Role-playing has existed for a century, if not longer. Some role-playing exercises (for education or business) are games with active human opposition, others are puzzles. You play a "role" even in Monopoly, and in many other board games, especially wargames ("you are the commander" said Avalon Hill long before "RPGs" existed). Yet most people would agree that hobby RPGs really got going with Dungeons & Dragons.
So what makes a hobby RPG different from all the "other" role-playing? Human or human-like avatars are the difference. There are three forms of avatar; in hobby RPGs it's the "pure" or "real" form. This is an entity that everything emanates from, the source of all your actions in the game, and if you lose that entity, if "you" die, you lose the game. The avatar is a focus of everything the player does, starting at the avatar, whether swing a sword, talk to somebody, move around, it is all about the avatar. There may have been games before the early 70s that used pure avatars, but none come to mind, and none made avatars famous. (Video games often use pure avatars, but those derive from D&D. Video games owe a LOT to D&D.)
The second avatar type is that "you" command, but you are not at risk, you may not even be represented by a piece or other asset. Nonetheless the activity emanates from all the assets that you command. In other words, you are a general, or a king, or a CEO. I call this a "virtual avatar," and this is the one used in role-play before the D&D revolution.
The third meaning is that you have a vague function but not a personage. For example, in long-timescale games like Britannia or computer Civilization, and in some social deduction games such as Resistance.
In other words, you have three types: the do-er (as in one doing actions) versus the King/general (the one giving the commands) versus the mysterious, omnipotent controller.
Notice I don't include the usage of "avatar" to describe the little picture we associate with our login/handle in various online communities: "an icon or figure representing a particular person in video games, Internet forums, etc." That's just a picture. I'm talking about function.
Avatars sometimes have a separate developer- or GM-provided "history" and personality (Mario, Sonic, Conan, Aragorn, etc.). Sometimes an avatar is a blank slate so that the player can more easily infuse his/her own personality into the avatar. But whether the avatar has an extensive backstory, or none, doesn't change the design function.
Of course, if we were to try defining "hobby RPG", we'd include some mechanism(s) that allow a player's avatar to increase in capabilities, whether through leveling, skill and feat acquisition, loot collection, or something else. A game without this improvement resembles many novels and movies, where the hero is about the same throughout. James Bond, Conan, Indiana Jones, may improve a little from episode to episode, but not consistently, and most other heroes/protagonists even less so. There's rarely anything like a progression from first to tenth level. Loot collection is the most common improvement in novels and movies. Jon Petersen (author of the historical Playing at the World) would add that in RPGs the player can try to do anything, unlike in other kinds of games where there are distinct limits. More about this another time.
Just as wargames were the hobby of Baby Boomers, video games (and perhaps D&D?) the hobby of Gen X, the game hobby of Millennials is avatar games of all kinds. Which mostly means video games: Skyrim in its first week of release sold $450,000,000 worth, vastly more than the past 10 years of tabletop RPG sales in the USA.
Did hobby RPGs originate the avatar itself? Not exactly, because many racing games, individual tank fighting games (such as World of Tanks), air fighting games, and others have a non-animate avatar, something other than a humanoid. Even when the pilot is modeled separately, the main action in the game comes from the vehicle. It is the focus entirely on the human (or human-like) character that led to an entire genre of gaming.
Reference: "A Perspective on Role-Play" by Stephen L. Lortz, Different Worlds magazine #4, Aug/Sept 1979, pp. 26-28.
contributed by Lewis Pulsipher
So what makes a hobby RPG different from all the "other" role-playing? Human or human-like avatars are the difference. There are three forms of avatar; in hobby RPGs it's the "pure" or "real" form. This is an entity that everything emanates from, the source of all your actions in the game, and if you lose that entity, if "you" die, you lose the game. The avatar is a focus of everything the player does, starting at the avatar, whether swing a sword, talk to somebody, move around, it is all about the avatar. There may have been games before the early 70s that used pure avatars, but none come to mind, and none made avatars famous. (Video games often use pure avatars, but those derive from D&D. Video games owe a LOT to D&D.)
The second avatar type is that "you" command, but you are not at risk, you may not even be represented by a piece or other asset. Nonetheless the activity emanates from all the assets that you command. In other words, you are a general, or a king, or a CEO. I call this a "virtual avatar," and this is the one used in role-play before the D&D revolution.
The third meaning is that you have a vague function but not a personage. For example, in long-timescale games like Britannia or computer Civilization, and in some social deduction games such as Resistance.
In other words, you have three types: the do-er (as in one doing actions) versus the King/general (the one giving the commands) versus the mysterious, omnipotent controller.
Notice I don't include the usage of "avatar" to describe the little picture we associate with our login/handle in various online communities: "an icon or figure representing a particular person in video games, Internet forums, etc." That's just a picture. I'm talking about function.
Avatars sometimes have a separate developer- or GM-provided "history" and personality (Mario, Sonic, Conan, Aragorn, etc.). Sometimes an avatar is a blank slate so that the player can more easily infuse his/her own personality into the avatar. But whether the avatar has an extensive backstory, or none, doesn't change the design function.
Of course, if we were to try defining "hobby RPG", we'd include some mechanism(s) that allow a player's avatar to increase in capabilities, whether through leveling, skill and feat acquisition, loot collection, or something else. A game without this improvement resembles many novels and movies, where the hero is about the same throughout. James Bond, Conan, Indiana Jones, may improve a little from episode to episode, but not consistently, and most other heroes/protagonists even less so. There's rarely anything like a progression from first to tenth level. Loot collection is the most common improvement in novels and movies. Jon Petersen (author of the historical Playing at the World) would add that in RPGs the player can try to do anything, unlike in other kinds of games where there are distinct limits. More about this another time.
Just as wargames were the hobby of Baby Boomers, video games (and perhaps D&D?) the hobby of Gen X, the game hobby of Millennials is avatar games of all kinds. Which mostly means video games: Skyrim in its first week of release sold $450,000,000 worth, vastly more than the past 10 years of tabletop RPG sales in the USA.
Did hobby RPGs originate the avatar itself? Not exactly, because many racing games, individual tank fighting games (such as World of Tanks), air fighting games, and others have a non-animate avatar, something other than a humanoid. Even when the pilot is modeled separately, the main action in the game comes from the vehicle. It is the focus entirely on the human (or human-like) character that led to an entire genre of gaming.
Reference: "A Perspective on Role-Play" by Stephen L. Lortz, Different Worlds magazine #4, Aug/Sept 1979, pp. 26-28.
contributed by Lewis Pulsipher
