D&D General Has the meaning of "roleplaying" changed since 1e?

[Lanefan]

And the question this raises is why not? If it really is all about inhabiting your own character then nobody should have a problem with how others imagine theirs.

But if they think you are playing a character who knows too much, they’re not really just inhabiting their own character, they are trying to inhabit yours, too, and think they have a better idea of who your character is.

If one player is acting in good faith and another at the same table is not, there's a problem - and it ain't with the one acting in good faith.

 

[Lanefan]

But why shouldn't they be metagaming using player knowledge?

Because metagaming like that is almost without exception done in bad faith in order to give the PCs an advantage they wouldn't otherwise have.

If I imagine my character as being somebody who knows about trolls, then I am 100% in character to use fire on them, right?

What knowledge penalty are you giving your character elsewhere in order to claim this knowledge benefit?

Also, the reason to switch things up isn't to "punish" anybody. It's to let them enjoy the blissful ignorance they had when they first started playing D&D. If you know the DM changes stuff, then you genuinely don't know if you should use fire on trolls. You don't have to play-act. It's way more fun to actually be as ignorant as your character supposedly is.

With this, I agree. It's more work for the DM, though.

 

[Marc_C]

From my memories of the 1981-1984 period the meaning of the word role-playing as not changed. After several games of Basic D&D (Moldvay) we had a big debate about 'roll playing', 'role playing' and 'playing a class as a role'.

Our group split in two over this. The other half decide to play Call of Chtuluh because they believed the system gave them more freedom to 'role-play', they liked deep immersion, investigations/mysteries and didn't like tactical combat.

My half settled for a middle of the road approach. Let each player play the style of role-play he is confortable with. As a new DM I catered to each style at the best of my limited abilities. I did more in character acting than any other player at the table.

 

[DEFCON 1]

The knowledge of trolls needing to be killed by fire is just one of hundreds of different things in D&D that we "experienced" players have to continually pretend against in order to try and maintain that character/player knowledge split. And in fact is one of the downsides I have found to continually playing the baseline version of D&D edition after edition. Almost every creature/trap/encounter in the MM and DMG is a repeat of things we have seen before for years (decades for some of us.) And while the game HAS to have these things in them every time a new edition comes out (because there are always new players and they deserve to fight orcs, displacer beasts, and mimics for the first time like we all did)... it does cause a bit of a confliction when the rest of us see the repetition over and over and we constantly try to subsume our previous knowledge (those of us who care about that kind of thing.)

Now we do it, because I think at the end of the day monster knowledge is such a small facet of the greater game that it isn't really that big a deal... but I can say from experience recently that playing in a friend's Pathfinder game for the very first time, we have encountered several monsters of which I had no idea what they were, and it made things much more interesting that what I am used to. I actually had to figure out what these creatures were and what they were doing just like my character was... and it was a really cool and compelling change of pace.

To make a long story short (too late!)... while I think it is generally impossible to make a D&D game a completely new experience for older players as well as new (because at some point if you remove enough of the known tropes of D&D to cover over the older player's experiences you aren't actually playing "D&D" anymore)... there is something to be said in always trying to keep things fresh. Because experienced players enjoy the surprises just as much now as we did 30 years ago.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Based solely on my conversations with a small number of players from back in the day, reading older edition manuals, and (in particular) looking at the OSR movement and their efforts to essentially "build the old, anew"...yeah, I think things have changed.

But it's more a difference of degree than a difference of kind. The "old" perspective and the "new" perspective are more like points closer to opposite ends of a spectrum than they are like totally unrelated concepts. "Immersion" is still quite possible in the older perspective just in a different (and often "narrower") sense,and likewise logistics-and-campaigning is still quite possible in the newer perspective just in a different (and often "narrower") sense. My Dungeon World game, for example, often has the players doing what they can to marshal their resources and cooperate with allies to get the best results, followed by them actually conducting a plan and trying to stick with it--strong shades of the logistical stuff, albeit in a more modern lens. Yet it is a deeply character-driven game where the most important events have been driven by what an individual character chose to do at a critical moment, and the evolution of the characters as people.

I do think, early on, the emphasis was more on questions of survival, resource expenditure, and leveraging advantages in a dangerous world, becoming Greco-Roman heroes (those who do great things, whether or not those things are noble or laudable). And I do think, nowadays, the emphasis is more on questions of narrative, personality evolution, and leveraging relationships in an adventurous world, becoming heroes in the modern sense (those who fight for moral good and oppose evil, even if they fail). But you could always find shades of the latter in the former, and vice-versa.

 

[Bill Zebub]

Because metagaming like that is almost without exception done in bad faith in order to give the PCs an advantage they wouldn't otherwise have.

Ok, but you're overlaying a personal expectation/opinion on other people, and trying to perceive motivation from action, which seems like a pointless thing to do. The fact remains that the only requirement you are offering is that people "make a decision as their character, not themselves". If the character I imagine knows all sorts of things about monsters in his world, then I'm doing exactly that. You may have something different in mind for my character, but if I'm expected to factor your preferences into my play then clearly you haven't told me the full story with just the bit about player knowledge vs. character knowledge.

If you also said, "Hey at our table we have this playstyle we prefer where all of our characters have a level of knowledge that is like that of the first D&D characters we ever had. And if you keep blurting out things like monster weaknesses it spoils it for us. Think you can play our way?" If I agreed to that, then I would be playing in bad faith to do otherwise.

What knowledge penalty are you giving your character elsewhere in order to claim this knowledge benefit?

Same thing as above. If you want to add yet another condition that for each knowledge advantage I give I should also create a penalty, then I would be playing in bad faith to join your table and not do that. But it's effectively just a house rule you have; it's not part of the game.

 

[Bill Zebub]

Also, the reason I imagine my characters as knowing things like burning trolls is not "to give myself an unfair advantage" but because play-acting the re-discovery of this fact is just not very interesting (to me).

 

[Ovinomancer]

The way you approach roleplaying is going to be based on the way you approach gaming. If you're a classic or OSR adherent, then roleplaying is going to be less about pretending to be a character and more about how you engage the game through your role as a class/race/ability set. It will be less playacting or separation of player/character (although this is a scale). Roleplaying his is just reflecting the player through the lens of the character.

If, on the other hand, you're engaging in Trad or Neo-Trad play, then roleplaying is going to be more about being a character like in a novel or book or story -- you'll be more concerned about making sure you're representing the characterizations while you're doing other things. Character here is rarely dynamic, because there's no pressures on the character as to who they are. Instead, you get some color through roleplay onto the actual play of the game, which is usually going to be focused on what the GM has presented or what the party wants to do. Here "roleplaying" is mostly reflecting a static concept, usually heavily based on tropes or inverted tropes, and most to entertain the other players as to how you work through the adventure.

If you're looking at Story Now, then character is under constant pressure and can be changed by the game. Here, roleplaying is about representing these conflicts in play and adapting to any changes to the character.

If you're looking at Nordic LARP, then you're trying to put yourself in the character's shoes -- the goal is to find the bleed where you feel what the character feels in the moment. Interestingly, this will usually mean that you can't stray very far from yourself in your character, because having to adopt a thought/consideration process different form your own makes finding bleed harder. So, this ends up a tad closer to Classic play in that character here is a lens of the player, but the focus of play is less on the Classic "solve the dungeon/puzzle" and more like the Story Now "put this character under lots and lots of pressure." Nordic LARP is not for people looking for an emotionally safe experience!

Note that NONE of these even start to engage the playacting/funny voice angles. You can do that with all of them or none of them -- it's a stylistic choice, it's not about how roleplaying works.

 

[Ovinomancer]

See 37% of the threads on Enworld for a discussion of this concept.

In my book, the Uncle Bob would be a story you improvise to explain why the dice told you that you knew something or did not know something. Knowledge is part of the intrinsic attribute of Intelligence, so if your PC knowledge about a topic is not established, rolling to determine if they know it makes sense.

Okay. So, then, which aspects of my character allow me to make things up about my character freely and which do I need to consult a die roll to let me know it's time to justify the die roll by making things up about my character? Who decides?

The answer to this is really going to be that it's the GM that's going to decide when it's okay and when it's gated -- basically, the GM provides permission for what my character knows and thinks. This is why I say that metagaming is only a GM problem. And I'm not picking up Angry's argument here -- I said that before I even was really aware of Angry, much less read that piece. The only person that's going to care about metagaming is going to be the GM, and it's entirely in the GM's ability to just make it a non-issue, even if they care about it.

For example, the trolls. Why does the GM care if players pretend to not know about trolls? Because they want the troll's gimmick to be a challenge, so this requires some forced pretending on the players that they don't already know the gimmick. But, this causes metagaming as well -- the players have to step outside their play of their characters and make decisions based on what the players know. They have to actually avoid actions that could be very reasonable because they can't say that it's not because they know they will be effective. Thing is, this is what the GM wants, so it's not only allowed metagaming, it's encouraged metagaming. Bah. If you want to use trolls, then you can build an encounter who's challenge isn't vested in not knowing the gimmick. Maybe the trolls know their own vunerability and so have coated themselves in wet mud and vegetation so as to protect from fire damage. Or there's explosives in the area. Or the trolls are underwater. Or, the trolls aren't the primary threat. And on and on. The space where "I really need the players to pretend they don't know the trolls' shtick for this to be fun for me," is infinite. So, if you force players into preferred metagaming because it helps you, then it's your fault as a GM. Metagaming is always the fault of the GM.

 

[jgsugden]

Let's be real - there was no consensus then. We didn't get together on the internet and argue about it to reach a 'majority view' because there was no internet. We just read the books and magazines, and we played the games. And, most people only skimmed the books.

For my part, when I started playing at age 6 in 1979, we talked in character. I played with slightly older kids. I still, fairly clearly, remember the moment of my first PC death. We found a cell in an evil shrine built within some caves. There was a lady prisoner in the cell, chained to a wall around a corner. We did not have the key to the cell. The thief tried to open the cell door and failed. We argued, in character, about whether to bash the door down and make noise, or wait until we found whoever had the key. The DM had the girl in the cell beg us for help, telling us she wasssss going to be sssslain by the clericsssssss. As young heroes do, we decided to break down the door, making a huge noise doing so. We rushed in to free her and then flee before guards came ... and we all had to make saving throws as she was a medusa. My PC failed. Whenever I run the Caves of Chaos, there is a stoned elf in that cell with the medusa...

But I remember we were playing in character. We were the characters. We spoke as the characters. We just described what we did and tried to look up to see if the rules discussed how to adjudicate it, and often just made it up as we went because a lot was not covered. Essentially, even at age 6, it was the same as I play today (although less refined and with less effective rulesets).