Chess is not an RPG: The Illusion of Game Balance

[Janx]

Celebrim I'm not sold on the single role thing though. It's pretty common for players to have more than one role in an rpg. Controlling multiple characters isn't that rare. Note are adjunct characters like familiars or the like.

That depends on the game and GM. I think players controlling multiple characters in an RPG is usually a GM concession to needing more characters in the party, or simplifying his workload so he doesn't have to "fight himself" with NPCs vs. monsters.

I'd say a "typical" RPG expects the player to be controling a single character, but that's not absolute.

If nothing else, difference is that the player is focussed on that character and responding from that character's viewpoint, rather than moving a number of generic pawns on the board. So a player running 2 PCs, is expected to determine PC1's actions from PC1's information, and likewise for PC2.

Though there are still players who will play D&D and run their fighter as a nameless token on the board, that is sort of the exception to the concept.

 

[howandwhy99]

I think I'm finally understanding why I'm having such a tough time following H&W's larger points. He's taking the word Role Playing Game, and then breaking that word apart to serve whichever meaning he needs at a given time.

No, I've been using the same definition all along. Role playing is since it was coined the act of playing a social role. It's part of sociology. Pretending isn't the roleplaying D&D was defined for.

Character role playing in the acting sense didn't become widespread until well after D&D took it as a label. That's the language confusion stemming from the 80s that leads to much confusion about the earlier books. Not to mention how games were not considered conflict resolution agreements then either, but mathematical constructs to be mastered through practice.

 

[billd91]

If nothing else, difference is that the player is focussed on that character and responding from that character's viewpoint, rather than moving a number of generic pawns on the board. So a player running 2 PCs, is expected to determine PC1's actions from PC1's information, and likewise for PC2.

Though there are still players who will play D&D and run their fighter as a nameless token on the board, that is sort of the exception to the concept.

I would agree that requiring a one-to-one relationship between player and character is reaching too far. An RPG isn't less of an RPG just because I play two characters in the same game. Rather, the in-game representation(s) of the players are personified. They aren't just tokens but are expected to have the characteristics of persons.

 

[Umbran]

Role playing is since it was coined the act of playing a social role. It's part of sociology.

In my understanding, role theory in sociology talks about "acting out a role" or "acting in a role", "taking on a role"or "assuming a role" more than "playing" roles. Probably because in this context, we are probably talking about the various roles a real person must fulfill, and how they come into real conflict, and it would be dismissive to talk about it as "play" when you're discussing the issues of being a mother and a professional, for example.

In psychology, however, role playing is used for therapy or training - and here it does have the connotation of "This is pretend, not the real thing".

Pretending isn't the roleplaying D&D was defined for.

I don't think it is all that clear cut. Nor do I think the original starting definition is really relevant now. We've had a few decades, and even Gygax's own later offerings lean to the, "pretending to be an elf" thing.

 

[Celebrim]

2: A game from the RPG family (whichever side of the line it falls on) that has a predefined end point and you can't continue after that point because the setup no longer makes sense, and is not just a module for a larger game.

I rather dislike all your definitions. They are meaningless, tautologies, and I can easily imagine an RPG that is not a story game that plays to an end and is only be designed to run for a single scenario. Likewise, I can imagine a story game that is meant to play on and on and on in multiple episodes until the players become tired of it. So the fact that Amber is meant to generate long running scenarios and has no defined end point doesn't to me seem to matter all that much. It just would fall then into a general class of "open ended games" which many RPGs belong to, but which many things we'd agree are not RPGs (but often have RPG elements, such as game pieces that persist between sessions of play) would also belong to. For example, neither Bloodbowl (a board game) nor Necromunda (a tactical wargame) is an RPG, but both are intended to support open ended play.

I don't believe Amber has any such defined end point other than that it's PVP. So it doesn't fit type 2.

Which as I said only means Amber is an open ended game, but I disagree that being open ended is an inherent attribute of RPGs or that not being open ended is an inherent attribute of story games.

With you on your conclusion. But Hillfolk is definitely an RPG.

I think given the loose definition of RPGs floating around that you are used to thinking of it as an RPG, but I'm rather unconvinced. I think Hillfolk is better represented as an example of an open-ended story game.

"A game where you are expected to make moves outside the direct scope of the game's mechanics, and where your moves are informed by intangibles like your character's motivations"?

Maybe. To me this relates back to the notion that there exists a fiction. I didn't want to get into this because it raises the problem of associated mechanics. I think all RPGs have at least some associated mechanics (or there wouldn't exist a fiction), but I'm not sure how to phrase things in such a way that it doesn't look like I'm saying "If you have dissociated mechanics, you aren't an RPG." - something I don't believe. For one thing, dissociation itself is going to be hard to precisely define as all mechanics tend to be abstract (and thus dissociated) on some level. I do absolutely agree that (it would seem) RPGs are defined by having open ended rules, and I think I'd add that up as a 4th entry on the list I'm making so far, though I think that it will be controversial with some because often people who play say D&D believe that they have a closed rules set (when I'm inclined to think that they don't). However, the reason I'm adding it is that the creation of open ended rules, the inspiration of which was reputedly "What happens if I fire a star trek phaser in a medieval battle?", is pretty much inextricable from the invention of the notion that you were playing the role of a single character within a fictional space in that moment when wargames became RPGs.

Still, this is fuzzy. It's quite conceivable to play an RPG with a closed rules set and setting. You could play D&D in a way that you rigorously adhered to the maxim, "No proposition without a predefined set of stakes is a valid proposition." In fact, I can think of one case where that is actually done, but it doesn't involve dice or paper.

You're in that case taking out a range of games I consider RPGs. Like Montsegur 1244. The argument here would appear to be that they are roleplaying but not roleplaying Games?

Here I have to agree at least a little with Hussar. RPGs aren't merely games that have some roleplaying in them. If we go that far, then it must be true that "Whose Line is it Anyway?" is also an RPG - at which point RPG has morphed from being something rather specific into an umbrella term that covers almost everything. What then happens is that we've left ourselves with no specific term for the thing we used to call an RPG. Since we already have terms like Story Game and Theater Game for things that share many traits with RPGs but which aren't RPGs, I see no need to make RPG the umbrella term. That said, I do agree that part of the problem here is that I'm getting a bit late to the party. In common usage, RPG has already morphed to mean both the specific thing I know as an RPG and also the umbrella term for all games that feature some sort of dramatic play.

Anyway, from my perspective, Montsegur 1244 is pretty much definitively a story game. Montsegur 1244 is really nothing more than a slightly structured theater game. With the exception of the formalization of the playing peices, it could well be a theater game. It's pretty much entirely an exercise in improvisational theater. Even if you only narrated, mistaking M1244 for an RPG would be like mistaking the act of outlining a module when playing "Iron DM" for the act of playing an RPG. If Montsegur 1244 is an RPG, then we must concede that "Whose Line is it Anyway?" is also an RPG.

And you've just included a wide range of tabletop wargames where you are playing the general and the fiction is important.

Possibly. However, I don't think I'm including games like Warhammer Fantasy, since even if you have a leader, the focus of play is on the manipulation of the whole army. You can play Necomunda, but the 'you' in that scenario is the gang, not really the gang leader. On the other hand, I can see Necromunda being played as an RPG quite easily with only a slight shift in perspective. (Remember, how you think about the game and how you prepare to play it is as important or more important than the system.) I might be including a game like Battletech if each player was limited to a single mech and single pilot and played in an ongoing campaign, but at that point we'd be shading off into MechWarrior and the game would probably start becoming recognizably an RPG.

But you can add b without making it an RPG. Fog of War rules for one.

Mentioning fog of war was a mistake. I didn't mean to imply that fog of war was necessary for creating a fiction. I was just reaching for examples of the sort of things that are done with table top games to support the idea that the game board represents a concrete and imaginable fictional space in which the activities are taking place. The notion of fiction as it exists in RPGs is almost certainly a development of how wargames had developed more and more detailed fictions in which the battle was to take place. Putting terrain on the chessboard - hills, ravines, ponds, etc. - would also serve to create a fiction. That said, it is a distinctive feature of RPGs that the fiction tends to be open ended in the same way that the rules are open ended. Playing a wargame, no aspect of the fiction not covered by the rules has any actual importance to play. The play isn't actually taking place in the shared imaginary space. The visible board is itself the shared space in a wargame or board game. I would suggest this departure from traditional closed system games is something that RPGs share with story games, and probably the entire 'dramatic game' family.

That said, this leaves me with a problem and suggests a way that cRPGs are different than 'true' RPGs and an area I feel somewhat sympathetic to Wick's observation that WOW is not an RPG. Computers created closed game worlds and game systems. Only to the extent that this is ignored and the computer is used as a minigame interface for certain kinds of proposition resolution, are you actually playing a 'true' RPG on a computer. So either I'm going to have to abandon the closed/open system/setting divide, or else either story games or cRPGs are going to have to drop out of the definition. Hmmmm.

Types of Dramatic Play
RPGs: ???
Story Games: RPGs without procedural fortune mechanics. (??)
Theater Games: Story Games that don't implement the Fundamental Law except by social contract. (Fairly sure on that one)
Improvisational Theater: A theater game played before an audience.
Traditional Drama: Theater Games that don't allow the players agency

 

[Umbran]

I wold imagine the basic definitional difference should lie in this question:

What is more important to the play - manipulating the actions of an individual character, or manipulating the elements of the story?

There is no reason why a story game should have a player take the position and viewpoint of a single particular character that they own - the storygame should be properly about *the story* and its elements, not *the character*.

There is a card game, "Once Upon a Time". This is a story game - it is about creating, shaping, and guiding a story. There is no playing of individual roles at all, so it is clearly not a role-playing game.

I don't think "role playing game with some authorial/editorial control for players" really equates to "story game".

 

[prosfilaes]

I think it is safe to say that neither you nor I know the definition of an RPG. All we can do is make lists of things we think are RPGs, and things we think are not RPGs. Our lists will probably not match up exactly. After that we can only try to explain why we think that this or that belongs on the list.

I think thinking of "the definition" can be misleading. Each person has their own idiolect, their own conception of any word, and for most people, for "roleplaying game", the concept is prototype-based, not definition-based, thus "I know that this set of things are roleplaying games, and anything sufficiently similar must therefore also be a roleplaying game." You can try and create some underlying definition, but it's going to be synthetic.

 

[billd91]

In my understanding, role theory in sociology talks about "acting out a role" or "acting in a role", "taking on a role"or "assuming a role" more than "playing" roles. Probably because in this context, we are probably talking about the various roles a real person must fulfill, and how they come into real conflict, and it would be dismissive to talk about it as "play" when you're discussing the issues of being a mother and a professional, for example.

In psychology, however, role playing is used for therapy or training - and here it does have the connotation of "This is pretend, not the real thing".

<snip>
I don't think it is all that clear cut. Nor do I think the original starting definition is really relevant now. We've had a few decades, and even Gygax's own later offerings lean to the, "pretending to be an elf" thing.

Yeah, I have to agree that the first definition is too narrow to be of much use. Role playing has also been long used to describe pretend play by children consciously taking on a role such as when they play house or cops and robbers. I think it highly dubious to assume the developers of D&D did not have that version of role playing in mind once they made the leap to playing individual characters. The pretend aspect is certainly present in AD&D. But I don't have any earlier rulebooks handy to check earlier publications.

 

[Umbran]

the concept is prototype-based, not definition-based, thus "I know that this set of things are roleplaying games, and anything sufficiently similar must therefore also be a roleplaying game." You can try and create some underlying definition, but it's going to be synthetic.

In essence, RPGs are a genre of game. Genres are almost never defined in hard terms, but instead in terms of, "If it has enough of the common tropes and themes, it is in the genre", where "enough" is kind of subjective.

 

[mouselim]

The sort of rules structure you describe is 100% not required for an RPG.

For instance, your example assumes that combat in the game involves initiative, affected by weapon speed and DEX scores. Which also assumes that PCs have ability scores such as DEX. You also make assumptions about action economy, consequence generation and imposition, etc.

None of that is true for the 4 RPGs I mentioned above. Characters are defined by descriptors (completey free descriptors for 2 of them, a mix of free and semi-free descriptors for MHRP, a mix of free descriptors and skill ranks for Fate).

Even Burning Wheel, which involves a weapons table with speed and vs armour, can be played without it. If the table doesn't want to bother differentiating in any detail between daggers and polearms, they're not obliged to. Situations where one weapon would be particularly advantageous or disadvantageous can easiy be handled via ad hoc modifiers (eg if the dagger wielder is charging the polearm wielder, the polearm wielder gets a bonus die; if the dagger wield is shaking the hand of the polearm wielder when the fight breaks out, then the dagger wielder gets a bonus die).

Incorporating weapons speed, DEX stats, vs armour, etc into combat resolution is a choice in design. Not a requirement.

Again I have to disagree. Let's take a real life scenario. Presumably that you have some experience in the army (as I have) and/or weapon arms.

A M16 rifle vs carbine - which has more recoil?

Will a person who has more strength shoot better (handling the recoil effect) than another?

Will having the correct technique (butt between chest and shoulder, release half-breath and hold, etc) help?

In your definition of RPG, I have a scrawny character who wields a GPMG but he is shooting it single-handedly and hits your brawny character wielding a M16 and at the same time, dives down to throw a bayonet at another character 200 feet away.