The only rule of this set that I will break is rule 4. 5e is simply too limited. I cannot effectively communicate my point without drawing on other, contrasting game systems. I'm sorry if this qualifies as a failure in your eyes, but that rule makes it borderline impossible to talk about some of these things. Now, that doesn't mean I'm going to
avoid 5e examples--rather the opposite, I do intend to use them. But I cannot accept being limited to
only 5e examples.
As noted above, I cannot do this while
solely using 5e as my example base. It is necessary to draw on non-5e things to do this (indeed, sometimes using non-TTRPG examples even). So I'm going to. Hopefully that is forgivable.
Further, I hope that the phrase "roleplaying game" is ultimately forgivable jargon--because it
is jargon, regardless of what anyone on this forum might feel about it. But circumulocuting around
that phrase constantly would be an absolute nightmare, so I'm not going to. I'm going to address what the terms mean, of course, but I
will be using them as jargon terms regardless. I will
try for this to be the only departure from absolutely common-use English.
---------
What is a "roleplaying game"?
Difficult question. Many people use the phrase for many things. People disagree about both words alone (what is "roleplaying"? what is a "game"?), and disagree about how they mix. Just one, perfect answer...likely impossible. Let's break it down more.
What is "roleplaying"? Most people who do roleplay agree that it means, or at least includes, imagining the life of a fictional person, and making choices for or as that person. But that answer is limited. It doesn't tell us much. Someone could declare that they're "roleplaying" whenever they play chess (in a perfectly ordinary way, no special behaviors or statements), because chess is a highly symbolic version of two armies fighting: the player is "roleplaying" the general commanding their armies. But most people who do roleplay would not grant this, and would say that the chess player is in general not doing any of the "imagine a person" aspect of roleplay. A few people might be that permissive, but most would not, and some would even find it annoying that the chess player was claiming to be "roleplaying."
So where does that leave us? Can we say more? Maybe. As part of people disagreeing that perfectly ordinary chess qualifies as "roleplay," many critics will make reference to words like "immersion" or "realism," noting that chess is
extremely abstracted away from the "in the (fictional) world" context of the actions the player makes, or even how the parts of the game interact (more on that much later). These words mean that players want to feel
connected to the context and experiences of the fictional person(s) they imagine in some way; it is not enough to declare that you can
make up a fictional context, the fictional context needs to be a core and unavoidable part of playing. But many people will disagree about what is
needed for well-made fictional context, how much work you must do to maintain it, what actions are allowed for people using it (whether they be players who are just using the rules, or players who take the role of referee, director, or creator).
This tells us that it's not
just being able to, in some way, imagine a fictional world with a fictional person. There needs to be some ability to
tell a story, somehow. Sometimes we set out to tell a specific story, and address setbacks, distractions, or upsets along the way. Sometimes, we just make choices that make sense for the player or the fictional person they're playing (or both), and hope that a cool story will happen along the way. Sometimes, we play specifically to experience what it's like to be under pressure, dealing with difficulties like a person in a story would face, even if the overall result after a span of time wouldn't really look like a "story" in the usual sense. And sometimes, we just want to feel like we're not boring mundane humans on Earth, but real, flesh-and-blood elves, living on a "real" (but fictional) world with all the consequences and opportunities this provides. Maybe there are other things too, but these are ones I know about. These different examples show how people can be really,
really different in what they mean by, or want from, "roleplaying" while still thinking a common term can be appropriate. I'll be coming back to each of these later; they are the heart of my "theory" (I call it a
taxonomy, as it's mostly descriptive, the intent is not to predict but to classify.)
But there's a whole other question to answer now (and then how the two answers interact)!
What is a "game"? In one sense this is very simple: an amusement or pastime that (usually) involves rules. In another,
holy Jesus, it is absolutely the OPPOSITE of simple. People disagree on what counts as "a game" from its very foundations (is "walking simulator" an incisive criticism of interactive fiction masquerading as game, or foolish gatekeeping holding back video games as a medium?) But, as before, we can start from agreed stuff, and try to cover the different opinions. We can say that, in general, games are things people do
for fun, not for obligation or pay or other things. It is certainly
possible to get paid for playing a game (e.g. tournaments), but in general the presence of such pay-for-play moves away from "game" and toward "work."
As stated, most people agree that games have rules. One way rules manifest is through defining ways that the game can somehow end "badly," where the players "fail" in some sense. You'll hear gamers bring this one up a lot. Another way rules manifest is the reverse, through defining ways in which players can succeed "more" or "better." Many gamers feel some amount of "it is possible to fail" and "success matters" is critically important for something to qualify as "a game." To lack such things reduces the experience to "merely" playing Let's Pretend--what is sometimes called "freeform" roleplay--which is generally not what people want when they say they want a "roleplaying game." ("Freeform" roleplay generally comes up short for equal but opposite reasons as chess coming up short: chess is undoubtedly a
game, but it is not roleplay; "freeform" roleplay is undoubtedly roleplay, but it is not generally seen as a game.)
Proceeding from this, we can start asking, what
kinds of success are usually important for roleplaying games? What forms of "failure" are considered desirable aspects of play, vs. ones that are considered undesirable breakdown of the rules? In general with roleplaying games (whatever tools one uses to play them), it is considered desirable to have one's very ability to participate in play as one of the potential "stakes" of that play, that is, one of the things which could be
lost if failure occurs. That is, whatever anchors the player to the experience and process of play (such as their "character") is fragile, and the rules may indicate that, if sufficiently numerous and/or sufficiently severe events occur, then that anchor can be destroyed, perhaps permanently, forcing the player to either depart the game, or find a new anchor (whether by creating a new one or adopting an already-created one). Conversely, almost all gamers regardless of their preferences agree that
at some point, focusing on tiny details of resolving rules, or having excessively detailed and complex processes in the rules, detracts from the experience of play.
Hence, almost everyone agrees that there should be a possibility of "failure" in the sense of your imagined person aiming for a goal within the imagined world and falling short of that goal. Almost everyone agrees that there should be
some kind of rule structure that determines whether those goals "succeed" or "fail," though what its nature should be, how firm its determinations should be, and how often it should actually be invoked vary
wildly from one group to another. But, in general, the consensus among gamers is that these things do need to be there, and need to actually work to some extent, without producing gameplay that is actively at odds with the intended experience. (Even people who speak out for having very few and very weak rules are rarely willing to accept rules that they consider actively at odds with imagining a fictional person, making decisions for or as that person, and determining what results from those decisions.)
Now, how do these two things
interact? This is of course
even more complicated than the previous two questions, but we can sum up the field overall by saying that
almost everyone wants what they consider a balance between extremes. The extremes are, as alluded above, chess-like play where there is essentially no roleplay at all unless it is actively projected by the players, and freeform-roleplay-like play, where there is essentially no game at all unless it is actively agreed upon by the players. Almost everyone who plays roleplaying games will recognize those two as being at the extreme ends, but very few agree on where the balance point is (or should be) between the two--and some value having different balance points for different games, muddying the issue further. Ultimately, it cashes out as something kind of like Aristotle's virtues: each person finds and chooses a point that matches what they're looking for, some kind of mixture between pure imagined fictional people/places with zero limits and zero rules, and pure rules and gameplay with zero need to imagine anything other than the tools of the game (pieces, boards, scores, etc.)
-----
What are RPGs for?
This is the heart of my taxonomy--some call it a "theory," I do not, "theory" seems to have loftier aspirations than my taxonomy. My goal is to answer the bolded question, with a particular eye toward a variant of this question: "What are RPGs
made for?" Earlier, I described four possible approaches to the "roleplaying" element of "roleplaying game." Now it is time to look at them more closely (though perhaps not in the same order I used above).
For some, the imagined people and places involved in "roleplaying" are mostly a tool. The tool serves a function, it enables something or enriches something or makes it worthwhile to do something. This utilitarian view of "roleplaying" is often taken by someone who enjoys the "game" aspect of "roleplaying game" a lot, and wishes to experience valued aspects of "gaming" while they roleplay. Sometimes, these aspects include competition with other players, trying to "outplay" peers or someone "in control" (that is, a participant who has great power to set the nature and difficulty of the fictional situations seen in play), other times this interest takes the form of examining the rules themselves and theorizing about how they could potentially be used (or, sometimes,
abused.) In general, people who value this aspect of roleplaying games want to have at least partially objective standards by which things can be judged, because the closer the standards are to objective, the more value there is in earning a difficult result. Such players may be driven to seek such things for a variety of reasons (praise, a sense of personal accomplishment, enjoying the social aspect of struggling alongside or against other people, etc.), but ultimately, the desired process for this group is to
achieve something. For this reason, I refer to this overall goal of design as "Score and Achievement." Because it is about developing some way of semi-objectively
scoring things (so that they can be judged, evaluated, and compared), in order to support players striving toward some kind of
achievement (success at a goal, overcoming a semi-objectively difficult obstacle, or reaching success in less time or with fewer spent resources etc.)
There is another, related but distinct, sense of the imagined people and places involved in "roleplaying" being a tool. This sense is one where the overall interest, on the part of the players, specifically
is to imagine a world and "live" in it, fictionally speaking. That is, for this sense of roleplaying, the overall goal is to make, as much as possible, a (fictionally) "real," consistent world that seems to be natural and follows intuitive rules. Many players who value this approach will refer to it as "realism," though this label is usually misapplied; more accurately, what they desire is a
grounded experience, whether or not it actually has the physical laws our real world has. Establishing a solid, understood foundation of what is and isn't true is thus a critical component of this perspective on roleplay. The rules, then, do not so much act as a tool for
evaluating success. Instead, they act as a tool for
developing the imagined world. If designed correctly for this interest, to a high standard of quality, the rules will smoothly, accurately, precisely, and consistently "advance" the world from one state to the next, like a film reel advancing frame by frame, giving outcomes that
could have been predicted in advance. (Note that whether they are
actually predicted in advance is irrelevant; emergent properties are often desirable here, it is merely a question of whether someone
could have predicted the outcome, given only comprehensive knowledge of the current imagined world and comprehensive knowledge of the rules themselves.) I have already used the word "grounded," and that is a critical part of this form of roleplaying game design; my word for "developing the imagined world," the process of having it "advance from one state to the next," is "Simulation." Hence, I call this overall design purpose "Groundedness and Simulation."
It is important to note, however, that not all players view the roleplay in quite so utilitarian a fashion. Some, instead, view it in a more...artistic fashion, if you will. They wish to extemporize, to
act, as one might in improv theater. For some such roleplayers, their interest is tuned toward some particular
kind of story or experience. They will often explicitly refer to such stories in their descriptions. For example, many gamers will refer (both positively and negatively) to a certain kind of roleplaying experience as a "supers game." This term refers to the kinds of stories seen in superhero comics, where characters are "larger than life," being bright, colorful, heavily committed to extreme positions (usually extreme good or extreme evil), having powers well beyond the limits of ordinary human beings, engaging in overacting with dialogue, taking actions which push the boundaries of plausibility (or even
possibility), etc. When players seek out a "supers game" (or other similar concepts, such as "zero to hero"--a game where the fictional people imagined by the players start out with very little power, safety, or resources, and must struggle to earn any of those things), they are committing to some kind of core thematic, fictional
concept around which play will center. This core concept will drive all aspects of play, and in general, people who seek this experience expect that the rules will contribute to the quality thereof, or at the very least, avoid doing anything which might tarnish that experience. The roleplay which fleshes out and gives life to this concept thus becomes the
focus of play, rather than a
facilitator of play. In my taxonomy, I refer to this core thematic concept as a Conceit, and the process of giving life to, of "exploring" and expressing that Conceit, I call "Emulation." The combination is thus "Conceit and Emulation."
Finally, we get to the most obscure intent, in part because it just hasn't been around quite as long, in part because it can be tricky to explain. In the above example, where a particular genre or theme or concept is chosen for focus, and both the rules of the game and the focus of the roleplay is on playing out that concept, some people turn to roleplaying because it puts them in the metaphorical hot seat. There's really no other pastime that can do this, where purely fictional situations arise and force a person to give a response, whatever that response ends up being. (In a sense, this is very similar to the point of "role play" in its therapeutic application, that is, in acting out scenes and situations, we push ourselves to respond to them, and potentially, to improve or speed up the process of psychiatric healing.) For folks who want this kind of experience, it is
absolutely vital that there be nothing, nothing
whatsoever, between the player and the
experience of, more or less, what a story protagonist experiences. That is, the player must be striving toward some goal, often protecting or advancing something valued by the fictional person the player is imagining as their anchor within the fictional world, and must face and resolve some kind of difficulty in the process of striving toward that goal. Now, "resolve" does not always mean "defeat" or "overcome," as it is also possible to resolve an issue like this by letting go, or deciding that what you value doesn't require you to deal with this specific issue. For players who enjoy this specific kind of roleplay, it's usually very important to structure the rules of the game so that there is absolutely zero (or as close to zero as possible) coercion, manipulation, or inducement toward some particular result, because if you've been coerced in some way, you weren't really making a
choice, you weren't really
tested, you just got to see the interactive movie someone else wrote for you. Because of that inherent interest in
being put to the test, I consider this design focus to be about
Values (as noted) that get put to the test in
Issues, and thus call it Values and Issues play.
To summarize, I consider there to be at least four purposes toward which "roleplaying games" can be designed (each of which may be sought out by players for many reasons):
- Score and Achievement: Roleplay provides the meaning and import, while gaming provides a semi-objective challenge to overcome.
- Groundedness and Simulation: Roleplay as the valued and desired byproduct of natural reasoning about a world and its contents.
- Conceit and Emulation: Roleplay as the process through which a concept or idea is given life and produces satisfactory expression.
- Values and Issues: Roleplay as the process of choosing what matters most, and having to resolve conflicts as a result of those choices.
I do not consider these to be totally separate, in part because often, players who want them desire rules that help make it easier to do these things, and yet those same players may want more than one thing at different times, or in different senses. However, there are two ways in which they can
end up in conflict with each other. The first is, simply, that it's hard (or even impossible) to try to do two or more things in the same sense, of the same thing, at the same time; in that sense, they are "exclusive" because
something takes highest priority. The second is that, because each of the four has ways it differs from any of the other three, often in tools or methods, it can be difficult to finagle a system that is actually
good at bringing about the desired player experiences associated with more than one. It is
especially difficult to try to combine all four into a single system.
I think I have given enough with this post. This is rather light on examples, other than chess, so in a follow-up, I will give examples to illustrate the process of play for these different approaches. Where possible, I will use
Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition, though I will almost certainly also contrast it against other systems when I do so. The only non-
Dungeons & Dragons systems I intend to use for these examples are
13th Age, which is a very close relative of
Dungeons & Dragons in general, and
Dungeon World, which uses a very distinct system (referred to as "Powered by the Apocalypse" by its users) but which was designed to
resemble the play of the earliest editions of
Dungeons & Dragons, so I consider it a reasonably close fit. I may also add a section discussing specific analysis of the narrow subtype of "roleplaying game" that
Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition claims to be, both explicitly (in terms of what its designers say/have said about it) and implicitly (in terms of what the rules and descriptive text implies about playing
Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition).
