Do you play more for the story or the combat?

[howandwhy99]

Can you suggest one? To be honest, I doubt it'll change the views on role-playing that I've formulated over the past 20 or so years, but I admit to being fascinated by opinions that run so contrary to my own.

Honestly, any good book on acting will help sort out the difference between acting and roleplaying. To my understanding it was Psychology that came up with roleplaying and having an instructor teach a role. Here's a good online version of what roleplaying is without the hobby BS of "playing a PC with a personality". The author of that article suggests more of a skill-based (he uses the word "sphere") rather than a task-based approach to defining roles. But the key point here is ROLE is defined outside of the roleplayer. Just as an actor plays with his role to determine how he will portray the written, scripted character, a RPG roleplayer plays within his or her role to determine how to best succeed in the predetermined Class role in the fictional world. As RPGs do not include scripts to follow, roles refer to the sociological definition of roles for roleplaying. In business roleplaying scenarios, these roles are typically your occupation. In RPG games, it is your class.

(Though this can be confusing as "Class" is sometimes reinterpreted by the game designers as occupation and not the role one takes within the game. For example, all Call of Cthulhu players play Investigators regardless of their class title. They are all doing the same thing - investigating Cthuloid activity. No one is learning how to be a antiquarian in that game.)

Are you agreeing with me that RPG play resembles fiction, at least enough so as to share certain terminology?

Not knowingly at least. (not that I have a problem agreeing with you) What I think you are referring to is fictional narrative, which is only one kind of fiction. I am saying ANY simulation is a fiction in that it is never the thing in and of itself. As a side note, I consider any perfect duplicate not a simulation.

This is another example of generalizing the meaning right out of a word, in this case, the world "fiction". Do I really need to demonstrate that all simulations are not fiction? OK, a computer weather simulation is not fiction. Happy?

Of course, it's a fiction. It's a simulation. It isn't the thing itself. It is a representation. I think there is a confusion here with non-fictional narrative. D&D games are not narratives in the same way most any game is not a narrative.

When we tell a story we are relating events.

When we write a story, alone or collaboratively, we are inventing events, in real-time, on the spot, so to speak, etc.

Yes. But we are not authoring a story when roleplaying. The world exists independently as a simulated environment beyond the scope of authorship for the roleplaying individuals. If it did not, then they could not play with their roles and characterize them. It's the difference between roleplaying and improvisational acting without a script.

When roleplaying no actions are predetermined for the roleplayer so no story is related.

A story is being created.

Again, anything existing is story creating. If you mean we are purposefully creating a fictional narrative, then you're suggesting an activity that isn't roleplaying.

A story (ie fiction) is the process of being written is still a story. It still possess definitive, story-like qualities. Which, I might add, are shared by RPG play, hence my use of them when discussing D&D.

Story-like qualities only exist in RPGs in the same manner story-like qualities are possessed by any actually existing things. D&D, Monopoly, Baseball, and normal life (non-game playing) are all story-like because stories are told to represent them. That there is a fictional (simulation) element to both D&D and Monopoly does not mean either requires the players to be authors. There is no authorship of fictional narrative of those four.
(to stave off the inevitable objection: yes, of course non-game playing real life can include being a novelist)

But roleplaying exercises go out of their way to ensure you don't have to stop roleplaying when playing them.

And yet we roll so many little dice...

Dice rolls are numerical description. They are the determiners of the results of your action. You "see" the results in your head the same way you would see them on a screen in a computer RPG. You don't get to control the dice rolls in the same way the DM doesn't get to. They are the functioning of the rule-based simulation in the same way programming scripts and randomizers function in computer roleplaying.

Would these books be about role-playing gaming, or about role-playing in other contexts/disciplines? All role-playing is not the same.

I'm talking about roleplaying that is referred to by actors, business trainers, teachers, TTRPGers, and CRPGers. That is the only kind I have ever heard of. The only real difference of usage between any of those groups is whether they refer to the role as a character in a script (actors) or a sociological role (everyone else) roleplayers' test their characterizations against.

I game to play fictional characters in adventures stories. I'm not practicing to anything, except perhaps funnier and more imaginative. I've never met anyone outside of you, how, that saw RPG play as a form of training.

You don't have to see it as practice to have it be practice. Pretty much any computer or console game is training. You test yourself against the system to see if you can win.

And roleplaying will always be training (or specifically termed rehearsal for actors) whether any one wants to try and create a new definition of it or not.

 

[howandwhy99]

I believe you and fanboy2000 are conflating story with history. A timeline that relates the relevant events of World War Two is not a story. It's simply a recounting of events.

Stories require conflict. They require plot. With no plot, you have no story. Without a conflict, you cannot have a plot.

"I ate a bowl of cereal for breakfast today" is not a story. It's history. It's recounting facts. There's no plot there. Thus no story.

The idea that there is no story in RPG's before the PC's interact with the plot is arguable. However, there is a plot in just about every adventure to interact with. How the story unfolds is unknown until such time as you actually play, but, that doesn't mean that there is no story there. There's a fairly broad number of stories possible from playing "Keep on the Borderlands" but, the story "We went to the Caves, we kicked the collective asses of a large number of humanoids that were threatening the locals" is the most probable one that's going to come out.

Now, KotB has only the slightest glimmer of a plot, but, it does have one. Tissue thin and all that, but, it's still there. The conflict exists - on one side you have the Keep and on the other, the slavering hordes of humanoids just begging to be killed.

Hell, that's the basic plot for just about every zombie movie out there as well. (I'm a huge believer that all stories are better when you add zombies and chainsaws. )

But, the point is, the plot and story is still there before you sit down to play. Everyone knows that you are generally going to have Story X occur. Game play just nails down the details.

Thanks for trying to clear things up. The problem is I don't believe plot can be in a RPG scenario without railroading the PCs. It seems at points you may be identifying locations or the game map with "plot". If that is true, then how isn't any area of the real world a plot? Is a chessboard a plot?

If this is your definition, I disagree with it as it is non-functional like the previous "story" definition. If anything that exists is, or is part of, a plot, then plot has no real definition. In my opinion, plots are part of intended narratives. Storytelling.

Perhaps you are defining plot as any kind of intended action? If that is the case, then for me plots are the planned actions of the NPCs. For players they are the intended actions of their PCs. For people in real life they are what they do every time they act with purpose.

But I don't think is what you mean either as you don't include history as plot. I think it has to be that plots are required only in fictional narratives, which require narrative intention to tell. It is not just any kind of intention. Otherwise we get plots as history. So we are back to roleplaying and roleplaying games not having plots unless the DM is railroading the players. As roleplaying isn't the creation of a fictional narrative and running a game like it is can only lead to either railroading problems or the loss of roleplaying.

D&D games are narrative stories in the midst of being told/written. They aren't fully written until the end of the final adventure of the campaign.

I believe this is the point about which we are disagreeing. This misunderstanding of story in RPGs was what I was referring to back in my original post. Story (and storytelling) is not something that happens in the game. It's what we tell others later.

 

[ExploderWizard]

It can be considered as an antagonist because it's set in opposition of the protagonist and his/her goals.

So every obstacle has antagonist status? Without a depiction of nature in that story having malign intent, I see the meteor as merely the natural result of physics and its unfortunate proximity to the protagonist as bad luck.

Is there another relevant way to view what stories are? Seeing as fiction is a artifact of human culture and all.

Fiction is a human creation. My point was that a story doesn't have to involve man within the story to be considered a story, although it isn't a story until it is told (by man) in one form or another.

 

[Mallus]

So every obstacle has antagonist status?

Oh no... I just meant you could consider a natural disaster, or something else without human agency, like a big white whale, as an antagonist.

Without a depiction of nature in that story having malign intent, I see the meteor as merely the natural result of physics and its unfortunate proximity to the protagonist as bad luck.

Physics and luck don't exist in fiction, there's only authorial intent. If an authors casts something in the antagonist's role, then it's fair game to consider it an antagonist.

My point was that a story doesn't have to involve man within the story to be considered a story, although it isn't a story until it is told (by man) in one form or another.

All stories are about men (and ladies), even the ones starring freedom-loving rabbits, brave little toasters, and talkative geometric shapes of various spatial dimensions.

 

[Scribble]

I believe this is the point about which we are disagreeing. This misunderstanding of story in RPGs was what I was referring to back in my original post. Story (and storytelling) is not something that happens in the game. It's what we tell others later.

For the most part I agree. The story is in the process of being written.

D&D players are both author and audience each with their own section of the story to write.

DM is author in a sense that he or she provides the setting, the plot, the villains, and the non main characters. He also makes decisions for those villains and characters.

Players are authors in a sense that they provide the main characters, and the decisions those characters make.

Both DM and players are audience in the sense that the outcome of the decisions is largely out of their control. Just liek the reader doesn't know what's going to happen on the next page, we don't know what the die is going to roll.

 

[ExploderWizard]

Physics and luck don't exist in fiction, there's only authorial intent. If an authors casts something in the antagonist's role, then it's fair game to consider it an antagonist.

Quite true, which is why D&D play is not fiction, or a story unless it is a railroad.

 

[Mallus]

Quite true, which is why D&D play is not fiction, or a story unless it is a railroad.

For the record, I never said D&D was fiction, I said it was fiction-like (in a number of ways).

 

[Scribble]

So every obstacle has antagonist status? Without a depiction of nature in that story having malign intent, I see the meteor as merely the natural result of physics and its unfortunate proximity to the protagonist as bad luck.

In this case I'd say nature is kind of the antagonist... But I'm not sure really. Maybe "bad luck" would be the antagonist in this case, with the meteor being the form it takes in this scene.

Fiction is a human creation. My point was that a story doesn't have to involve man within the story to be considered a story, although it isn't a story until it is told (by man) in one form or another.

Man in this instance is equal to main character.

It doesn't matter if your main character is a man, a woman, a dog, a piece of cheeze, or a god, the struggle it faces will still fall within one (or more) of those 6 categories.

 

[Scribble]

Quite true, which is why D&D play is not fiction, or a story unless it is a railroad.

That's not true.

It's an improvisational form of a fictional story with multiple authors, with descision points being determined in a semi random fashion.

Would you call improv theater not fiction and not a story?

 

[The Little Raven]

Quite true, which is why D&D play is not fiction, or a story unless it is a railroad.

I'd hate to be the dictionary guy, but the biggest part of playing D&D is imagining things, and that is fiction.

fic·tion
4. the act of feigning, inventing, or imagining.

Source: Random House Unabridged Dictionary

fic·tion
1.
a. An imaginative creation or a pretense that does not represent actuality but has been invented.
b. The act of inventing such a creation or pretense.

Source: The American Heritage Dictionary

fic·tion
1. The act of feigning, inventing, or imagining; as, by a mere fiction of the mind.

Source: Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary

This last one, in particular, dates back to the 1600s.