Do you "roleplay" in non-TTRPG Games?

[stonehead]

I think that definition is good enough. However, I disagree with the premise "I know the best strategy, but my character wouldn't do that." I generally don't play board games that have an absolute "best" strategy. A game where there is only one "best" move gets pretty boring pretty fast.

That's fair, but if I'm talking about whether I do or do not do something, I'm only going to talk about the games that I play. And like, don't get me wrong, Wingspan isn't a solved game or anything, but if I'm picking all the penguins because I'm roleplaying an arctic explorer, and the other players are picking the best birds for their strategy, I'm going to be at a disadvantage. Don't get me wrong, I could still win, there's a lot of luck involved, and I could just be that much better than my opponents. I wouldn't be trying my hardest though.

Maybe a better example, still using Wingspan: in the early game, I have the choice between playing an owl and a vulture. They both work with my strategy, and which one is better depends on which cards I draw in the future, which I can't know. I'll probably pick the owl, because I like owls. If this was the last turn however, and I count the number of points I would end up with by playing the own compared to playing the vulture. If the vulture gives me one more point, I'll play that. If someone else sticks to their guns and plays the owl, I think they have a claim to be roleplaying. They probably have more fun doing that, but I have more fun counting my hypothetical points.

I can't comment on anyone else, but when I think of roleplaying, I think of what is distinctive about the play of a RPG from the perspective of player participants. And that is:

*The player's "moves" - both what is permitted, and what will result from it - are shaped by the player's fictional position;​

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*The player's fictional position is centred on a particular imagined character (their PC) in particular imaginary circumstances.​

The first of these features can be found in some wargames - eg in some free kriegsspiel-type wargames, adjudicating whether my tanks can cross the river will depend, at least in part, on extrapolating from imagined stuff (like the capabilities of the tanks, the depth of the river, etc). This contrasts with purely mechanical resolution (of the sort found in some wargames and most boardgames, for instance).

The character-centric aspect of the second feature is quite common in games: many games have the player "inhabit" or identify with/as a character. But in a RPG, the character is an imagined person in imagined circumstances which thereby establish the player's fictional position.

It's the combination of these two elements that I think is at the heart of RPGing. The GM in a RPG isn't always roleplaying in this sense (sometimes they might be, such as in some contexts of playing NPCs); but it's at the heart of what the players do.

In playing a boardgame which permits character identification, I can make choices that are suboptimal from the point of view of game play, because it's what I imagine "my" character would do. But the stuff I'm imagining about my character doesn't shape my available moves, nor the outcomes of them; those are determined, mechanically, by the rules. (In other words, there is no fictional position.) RPGs are different from this; and that's what I think of, when I think of roleplaying.

By this logic, no one would roleplay in a board game, right? Arguably you couldn't even rp in forums or chatrooms. That's fine, I'm not going to be prescriptive about language, but it doesn't seem to match with the way everyone else is using this word.

 

[haakon1]

Seems like we could (and may) argue until the end of time about “What is role playing?”

But are there people who simply do not care if they win the board game and are not particularly interested the official goals/winning conditions, but are instead are playing as a certain character simply because they want to … absolutely.

Just as most people in a marathon aren’t planning to win the race.

There’s a saying for this: “It’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game.”

Just as there are people who play D&D to “win the game” with the best DPS.

There’s a saying for this: “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.”

 

[pemerton]

By this logic, no one would roleplay in a board game, right? Arguably you couldn't even rp in forums or chatrooms.

Free-form roleplay seems like it involves fictional position. LARPing is different, because at least a fair bit of the position is actual, not fictional. In Diplomacy, too, the position - of having alliances or being betrayed - is actual and not fictional.

That's fine, I'm not going to be prescriptive about language, but it doesn't seem to match with the way everyone else is using this word.

I dunno. There seems to be a lot of different stuff being said.

For instance, you're talking about "character-driven" choices over playing to win: the "aesthetic concern" that Laws wrote about in OtE. But in some boardgames/wargames, at least, what really seems to be going on is simply the setting of a variant win condition: eg can I win a game of MtG while only playing Goblins in my deck? Or can I win a game of Risk while only operating from this particular set of territories?

And some of what is being talked about is not about game play at all, but the aesthetics that surround game play: like voicing a "character" while playing Cluedo. Equating this with the voicing of a character when playing a RPG seems like a category error to me. Miss Scarlet saying something sassy about the rope in the ballroom is just having fun at the table, but isn't a move in the play of the game; whereas my PC saying something to a NPC is actually making a move in the game, which then has to be resolved to find out what happens next.