So, in my previous major post, I said I would offer some practical examples of what I was referring to. Let's do that now. I will give examples for the four answers I have proposed to the question, "What are roleplaying games made for?" Before I do, I'd like to stress that I
do not consider these the only answers. It is entirely possible that there are more I haven't thought of yet, or even answers that haven't been considered by
anyone yet. Further, while I do think these answers have a tendency to push one another away (some more strongly than others), I think it's actually very uncommon, perhaps even quite rare, for players to have
zero care whatsoever about the other answers, even though one answer will (almost always) be
most important to them.
To recap, for those not wishing to reread the (lengthy) previous post, the four answers I've mentioned are:
- 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.
These answers have both historical details (e.g., what I call "Score and Achievement" is by far the
oldest answer to the question, "What are roleplaying games made for?") and practical details (e.g., different games implement or manifest them in various ways, but patterns tend to emerge). Where possible, I intend to discuss some of this, but my knowledge and analysis
will be incomplete, because I am not a historian and have not played, nor read, nor even
heard of every possible roleplaying game ever made. I ask, then, that discrepancies be understood not as an unfair pre-judgment failure to account for something real and meaningful, but rather as a coincidental blank space that simply went without comment due to ignorance or merely having nothing to say. If, on the other hand, you genuinely see a claim to exclude or dismiss something unfairly, I welcome reply, but you may only get, "That isn't meant to be a restrictive rule, just a description of an observed pattern" as your response.
With that lengthy preamble concluded, let's look at some examples.
Score and Achievement
As I said, this is the oldest answer, and is an answer for why
most games get made (I'm ignoring "to make money" because that's not about design, nor very interesting to me.) Simply: lots of games make "numbers go up" (or "stay down," e.g. golf) desirable. Many games tie this to some physical action, object, or demonstration of skill, e.g. arcade games. Roleplaying games, however, exist at least as much in the mind as they do in physical objects (often moreso). This means players need reasons to care about the numbers; there is no built-in reason like with many other games. That's where story is important for games focused on skillful play, carefully using resources, and other forms of "adroitly avoid failure and pursue highest success" gameplay.
Dungeons & Dragons has essentially always filled this niche, but the specific way it does so has varied over time. "Combat"--violent conflict, usually against "monsters" (but sometimes humanoid enemies)--is pretty much by definition a matter of "can you succeed well enough, fast enough?" In
Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition, there are lots of mechanics which measure success or complicate the process of seeking success in order to enrich the play experience. Each player's imagined person, their "character," has various gameplay features which provide numerical advantages when engaged in combat; these include things like "race" (an amalgam of physiological and cultural traits), "class" (the "character's" training and past life experience, e.g. a "Wizard" has usually attended some form of university-style institution to formally study magic, while a "Paladin" usually belongs to a sacred, knightly order), and "background" (in brief, personal life history). These things provide resources and options which players can leverage in play; in general, the players' goal in combat is to deplete every opponent's "hit points" (or "HP," a mechanic representing endurance and ability to remain an active combatant) before the enemy can deplete their character's "hit points" and those of the other players' characters. Defeating the opposition (whether by actually "killing" them or by breaking their will to fight, if the facilitating player--the "Dungeon Master"--decides that's reasonable) results in gaining "experience points" ("XP"). Characters that gain enough experience points "level up," that is, their skills and abilities advance by a discrete and pre-defined amount. Experience points and levels are another metric of "score," one that bridges between the discrete bouts of indiivdual combats.
This is far from the only option, however. In much earlier editions of
Dungeons & Dragons, particularly the "original" version (sometimes called "OD&D"), combat was considered a bad thing. This was by design: in early editions, combat was
brutally difficult, and extremely likely to result in character death (usually considered a bad thing), unless the players had worked rather hard to bias that combat heavily in their favor. Instead, early editions of
Dungeons & Dragons used a system where the
monetary value of treasures the player characters extracted from their expeditions would translate into experience earned, and thus measure player achievement. (These expeditions, regardless of edition, usually go into ruins, typically underground, colloquially referred to as "dungeons" regardless of their actual purpose, e.g. tombs, decaying fortresses, temples, natural caves, etc. are all called "dungeons.") This system was often called "GP = XP" (or vice-versa), because the "gold piece" (GP) value of the fictional treasures acquired by the player characters determines the amount of experience points they earn. Though this rule is not always strictly followed in a mathematical sense, that is, it was not always a perfect 1:1 relationship between "gold pieces" recovered and "experience points" gained, it is a useful shorthand. In games of this style, which include several "modern" games designed with a similar ethos, one demonstrable achievement would be having a character that survived to reach high level, because that meant the player was very good at managing resources and avoiding the many dangerous hazards of the fictional world. Some fans of this specific subtype of "Score and Achievement" play consider other, more modern-day-sensibility forms of "Score and Achievement" play to be inferior as a result, which reflects the specific focus on
being challenging in an at least
somewhat objective sense.
But I am tired and there's much more to say on other things, so I'll stop there for now.
