My Attempt to Define RPG's - RPG's aren't actually Games

[aramis erak]

I guess I'm trying to equate campaign to game. You play the campaign - whether it's a single one shot adventure, or a ten year long epic. While playing that campaign, you don't play other campaigns (at least not with the same characters typically).

You see it in the language that people use. They're playing Against the Giants. They're playing whatever campaign they happen to be playing.

I don't hear people talk that way; I see it only online. Even in Organized Play, the people I've been exposed to in both Alaska and Oregon talk about the game system, not a campaign title. And a handful of old grogs call every RPG "D&D."

 

[Maxperson]

Note, I realize my mistake here in saying that RPGs aren't really games. Of course they're games. But, what differentiates them from other games is that the base of an RPG is a game creation engine. You don't really actually directly play an RPG. You use the RPG to create the game that everyone in your group is going to play.

RPGs meet the same definition for game that every other game meets. "a form of play or sport, especially a competitive one played according to rules and decided by skill, strength, or luck." Creating the campaign/adventure is done according to the rules, so is itself part of the gameplay or more accurately, part of game setup. You aren't creating a new game.

I also don't agree that you aren't directly playing the RPG. What I do during game play, both as DM and as a player is governed by the rules, just as it is with any other game. If I want to attack something, I have to declare a mechanically legal action and then resolve it according to game mechanics set forth in the rules. It's no different than than wanting to move my knight in a game of chess and having to move it in a mechanically legal manner according to the rules.

 

[Hussar]

/snip

I'll try and dot point it:

* An RPG involves establishing and progressively authoring a shared fiction.​

Thing is, there are a number of board games that do this. Battlestar Galactica, for example. As well as a number of Euro games.

* Most of the participants have game pieces which correlate to particular characters in that shared fiction.

Again, this appears in a number of board games. BSG is a good example. You play characters from the series.

* Those players' moves typically correlate, in some fashion, to things done by those fictional characters and take the fictional circumstances of those characters as an input into resolution.

Again, there are a number of board games where this qualifies. Room 25 has "characters" that you play and the fictional circumstances are very much part of how things are resolved.

* Unlike in a shared storytelling game, the authorship of the fiction, especially around the playing pieces, is circumscribed by mechanics.

Frankly don't care. Not trying to differentiate from storytelling because it's beyond the scope of my definition.

* Unlike in a boardgame/wargame, players' moves are permitted to directly engage the fiction.

Again, far too many Eurogames fit in as RPG's under your definition to be useful to me.

I'm sure there are borderline cases, especially in the area of avant-garde game design, that violate my dot points, but nevertheless I think my dot points go most of the way to identifying what makes a game a RPG.

Eurogames are hardly "avant-garde". They've been around for quite a while now. Heck, even older games like Hero Quest tick most of your points.

 

[Maxperson]

Thing is, there are a number of board games that do this. Battlestar Galactica, for example. As well as a number of Euro games.

Again, this appears in a number of board games. BSG is a good example. You play characters from the series.

I'm going to preface this by saying that there are often a number of games with the same name. Middle Earth/Lord of the Rings is a good example. So, if I'm talking about a different game, bear this in mind.

I once played a Battlestar Galactica game. You basically had everyone playing a named character from the series and one person was the cyclon. He had to try and sabatoge the fleet's success without getting caught, and the others had to figure out who was the cylon. While the game pieces did correlate to characters from A FICTION, they didn't correlate to any sort of game fiction. The game itself was mechanical and you could have substituted any or all of the named characters from the series with Professor Plum, Colonel Mustard, etc. and still played the same game. No fiction was being authored.

 

[Lanefan]

I would say no. You are playing a different game of poker with each deal. Over the course of the night, we've played many, many games. Each game is distinct from the others - the rules of game 1 and the results of game 1 don't really have any impact on the choice of game 2. It's not like I'm saying, "Well, I've got lots of chips, so I'll pick this game over that game". The choice of game is largely based on preference.

So, no, there are no "campaigns". What you have are dozens of sequentially played games.

So am I reading you correctly in saying you see no appreciable difference between carrying the chip count forward each deal and resetting it to all-even for each deal?

This is what I'm getting at - the persistent chip count is the thread that connects a series of otherwise disconnected things; and at the end of the night I'm not going to care how many different types of poker we played, I'm going to see it all as one event because I care that I lost $87 playing bloody poker!

On a more RPG-flavoured note: what's your take on through-the-editions D&D campaigns? By this I mean the type of campaign that starts out using 0e D&D and every couple of adventures moves up an edition, updating the PCs to suit, until they do a couple of adventures using 5e and then quit. Same continuing story, same continuing PCs and players and DM throughout, just a regularly-changing rules system. Is that a single game or a series of games?

Lanefan

 

[Umbran]

I would say no. You are playing a different game of poker with each deal. Over the course of the night, we've played many, many games. Each game is distinct from the others - the rules of game 1 and the results of game 1 don't really have any impact on the choice of game 2. It's not like I'm saying, "Well, I've got lots of chips, so I'll pick this game over that game". The choice of game is largely based on preference.

So, no, there are no "campaigns". What you have are dozens of sequentially played games.

Heh. I suggest you not play big money that way. I have a couple of friends who make a substantial part of their living playing cards, and to them what has passed in previous games matters a great deal - it speaks to the pattern of thought of the opponent, which is everything in a bluffing game like poker, where the odds are only part of the equation - betting strategy is a matter of psychology, and that you can play with all night. Variants may be picked to probe on style, or to press on a weakness, or to fluster.

 

[Maxperson]

So am I reading you correctly in saying you see no appreciable difference between carrying the chip count forward each deal and resetting it to all-even for each deal?

This is what I'm getting at - the persistent chip count is the thread that connects a series of otherwise disconnected things; and at the end of the night I'm not going to care how many different types of poker we played, I'm going to see it all as one event because I care that I lost $87 playing bloody poker!

On a more RPG-flavoured note: what's your take on through-the-editions D&D campaigns? By this I mean the type of campaign that starts out using 0e D&D and every couple of adventures moves up an edition, updating the PCs to suit, until they do a couple of adventures using 5e and then quit. Same continuing story, same continuing PCs and players and DM throughout, just a regularly-changing rules system. Is that a single game or a series of games?

Lanefan

I see what you are getting at, but I'm going to side with [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] on this one and say that each hand of poker is a different game. I've been at tables where some games are 5 card draw, some are 7 card stud, some are hold 'em, some have wild cards, and some don't. I've even been at tables where you could just declare high card wins as the game you wanted to play, or a different short card game with multiple people that you could bet on. The chip count was carried over, but the games were all different. I think it takes more than just carried over chips to turn it into some sort of campaign.

 

[pemerton]

Again, far too many Eurogames fit in as RPG's under your definition to be useful to me.

What Eurogames have you got in mind that let you directly play the fiction - eg dig through the floor of the room you're in without that needing to be a mechanically defined move in the game?

I once played a Battlestar Galactica game. You basically had everyone playing a named character from the series and one person was the cyclon. He had to try and sabatoge the fleet's success without getting caught, and the others had to figure out who was the cylon. While the game pieces did correlate to characters from A FICTION, they didn't correlate to any sort of game fiction. The game itself was mechanical and you could have substituted any or all of the named characters from the series with Professor Plum, Colonel Mustard, etc. and still played the same game. No fiction was being authored.

There are a billion-and-one games like this one that Maxperson describes - they don't involve authoring a shared fiction (at least as typically played), and even moreso don't involve playing the fiction either unmediated by mechanics or as an input into the resolution system.

Forbidden Desert has flavour text, including for the "characters" who are the play pieces. But there is no shared fiction that is a key focus of play and a central aspect of resolution. Flavour text isn't a shared fiction.

 

[Shasarak]

I would say no. You are playing a different game of poker with each deal. Over the course of the night, we've played many, many games. Each game is distinct from the others - the rules of game 1 and the results of game 1 don't really have any impact on the choice of game 2. It's not like I'm saying, "Well, I've got lots of chips, so I'll pick this game over that game". The choice of game is largely based on preference.

So, no, there are no "campaigns". What you have are dozens of sequentially played games.

If a night of poker is a campaign then maybe each hand is the RPG equivalent of an Encounter and the Players chips are the equivalent of HPs. If you run out of HPs then you are out of the game unless you can get a Healing spell cast on you by making a cash donation to the God of Poker chips.

 

[Hussar]

There's another aspect of games that people are ignoring as well.

Computer games. The line between computer games and the game that I'm calling campaign is getting thinner and thinner every day. Games like Raft, or The Forest or even Seven Days to Die are pretty darn close to an RPG campaign. And they certainly tick all or most of the boxes that Pemerton listed above.

As far as board games go, I'd point to Room 25, as an example, where your actions directly impact the game within the fiction.

And, note, if we want to go that route, then this disqualifies RPG's that have meta-gaming mechanics since you are affecting the in game fiction through out of game elements. I really don't think that's a useful path to follow.