So What is a Roleplaying Game? Forked Thread: Clark Peterson on 4E

[JoeGKushner]

Last week, before starting my game, I used some brief notes to convert one of the adventurers from Goodman Game's hardcover of 1st level short adventuers to 4th edition. Nothing specific and just a few swaps of "pirates" for humans from the Monster Manual.

Before the dungeon crawling started, they were in a tavern and catching up on various news events on the streets of Punjar. Some rolls were made and a lot of players talking to various NPCs, friends, allies, rivals, etc...

I'm baffled that any edition would make such a scenario of players role playing their characters difficult.

Anyone have this happen? That you're playing Fantasy Hero and someone leaps out a window screaming that he couldn't role play in such a granular system? Someone cut his wrists to Rolemaster because of the horror the critical hit system does to role playing?

Baffled I say. Baffled!

Forked from: Clark Peterson on 4E

As soon as someone comes up with an agreed upon all-encompassing definition of what exactly a roleplaying game is, then we can determine whether or not 4E is a roleplaying game. To me, whether it is or is not is less of a question than whether 4E is D&D. To me and many, many others, it isn't. I even gave it a shot when it came out. I took the time to read the books, I played a few games. At first it was fun, but the fun quickly turned to annoyance and eventually hostility. Powers are such an overriding, annoying, and poorly conceived mechanic that I really can't believe that they went forward with it. What were they smoking? The problem is that this wouldn't even be an issue if someone would have come out with 4E under the OGL. I don't think it would have been widely embraced, there would be few proseletyzers, and it would have died the quiet death it deserves. Instead the golden age of gaming has been turned to division and conflict. Good job WotC, and thanks.

 

[The Little Raven]

Baffled I say. Baffled!

Same here. All it boils down to is that the claim is just another form of the "YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG!" screed that gamers use on eachother to make them feel like their preferences are the right way. It's "one true way" crap.

 

[BryonD]

I'm baffled that any edition would make such a scenario of players role playing their characters difficult.

I don't think that it is possible for a game to make roleplaying your characters difficult.

Of course this truth applies just as well to Descent as it does to GURPS, 3E, 4E, Hero, Mutants and Masterminds, Burning Wheel, you name it.

As my sig notes, roleplaying is not between the covers of a book. However, a good roleplaying game (by my defintion) is one in which the mechanics do justice to reflecting the world's reaction to the activities that are being role played.

I can roleplay superman. If I make a 1st level 3E rogue and declare him superman, I can easily roleplay him as superman. I will fail to perform like superman in just about every way. As a superman RPG, low level 3E is a total failure. The total inability of it to inhibit my roleplaying of superman does not offer one bit of compensation for this failure. It fails, right in the middle of my awesome roleplaying. End of discussion.

4E does a vastly better job of modeling fantasy heroes than low level 3E does of modeling superman. But by my standards it is still only fair to middling. There are vastly better games out there.

I can roleplay a fantasy hero precisely the same in any of these games. I'd be just as baffled if someone said I could not. But feeling that the mechanics are living up to the roleplaying I am doing is a completely different matter.

 

[Halivar]

It's a game... with roleplaying.

Anything past that is just making stuff up to explain why someone's preferences ought to be weighted as objective truth.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Or another question: Combat - what makes it RPG combat vs Board Game Combat?

Note that Darrin does explicitely mention that "Roleplaying Game" is still not defined well enough to say a certain game is not an RPG, and he's more interested in the question whether 4E is D&D or not (which is a question I don't care about because D&D is something different for anyone, and I can write 1,000,000 times that 4E feel like D&D to me, it won't change Darrins mind, and vice versa)

I had actually a different question, but along similar ideas.

What about combat in an RPG does tell us that it is an RPG combat system, and not something else? Because I keep hearing these complains about "board-gamey" or "card-gamey" or what-you-have, and all this actually talks about is combat. But combat is not the only part of an RPG. I see it as an important aspect of RPG, but there is more to it?

In a way, I think the entire mindset you go into an RPG vs. any other game. When you're playing Monopoly, you don't go in with the belief that any of your game pieces stand for a person with desires, hopes or interests. It's your game pieces, and your desires, hopes and interests are the important part - (and your desire is typically to win).

In a RPG, you begin by assuming that you're not steering a game piece. You think of yourself narrating the actions and decisions (using different methods) of a fictional person. You use rules to determine whether he succeeds in his goals and ambitions. You play pretend.

With an RPG mindset, maybe you could play Monopoly like an RPG. But it might feel very narrow-minded, since the game does not assume any goals beyond acquiring money and buying buildings.

Many RPGs come with a detailed combat system, but regardless of the level of detail, the games still assumes there is more beyond it. It doesn't always give hard rules for that (early RPGs - including D&D - don't support a real skill system), but they still hint at the DM to allow such things to happen. If a player wants to pick a lock, and the designers didn't create an explicit Thievery skill or Lock-Picking tool, the DM can still allow the player to do it - and it might be resolved using a dex check (if the game has such an attribute) or by the player describing how he tries to do it.
In a monopoly game, there is no guidelines or suggestions if a player wants to hold a party in one of his buildings and invite all his friends. Or that he wants to role-play his "character" (game piece) falling in love with another game piece.
In a game of clue, the investigators can't decide to just run away, torture one (or all) of the suspects, or decide to conspire with the real perpetrator.

I think one of the fundamental things in an RPG is that it is open ended. The rules provide a starting point, but you have to fully acknowledge the possibility that there is stuff outside it, and players (including the DM) should never forget that part, and usually even count on it.

 

[GlaziusF]

Someone cut his wrists to Rolemaster because of the horror the critical hit system does to role playing?

"Okay, so now take off the armor absorption modifier... modifier... modifier... rrr, table table table ah! There it is. Divide this into... number's smudged. Ah well, go through the damage calculation again...

"There we are! Now for the - wait, these two numbers don't even look alike. One more pass won't hurt...

"THIS number isn't like either of those! What did I do wrong? One more time...

"Finally! It matches SOMETHING. Okay, absorption modifier, random variant, rank 5 slashing critical- okay!

"So I sweep my sword down in a vicious arc and sever its arm at the elbow!"

"Uh, Frank? We're fighting giant spiders. No arms."

"YEAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRGH!!!!!"

 

[jensun]

Oh look, a day with a Y in it and someone is saying that D&D isn't a roleplaying game.

This has been the same argument since the early 80's. Sometimes I wish people would just get over themselves and play the games they enjoy and leave other people to play the games they enjoy.

 

[Darrin Drader]

IN my opinion, the definition of a roleplaying game is a game that includes the following:

Allows you to take on a uniquely designed persona of a fictional character

Provides rules for improving that character

Provides rules for task resolution, including combat

Provides rules to help the GM adjudicate social interaction

I think that if you remove any of those, it stops being an RPG. It is true that if you go back to 1st edition and 2nd edition, the rules for social interaction were secondary at best, and the primary two items that you concerned yourself with were race and class, so characters were less unique. Their uniqueness were a function of ability scores, which didn't actually always have an effect on the game, and pure concept rather than mechanics enabling the concept. Does that mean that first and second edition weren't true RPGs? No, it just means that the concept has evolved.

4E has numerous problems, but one of them is the fact that the core rules do not provide a mechanical means to make unique characters. Feats have been neutered to the point of redundancy, and the only thing that really matter are your powers. You're back to earlier editions becuase the options available are so few. Despite the pages upon pages that they devoted to each class, there's only a couple different builds available for each class. Nevermind the fact that powers don't function anything like class abilities. All the forced movement, damaging on a miss, and short term conditions just cause the game to devolve into repetative gamist crap.

 

[jensun]

IN my opinion, the definition of a roleplaying game is a game that includes the following:

Allows you to take on a uniquely designed persona of a fictional character

Provides rules for improving that character

Provides rules for task resolution, including combat

Provides rules to help the GM adjudicate social interaction

I had no idea that OD&D and BECMI (missing 4), Spirit of the Century (missing 2),1e/2e D&D (missing 4) and a great many indie games (missing 3) are not rpg's. I am sure their authors would be thrilled to know you judged them all as failures.

Your comment about mechanical differentiation is just laughable. By that standard no version of D&D prior to 3e has been any good for roleplaying.

I score you 0/10.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

IN my opinion, the definition of a roleplaying game is a game that includes the following:

Allows you to take on a uniquely designed persona of a fictional character

Provides rules for improving that character

Provides rules for task resolution, including combat

Provides rules to help the GM adjudicate social interaction

I think that if you remove any of those, it stops being an RPG. It is true that if you go back to 1st edition and 2nd edition, the rules for social interaction were secondary at best, and the primary two items that you concerned yourself with were race and class, so characters were less unique. Their uniqueness were a function of ability scores, which didn't actually always have an effect on the game, and pure concept rather than mechanics enabling the concept. Does that mean that first and second edition weren't true RPGs? No, it just means that the concept has evolved.

4E has numerous problems, but one of them is the fact that the core rules do not provide a mechanical means to make unique characters. Feats have been neutered to the point of redundancy, and the only thing that really matter are your powers. You're back to earlier editions becuase the options available are so few. Despite the pages upon pages that they devoted to each class, there's only a couple different builds available for each class. Nevermind the fact that powers don't function anything like class abilities. All the forced movement, damaging on a miss, and short term conditions just cause the game to devolve into repetative gamist crap.

Well, your definition looks like a good starting point, but since it apparently fails already for early definitions of D&D, does it really work? You talk about "evolving" defintions - are you "allowing" to early editions of D&D no longer to be considered as RPGs by our definition, so that anyone playing still OD&D would no longer be a role-player? Or do you allow using different "evolutionary states" of the RPG definition to apply to different games? And are you "misusing" the term evolution to hint at an "improvement" in the definition? Evolution only leads to fitness for a given environment. If the environment - gamer interests - changes, a previous version of the RPG definition could become "unfit" and be replaced by something else. And if this environment contained more elements of the environment that created OD&D, the definition might get closer to an definition that still fits OD&D.


Furthermore I feel you focus way too much on the pure rules aspect. Rules are not everything to D&D. The entire background and the motivations of the events in play are not part of the rules. And I think that is what makes it more unique from other game types then everything else.

I think one of the strength of any RPG is that you could take two characters with fully identical statistics, and they could still be very different in the actual game. And likewise, you could use two characters with very different game aspects, but still be the same person. You can transform most characters between different game systems even (not just mere editions - you could pick a OD&D Fighter concpet you played and use the same person in a Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay game!).