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

[el-remmen]

I have attached this before, but this editorial from Gygax in Dragon #102 (Oct 1985) goes into this divide from the perspective of role-playing vs. acting. In this case, he defines role playing as "playing a role" as in what your class/race allows you to contribute in fulfilling a role on the team, versus "acting" which is playing out the quirks and motivations of a character's personality and history.

 

[LordEntrails]

As I have matured over the decades, the definition has changed for me. I think my maturity has been a shadow of the maturity the industry/community has also undergone.

As such things always are, they are never linear, but clear trends can be seen over longer times and large groups. As such, my view is that such has changed pretty much along the lines the OP lays out. Of course, experiences differ and specific points can be argued and debated, but on the whole, yes, the definition of roleplaying has evolved over the decades.

 

[Ath-kethin]

I started playing TTRPGs in the early 90s, first with Earthdawn and then with AD&D 2e/1e. But I came into all of it through reading novels (particularly, at the time, Dragonlance and other Weis & Hickman series), and I gamed mostly with others who loved those and similar books.

From the first time I played, my groups focused on character development and stories. Those stories were interwoven with "gamier" content, but the story was still the focus.

My approach hasn't changed much in the years since. I run a lot of DCC now, for example, and even there the game's focus is on the characters.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

This is a spin-off from another thread (kind of like Laverne and Shirley) and I'm curious if others have opinions about this question.

I've seen (and heard) the argument that "it's called a roleplaying game, therefore it is primarily about roleplaying".

However, I don't think the word "roleplaying" means what it used to mean. When I first started playing (my first games were a mish-mash of 1e and 2e) our characters didn't have personalities. Or, at least, we didn't think of the way we played as being driven by the character's personality. Adam played his rogue Porthos as a jerk, for example, but really I think it was just an excuse for him to be a jerk. Also, he was only a jerk toward the rest of us: we also didn't really interact with NPCs very often, and we certainly didn't explore who our characters were, or show any interest in who the NPCs were. They had information we wanted, or goods to trade, or stuff to steal (Adam...) and that was it. And even that was the exception, not the rule. Mostly we killed monsters and took their stuff. We "played a role" by pretending to be a fighter or a magic-user or a rogue. End of story.

I'm curious what others' experience was.

But I'm also wondering what the folks over at TSR intended. What did they originally mean by "roleplaying," and has that meaning changed?

I just skimmed through the Red Book and could not find a single passage that had a whiff of anything we would consider "roleplaying" today. In fact, I did find this passage on page 3 or so:


In other words, your "role" was determined by your class. Which is how I remember it.

In the other thread another poster offered this passage from an early edition (that I couldn't find in Moldvay; not sure which edition it was in):

Although that doesn't really explain very much. That also fits with the "you are a fighter" version of roleplaying. It says nothing about the motivation and goals and backstory and relationships that we think of with modern roleplaying.

AD&D expanded on these ideas a bit, and defines your character as being a combination of your attributes, your backstory, and your alignment. That's beginning to sound more like modern roleplaying, but still pretty flat. Some modules had NPCs to interact with, and even advice to the DM on how to portray that, but other modules were pure hack and slash, and the pregenerated characters had nothing about their personality. But overall the percentage of text that suggested this form of roleplaying was very, very low.

Now of course the books are chock full of roleplaying content. In the PHB we have backgrounds and Traits/Bonds/Flaws/Ideals and many pages of fluff on the various races, etc. etc. etc. The published adventures include as much storytelling, NPC personality profiles, and social interaction content as they do fighting and looting. Clearly the content of the published material has changed.

But has the game? Has 'roleplaying' always meant the same thing, and the published game has just (officially) embraced more and more of it, or has the meaning of the word itself evolved?

Were we playing it wrong?(wrong question)

Thoughts?

Early RPG play, like pre-1977 D&D, was often played as a sort of variation of wargaming. So, sure, a lot of players didn't treat PCs much different from the little cardboard chit which represented the Panzer Lehr division in AH's D-Day game, or any unit in a minis game. OTOH this was not even close to the only way people played even in the early days. I would argue that the concept which Dave Arneson was building on, which was partially 'free kriegespiel' includes a high degree of RP, albeit perhaps focused on only certain elements.

But all you have to do is look at what people playing early D&D on the West Coast were doing to see that elaborate RP was always considered a part of the game. Even Gygax's games seem to have had a pretty fair amount of characterization, more than you depict.

I believe it was always a consideration. When I played in those early days, we did think up personalities. We were young, they were often silly and superficial, but we WERE children...

Modern RPGs, by which I mean ones written using techniques developed in the last 20 years, often have a considerable investment in thematic elements and the 'narrative process' of developing play as a form of story about the PCs and their activities, personality, etc. This is certainly an evolution from where things were in the 1970's, but it isn't exactly a new trend either! MHRP of the mid 80's has features which encourage playing your characters as characters, and not just 'pogs'. Top Secret/S.I. has Fortune and Fame points, that was published in 1987 and isn't the first game to have these sorts of elements. Tech has come much further in this area, but clearly RP was always a goal in RPGs.

 

[J.Quondam]

When I started with Basic as a kid, we didn't really roleplay our characters. Or perhaps more accurately, our characters were just fantasy reflections of our real selves: Me... in armor, swinging a sword! Me... casting fireball! Me... with pointy ears doing elfy things!

In college in the 90s, playing in an expansive, established homebrew campaign using a mishmash 1e/2e system, our characters had clear personalities, and we routinely interacted NPCs in all sorts of ways. Every time I rolled up a new character, I thought about what sort of RP they would be engaging in and how.
With a few exceptions here and there, it's been "role play all the way" ever since.

 

[Mallus]

Good Lord that text about player/character separation in the Mentzer edition is bad.

 

[Lanefan]

Good Lord that text about player/character separation in the Mentzer edition is bad.

Bad as in badly written? If yes, I can kind of agree.

Bad as in putting forth bad concepts? Not in the slightest. He's bang-on right in everything he says there.

 

[Bill Zebub]

Good Lord that text about player/character separation in the Mentzer edition is bad.

I’d love to see Mentzer debate Angry DM.

/popcorn

 

[overgeeked]

I’d love to see Mentzer debate Angry DM.

/popcorn

Why? Near as I can tell Angry never had anything to say beyond his schtick.

 

[Jack Daniel]

"When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up." —C. S. Lewis

As a rule, I despise most of what C. S. Lewis has to say on most subjects, but I do like this quote. It has always stuck with me, and it applies to this situation as well.

When I started playing D&D as a kid, we play-acted our characters and mostly ignored the game's rules. But as I've matured, I've learned to set aside excessive thespianism, to quit fretting about players who don't like to speak in character or banter with other PCs, and to appreciate D&D as a game—as well as to ignore those voices who would call this approach immature (or "not roleplaying").