I believe others did, as well. Additionally, I don't think that Gary is the final arbiter of what is and is not roleplaying. He may have birthed (or, at least, midwived) the hobby, but it has grown up.The OP even went into some detail to elaborate the two ways of thinking about roleplaying, and to posit some ways in which the functional approach might bleed into the personality approach.
My belief on the history is that a certain amount of it is due to the hobby being young -- the archetypes were still archetypes, not cliches. The early game was also closer to its war gaming roots and hadn't matured, yet. Even then, there's plenty of evidence to indicate that Gary and company injected quite a bit of persona into what they were doing.Building on those conjectures about "bleeding" in the OP, I'm also - but this is somewhat secondary - arguing that "function" is how "role" was presented in some early game texts, but that there is a change in that presentation somewhere in the mid-80s. That historical argument is interesting to me, but secondary to the premise and question of the thread.
No one much liked clerics in the olden days. That didn't stop people (usually the last person to join the group) from playing them, because they were so vital to the playability of the game.I didn't see a cleric played until the late 1990s, as far as I recall. No one I played with liked them.
'Adjusted?' To what? Take on one kobold at a time and retreat for a week?. So, we had the fighter on the left, the fighter on the right, the ranger, and (maybe) the thief. Functional niche wasn't even a consideration. We just adjusted our tactics/strategy.
It's a pretty big leap to say "your character has a different mechanic than another character" to "your character has an entirely different function than other characters".It's not a far cry, at all, it's directly supportive of it. Not only that, but having some function (the OP used function, rather than 'role' IIRC, role having both the baggage of the R in RPG, which is in question, and of 4e formal roles), is prettymuch inevitable. Unless your character is utterly passive (even then it might have some sort of observer or victim function in the story) and/or utterly useless, neither of which is typical.
Intent is a huge thing here. Intent and expectation.By the same token, you can completely avoid having any sort of personality for the pawn you're using in a game, as in a boardgame.
Haha. There were a couple of TPKs. There were also a couple of druids, but no one really took to them. I think we had one bard.Seriously, though, fighter, ranger, thief, they each had their traditional functions (frontliner, tracking, getting killed by traps), and each certainly must have been functional in the context of that super-slow-motion, weeks-of-resting between fights, 'adventuring' party (sorry, I know I said 'seriously' but I just couldn't keep it up...
...the very idea....
...sorry - I'll shut up now).
I don't see the necessity of the leap. As long as your character has a function. If he doesn't, what's he doin' hanging around with folks what have things to do?It's a pretty big leap to say "your character has a different mechanic than another character" to "your character has an entirely different function than other characters".
That's the point. As a sole arbiter of what constitutes the R in RPG, functionality doesn't cut it. Pawns in a board game have functionality.Second, it overlaps too much with board games and (non-RPG) video games. Like entirely.
Role is what we're trying to define, so that's not helpful. Aspects unrelated to function or personality? I don't think so. Aspects can very neatly and flexibly cover both.Third, not every game supports that; it'd be easy to make a Fate character whose aspects are unrelated to their role.
Illustrative of the scope of RPGs.And unless you make a party together, sometimes your function in the group is not always the function you designed your character for.
It's a stretch to say it does so exclusively. It's also a stretch to say that personality does so exclusively. Put 'em together and you start to have something.But it's a stretch to say the "role" in "role-playing games" comes from filling a role/ function in the party.
You mean you can act out the persona (the definition of role is what's at issue). IT'd be a stretch to say you're roleplaying, because there's not only no difference difference among the personas, there's no functional difference in how they're played. You just go through the motions of the board game.You can play Clue and roleplay. You can adopt the persona of Professor Plum as you play.
In that case, you probably /can/ shade into RP, because you are making decisions that lead to the role being functional as well as an unconnected portrayal. Battletech did spawn an actual RPG. A crappy one, but still... ;PAnd you can RP your heart out in tactical miniature combat games like Descent or BattleTech.
To an extent, you could, but you'd be ignoring chunks of the game. 3 of his stats, his skills, many of the less formal options available in combat, etc.You can play bob the human fighter as a pog that is moved from battle to battle, or run D&D like a series of tactical battles.
While TT and Live-action have their differences, they're both much more clearly RPGs than, say, CRPGs or MMOs.Similarly, LARPing also exists and overlaps with RPGs. But I wouldn't classify dressing up, moving around a real world space, or combat with foam weapons in the definition of RPGs either.
Hanging with friends. Thrust into a tough situation. What was Arthur Dent doing with Ford Prefect?I don't see the necessity of the leap. As long as your character has a function. If he doesn't, what's he doin' hanging around with folks what have things to do?
But, again, how does that factor into a game like Dread where there are no character sheets or character abilities? Or something like Fiasco?That's the point. As a sole arbiter of what constitutes the R in RPG, functionality doesn't cut it. Pawns in a board game have functionality.
By the same token, portraying a personality as sole arbiter of what constitutes R in RPG doesn't cut it. An actor reciting the same lines every night and twice on sundays is doing that.
But, put 'em both together and you have a Role in the RPG sense: a meaningful, realized character.
Which was my thought until I considered the above, and games without fancy character powers. Where you might be less a role and more a character archetype.It's a stretch to say it does so exclusively. It's also a stretch to say that personality does so exclusively. Put 'em together and you start to have something.
Which is the point. You can totally RP through Clue, justifying your characters actions based on the adopted personal of Professor Plum. Having stretches of in character interactions across the table. (Try it. It's awesome fun.) And it's not much of a stretch to go from that to the Evening of Murder parties that are basically LARPing. To say nothing of historical reenactments. (Again, with no character capabilities.)You mean you can act out the persona (the definition of role is what's at issue). IT'd be a stretch to say you're roleplaying, because there's not only no difference difference among the personas, there's no functional difference in how they're played. You just go through the motions of the board game.
You can speak in character all you like, if the character makes no difference, it's just an affectation. ;P
In that case, you probably /can/ shade into RP, because you are making decisions that lead to the role being functional as well as an unconnected portrayal. Battletech did spawn an actual RPG. A crappy one, but still... ;P
But you could. Easily. Just walking up in social situations and being all "I made a Charisma check. I get a 13."To an extent, you could, but you'd be ignoring chunks of the game. 3 of his stats, his skills, many of the less formal options available in combat, etc.
It is largely about functions. See for example the Thesaurus definition:
The only one of the above which might seem to involve personality is the first one related to performing actors. But even in this case the "role" is about the character's function in the story, e.g. the hero, the villain, the damsel in distress, the comic relief... The expression "an actor plays a role" doesn't originally mean that she performs a personality, but rather that she indeed covers a function in the narrative.
I think Gygax mixed a bit of personality with function mostly because he wanted his classes to provide also a story function, so that his set of rules could be used to direct also the overarching narrative, and not just the tactics and resolutions during the game.
It is peculiar that nowadays we have largely learned to prefer freedom from rules when it comes to create a PC's personality, and therefore we tend to reject rules restrictions and compulsions to non-tactical behaviour, while yet at the same time we have shifted to calling such non-tactical behaviour "roleplay", which is the part we don't want our "roleplay games" books to tell us how to do.
But, by that definition of "role", hockey and football (both types) are role-playing games.By contrast, the role in the party is for me a major defining feature of a RPG. It's what enables cooperative teamwork for problem-solving in a structured way. Same idea as in a team sport, where you have defenders, attackers, goalkeepers, stikers etc... There are very few teamsports where everyone is equal in role.