D&D 5E What is the "role" in roleplaying

It's hard for me to answer the poll because each of the answers without the other feels empty for me.

Being able to do things but not having good reasons for taking actions nor values that can get me into interesting conflicts is not fun. Playing a character with goals and relations but no ability to affect fiction in meaningful way (because of character's incompetence, bad game mechanics or a GM that ignores the system) isn't, either.

When I make choices during game, I base them on the character's personality, but also on their abilities and on the metagame situation. The "role" I play is the total of what my character believes, what they are able to do, what other PCs need from me and what is fun for the group (the RL people).

D&D as initially released, provided two distinct roles for participants; player and referee. The role of player is manifested in the game as an adventurer, an inhabitant of a fictional world. The role of referee is manifested in the game in various capacities including world creator, rules arbiter, and portraying the role of anyone or anything in the campaign that isn't a PC.

The PC roles or character classes were more than just professions, they represented who a character was at his/her core. Playing a fighter was more than just playing a character with martial skill. The role of fighter was a specific approach to the game that went beyond what weapons or gear you chose. Likewise with a cleric or magic user. The chosen role defined how a particular player wanted to approach the challenges of play and the outlook of the character with regard to interactions with the rest of the world.

Somewhere down the line as classes began to proliferate and become more specialized, their meaning as a core of who the character was got replaced with becoming their job. Naturally, as classes became more narrowly defined then they became less connected to actual character identity. For most people, their profession doesn't define who they are as a person. Its the same with highly specialized classes, they don't define who the character is, only what they do.

It is this focus on character classes as occupations that mentally links the players to only the mechanical rules based skills & abilities of the class. If class is nothing more than a job then the job skills are the only aspects of the class that mean anything. There is no underlying philosophy or reasoned approach to interacting with the world when not employing these job skills. In essence, the class no longer provides much of an identity or general approach to play. Without such an approach whenever these classes cannot employ their specialized job skills, the character feels "useless". That is the natural result of connecting a character class to a job instead of a reasoned approach to interacting with the world (i.e. an identity).

pemerton said:

Roleplaying means playing a role.

There are (at least) two things this could mean.

It could mean filling a role that is defined by functions, capacities, responsibilities, etc. (Being a firefighter is a different role from being a librarian.)

It could mean performing (in the theatrical sense) a role that is defined by personality, motivation, etc. (Playing Hamlet is a different role from playing Sherlock Holmes.)

<snip>

But the first can bleed into the second - a functional role might also suggest a certain sort of personality or at least basic set of motivations/behaviours <snip>

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Going to take a look at three games. Just going to be analysis of how much bleed there is, how much of that bleed is a result of systemization or advocacy on behalf of the designers. The first will be Moldvay Basic and two modern games that it inspired; Torchbearer and Dungeon World.

Moldvay Basic

The PCs are built with:

- Ability Scores
- Class
- Gear
- Inheritance (if this is a later PC and the player tagged this PC for their stuff less taxes upon death)
- Languages
- Alignment

Ability Scores have a pithy description of their functionality and gist. The most consequential aspect of them on play is earning extra XP if your class meets the threshold for its Prime Requisite. The game doesn't advocate for stupid Wizards, clumsy Thiefs, or weak Fighters. It advocates for choosing class based on your rolls matching the a class's prime requisite. So there is a positive feedback loop for optimization of Ability Scores.

Class will give you both your utility/functionality and your "place in the world." The feedback loop here is that if you're a Dwarf (a strong, hardy PC with infravision and the ability to detect traps and construction/stone-work oddities), you're set up as the party's vanguard. They're rewarded. You're rewarded. Freeform play in town will occur (sell treasure, regear, hire retainers, gather intel/plan next expedition), but the meat of the game is organized in Exploration turns and Encounter turns and your actions in these turns are easily inferred from your Class. There are a few pithy sentences describing inclinations and physical aesthetic. Finally, the Party Composition portion of the book stresses variety due to the niches/roles expressed by Class.

While not PC build-related, the Mapper (maps dungeon) and Caller (team PC rep) are player roles that are mostly metagame, but often carry in-game roles along with it.

Alignment comes in Lawful, Chaotic, and Neutral. The only real systematized component here is the unique Alignment Language which comes into play quite a bit when parlaying with team monster. There is no other feedback loop associated with it. There is no prescription of action here, just pithy descriptions that provide the players some shorthand for their character's basic M.O.

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In all of my games GMing Moldvay Basic (and its descendents/expansions up through RC), its always been the same (with probably 200 players or so in the last 32 years and change). The players have a stable of characters. Once they know the gist of their quest/dungeon, they select one of those characters, then gear up > go on expedition > bring the living back to town to sell stuff/trade quest item for stuff > grab retainers/figure out next expedition > rinse/repeat. The roleplaying is light, mostly cookie-cutter with characters being extremely vanilla (often named silly things) until they've proven themselves (survived several expeditions/levels).

Once they've done that, they'll be taken more seriously. Characterization and jokes will emerge naturally from their successes and failures. This stuff will color the conversation of play and the action declarations of those characters. But (a) there is no systemitized feedback loop involved with that characterization and (b) there is an umistakable relationship of cause:downstream effect or chicken:egg.

I'll do Torchbearer and Dungeon World at some other point...maybe Monday.

Manbearcat said:

Moldvay Basic[/B

- Inheritance (if this is a later PC and the player tagged this PC for their stuff less taxes upon death)

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I don't think Moldvay has this. But it is mentioned (but slightly obliquely) in the AD&D PHB, in the final section on Adventuring.

Manbearcat said:

Moldvay Basic (and its descendents/expansions up through RC)

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Looking at Moldvay Basic, it doesn't talk about personality as far as I can tell, but the final step of making a character is giving him/her a name.

Looking at RC, it has a whole section on background and personality. From page 11:

[N]ow it's time to give your character his name, peronality and background - the traits which make him a real character. . . . You should think about your character, about his mannerisms, the way he speaks, the way he dress, how he spends money, what sort of people he likes, how he likes to spend his non-adventuring time, and so on. The more attention you invest in imagining your character . . . the more interesting and "real" you will make him. Sure, it's useful for your character to be the mightiest warrior in the world . . . but none of the other player characters will care whether he lives or dies unless he has a personality.​

This is pretty close to the AD&D 2nd ed PHB. I think it exmplifies the change from the early 80s to the early 90s in understanding of what "roleplaying" means.

pemerton said:

I don't think Moldvay has this. But it is mentioned (but slightly obliquely) in the AD&D PHB, in the final section on Adventuring.

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Don't have my books with me...but I want to say...end of the Characters section? Somewhere around Gear, Alignment, and Languages. Should be a blurb in there.

pemerton said:

Looking at Moldvay Basic, it doesn't talk about personality as far as I can tell, but the final step of making a character is giving him/her a name.

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It definitely doesn't. Alignment and Class only give the most broad, vanilla strokes of ethos and cultural inclinations. Which works well enough because the game isn't about depth of character but cohesive dungeon delving squads pulling loot out of monster/trap infested dungeons or die trying.

Its squarely centered around that premise and any characterization of their PC by players is pretty much incidental to the thrust, procedures, and rewards of play (and typically only emerges, if it does at all, after a long series of successful delves by the PC in question).

I'll contrast that with Torchbearer and Dungeon World in a future post. The (systemitized) "bleed" you mentioned there should be apparent to readers.

pemerton said:

Looking at RC, it has a whole section on background and personality. From page 11:

[N]ow it's time to give your character his name, peronality and background - the traits which make him a real character. . . . You should think about your character, about his mannerisms, the way he speaks, the way he dress, how he spends money, what sort of people he likes, how he likes to spend his non-adventuring time, and so on. The more attention you invest in imagining your character . . . the more interesting and "real" you will make him. Sure, it's useful for your character to be the mightiest warrior in the world . . . but none of the other player characters will care whether he lives or dies unless he has a personality.​

This is pretty close to the AD&D 2nd ed PHB. I think it exmplifies the change from the early 80s to the early 90s in understanding of what "roleplaying" means.

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That definitely sounds right.

ExploderWizard said:

The PC roles or character classes were more than just professions, they represented who a character was at his/her core.

<snip>

Somewhere down the line as classes began to proliferate and become more specialized, their meaning as a core of who the character was got replaced with becoming their job. Naturally, as classes became more narrowly defined then they became less connected to actual character identity. For most people, their profession doesn't define who they are as a person. Its the same with highly specialized classes, they don't define who the character is, only what they do.

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The idea of class as profession has a long history, though. Page 18 of the AD&D PHB says that "Character class refers to the profession of the player character", and the same equation of class with profession occurs on p 7. And in the DMG, Gygax says (p 12):


Moldvay also glosses "class" as "profession": p B3.

And some specialised classes (eg druid, monk, paladin, original Aragorn-esque ranger) actually establish the identity of the character more thoroughly then the broader classes like fighter and MU.

So I would say, rather than the conception of class narrowing from "identity" to "profession", it changed frombeing a conception of profession and role conceived of as a whole way of life within the gameworld and hence an approach to the game, to being a mere set of mechanical abilities of little significance for how the game is actually tackled. This is part of the broader trend of disdain for the importance of mechanics that one sees beginning in the late 80s.

On p 85 of his DMG, in a discussion of the game logic of the XP rules, Gygax says:


I think this, together with the discussion of "natural functions" on the following page (which include "boldly leading" for fighters, "helping" for clerics, "employing magic items" for MUs, and "acquiring extra bits of treasure when the opportunity presents itself" for thieves), reinforces the idea that class brings with it certain expectations about functions, responsibilities, etc - from which there then follows a place in the imaginary world.

Whereas by the time we get to the 2nd ed PHB or the RC (as per the passage quoted just upthread in my reply to [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION]) we have the idea of personality as the separate and more important component of character role - and so we get fighters who hate violence, thieves who refuse to steal, MUs who disavow the use of magical items, etc. Playing the character comes to mean not inhabiting the functions/capabilities of the character - which in classic D&D are determined overwhelmingly by class - but developing and then acting out some personality, to which the functions/capabilities of the character might be quite orthogonal.

Manbearcat said:

Don't have my books with me...but I want to say...end of the Characters section? Somewhere around Gear, Alignment, and Languages. Should be a blurb in there.

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OK, you're right. From p B13, under the heading Inheritance:


That last sentence is confusing, to me at least. Does it mean each player may have only one heir for his/her PC at a time? That each heir can inherit from only one player's dead PC? Or (the weirdest reading but the most natural literal take on the words) that there is a lifetime player limit of one inheritance, no matter how many PCs you play and lose?

Manbearcat said:

Alignment and Class only give the most broad, vanilla strokes of ethos and cultural inclinations.

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Here is Moldvay on alignment (p B11):


I think this is pretty similar to how Gygax presents alignment. It is "prescriptive", not merely "descriptive", establishing in-principle constraints on action resolution. Because they are only "in-principle", players can violate those constraints, but adverse consequences might follow.

So choosing alignment is also specifying an aspect of the role the character will fill - hero, roguish scoundrel, or villain. (I have doubts that 9-point alignment is very useful for this, but I don't think Gygax fully thought that through in terms of the changes it would lead to in relation to alignment as an element of the game.)

Faenor said:

Ok, I think I need to say less.

Which do you mean?

1) role-play means choosing your actions based on a combination of class and personality.

2) role-play means play acting your personality.

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It's not quite that simple. You can roleplay as number 2 there, but only if number class, race, skills, etc. don't exist. Every time you add to your character, those additions impact how you roleplay your personality as those things have an impact on personality. They help explain the why of what you do.

pemerton said:

I think that Gygax used "roleplaying" to mean taking on a certain imagined function or suite of capabiltieis in the game; and that, by the late 80s (as reflected in the AD&D 2nd ed PHB), the terms was generally used to talk about making up an entertaining personality.

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No, Gygax meant the same thing by it that everyone else does. "Roleplaying" is used almost-exclusively to refer to the "acting-in-character" sense of "role". It is not interchangeable with "playing a role". (If this surprises you, welcome to English. You will be shocked when you find out what "motherf******" means.)

My response is that I don't see the difference between "assuming", "fulfilling", "becoming" and "doing the job of".

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That has become abundantly clear.

The question is whether you would like to make an effort to understand the distinction being made, or whether you're just here to tell us that you don't see it and therefore it doesn't exist.

Tony Vargas said:

It's true that portraying a personality in the limited mechanical concept of an actual board game like Clue has no impact on the narrative, yes. That's why portraying a personality, alone, is not the 'role' in RPG. The ability to impact the narrative if a question of function within that narrative, and is also arguably not enough, alone. Put 'em together, though, and you've got a Role you can Play meaningfully in a Game.

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Yes. Both are required for the role in a roleplaying game.