That's never been a necessary component of RPGing. The core of RPGing is not theatre. It's that the player role means declaring actions for a character that "occur", and are resolved, as events in a shared fiction. This is what Wesley, Arneson and Gygax - between them - worked out, and presented as a game form.
RPGing and imagination: a fundamental point
- Thread starter pemerton
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The MU casts hold person, I shove the necklace in my backpack, and we all skedaddle down the stairs!
Where are these events taking place? The people at table are not doing these things. They are sitting at a table, talking to one another and writing things down.
Nor are these figurative descriptions of moves of pieces on a board. They're not analogous to (say, and picking up on your example) a Forbidden Desert player saying I drink some water and then shovel some sand while lowering their water meter one slot, and removing a sand token from the board.
The action declarations, in Arneson's D&D as much as in a game of Apocalypse World taking place right now, have the purpose of changing what everyone is imagining together, about this group of people exploring a dungeon together. That's the core of the game play!
I have no idea how you think Arneson et al played D&D. What do you think they were doing?
No it isn't. Its actually Roleplay; an advanced form of Improv game where a complex and persistent shared reality is managed by the Players from Scene to Scene.
Clint_L
Legend
Yes, I agree. That's why I wrote that "Imaginative play is an essential ingredient of any TTRPG - it's what makes these open rather than closed game systems." So framing the discussion in terms of the necessity of imagination seems to me to be sort of begging the question.
Lanefan
Victoria Rules
The "role-playing" in role-playing game speaks directly to it being, in part, theatre. Not theatre as in putting on a show to entertain a passive audience (Critical Role et al notwithstanding!) but theatre as in inhabiting a character to whatever extent and framing one's declarations in terms of what that character would do in that moment*. Even if just superficially, you're playing a role; as opposed to playing in purely pawn-stance (or avatar) mode which - while it can be done - defeats much of the purpose.
This theatre piece is the Braunstein influence. I'm not sure if you've ever played Braunstein. I have, and honestly it more resembled a non-costumed and almost rules-absent LARP than a TTRPG as we know it: all you can do is think as your character and say (and in some cases do) what it would. The GM describes the setting to everyone and explains the situation, each player gets a short page of notes specific to their character, and after that - other than occasionally announcing that another in-game day has passed - the GM largely stands back and watches the fun.
* - the 1e DMG play example demonstrates this fairly well, I think. The oD&D play example you quoted does not, which only goes to show how play within the game had evolved between 1974 and 1979.
I understand your first two sentences here, but not the third sorry. I'm not sure how you are using "begging the question".
It's not my goal in this thread to judge anyone's degree of imaginativeness. I'm certainly not here to condemn pawn play - quite the opposite!
This is what is called shared imagination. There is no reality in a literal sense - there is a fiction. The fiction "exists" only in imagination. The "management" of that fiction consists in coordinating the shared imagination. Vincent Baker has written about all of this on his blog over the past 20 years. For instance, from June 2003:
Roleplaying is negotiated imagination. In order for any thing to be true in game, all the participants in the game (players and GMs, if you've even got such things) have to understand and assent to it. When you're roleplaying, what you're doing is a) suggesting things that might be true in the game and then b) negotiating with the other participants to determine whether they're actually true or not.
AbdulAlhazred
Legend
The skill system was pretty chunky, so level 1 pilot makes a GOOD pilot, not extraordinary, but capable of holding a license and carrying out any routine piloting task. level 2 is an expert, like your average military/commercial level, level 3 is HIGHLY expert, and level 4 is basically the pinnacle of achievement in any field (not that level 5 and 6 are forbidden exactly, but getting them via the normal lifepath is pretty much impossible). I always assumed that Miller shared my penchant for simple, direct presentation of things, and eschewed tiny variations that make practically no difference in practice: such as all the 1% skill increments of BRP, which just don't matter.
But it did produce the consequence that an increase in skill rank isn't something that just happens because you spent a week doing some tricky flying. Generally the solution was to break the ranks down into 10ths, so you could be 'pilot 1.3', which wouldn't really do anything for you, but it was a sort of crude 'XP system' for each skill. I believe something along those lines was later codified in one or another variations of Traveller.
I'd also note that, while Traveller doesn't claim there is a closed canonical skill list, the lack of an advancement system also fairly precludes the tacking on of endless new skills. Various supplements did add a bunch, but the list never really got all that long. It made for a pretty solid system, just one that centers on certain types of play. I think it is fair to conclude there's certainly a pretty significant set of RPG genre which benefit from steep personal progression curves in a D&D-like way.
