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

[Treebore]

Well, I think all RPG's allow role playing. As for which does it best? L5R d10. Now this is of the game I know and have played, which is far from all of them. I just love how L5R helps make role playing meaningful within the rules mechanics themselves.

I also know that "role playing" means widely different things to different RPG players. There are people who use voices, draw pictures, get into how the clothes of their PC look and what they are made of. Then their are people who don't really think about a "persona" for their PC at all. They roll the dice and see if they killed it. There are people like me, who have a story going on in their head based as closely as possible to the events going on in the actual game itself. My fellow players have practically no clue about it though. They get occassional clues when I say, "My character wouldn't do that, so he'll show mercy, give them 20 gold, and tell them to change their ways for the better."

Or, with my 4E Dragonborn, they get a clue when I say, "Does the creature have a liver and how big is it? I LOVE liver!!". There is much more "role playing" going on in my mind then is going on externally.

So like Darrin said, there is no "definition" that covers everyone.

 

[Yair]

Mustrum_Ridcully, I think, has spotted the main issue - what is it about the combat system that makes it part of an RPG? And his answer is spot-on - that the system supports the idea that the combat is taking place within an imagined "real" world.

I think the 4e combat system is too hampered by rules to allow the freedom and freeform feel that are required for this versimilitude. My players don't even bother reading out the powers' names - they just roll the dice, state the effects, note the mechanics... they talk about "if you move to this square..." or "Ah, good, he died - I teleport"... The different powers all seem to be a blur, with sensible effects not being translated into anything resembling what would be plausible mecahnics (you can cleave into the thing you wouldn't have hit... really?), and mechanics without snesible in-world reference (someone dies, and instantly the warlock teleports across the battlefield)... Most of all, the combats are a long game-within-a-game, something with very defined and arbitrary rules, done in squares and points and lots of technicalities instead of having an organic feel of characters kicking ass.

It isn't that 4e doesn't support roleplaying. It isn't even that 4e combat doesn't support roleplaying - you can have great fun manuevering, wielding powers, improvising, and, yes, roleplaying your way through a 4e encounter. But the system does generally feel too mechanical, the mechanics are getting in the way of imagining the character getting to do cool stuff too often.

IMO. We only played low level (1-3) so far, mind you.

 

[Zsig]

Provides rules for improving that character

Provides rules for task resolution, including combat

Provides rules to help the GM adjudicate social interaction

To me, a role-playing game doesn't necessarily need any of those.

 

[JoeGKushner]

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.

If all we're looking at is core rules, wouldn't the 3rd edition of the game fail on that role even more? Especialy in terms of fighters and rogues? If we're not looking at core rules, wouldn't that be an untrue statement?

In the core of 4e, I haven't played every race/class combo yet so can't see this statement as being even slightly true for me. For others, I'm going to have to go back to my initial post and ponder how the game system itself is actually effecting the player's ability to role play their characters.

I guess I"m pretty much in full agrement with the following...

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!).

And one of my friends does this often with the core concept of the character.

Hell, after watching Berserk the first time, I must've made a half dozen variants of Guts in Fantasy Hero, Warhammer and D&D (several different campaigns that never got off the ground.)

 

[Walknot]

PvM

You have got some rules (that is the game part) and most of those are helpful to or at least compatible with playing a role of your choosing. So to the simple pleasures of the playing a game, you can add the complex pleasures of imagining a separate persona. And with that you get a durable social milieu that can foster friendships and personal growth. Also killing monsters.

 

[Mallus]

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

This is it in a nutshell. Though I might amend the sentence to read 'character or characters', though I personally don't like to play more than a single character at one time. Also, this is why Monopoly isn't a role-playing game.

Provides rules for improving that character.

Oh well, there goes classic Traveler.

Provides rules for task resolution, including combat.

Oh well, there goes My Life With Master and Nicotine Girls. On second thought, that's no great loss (I kid, I kid... I've nothing against indie games).

Provides rules to help the GM adjudicate social interaction.

Oh well, there goes OD&D, and AD&D, and 2e... hey, can we rethink this one?

Does that mean that first and second edition weren't true RPGs? No, it just means that the concept has evolved.

I think what it means is that you don't really think rules to resolve social interaction are a requirement.

The first defining characteristic you listed is aces, the others, not so much.

 

[Harley Stroh]

The test of a role playing game applied against a board game:

I don't daydream about my Monopoly character between sessions.

//H

 

[Keefe the Thief]

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.

Very good. Now try if you can talk about the topic without calling 4e repetative (sic) gamist crap. See if you can do it. Take it as a test of self-control that improves the atmosphere of the thread.

 

[Jackelope King]

An RPG is an activity that allows two or more participants to create fictional agents (usually characters) who will face challenges on behalf of the participants in a shared imaginary space.

That's what every single RPG boils down to. How a game does these things can vary from game to game. Some are heavily declarative (resolving things based on common-sense and mutual understanding), some are heavily defined (resolving things based on pre-defined rules), and most are somewhere in the middle. Being able to progress characters is common, and having different ways to resolve different types of challenges is also somewhat common (though the modern tendancy is towards using a similar underlying mechanic for 'em).

And there are all sorts of different ideals on how games should work ("all characters should be balanced with one another is an ideal", for instance, as is "characters should act appropriately for the genre of the game"), which again are layered atop this basic premise.

But those basic elements (participants with characters facing challenges in a shared imaginary space) are what all RPGs have in common.

 

[Remathilis]

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.

To be fair, Editions prior to D&D DID have a social interaction mechanic.

OD&D, B/X, and BECMI could resolve such matters with a charisma check.

AD&D 1e/2e had NPC reaction adjustments. They were 2d6 rolls, and the higher you got, the less likely the NPC was to hate your guts. Charimsa affected the roll (hence "reaction adjust" on the cha modifiers).

AD&D 1e/2e and BECMI also had rules for NPC henchmen/follower morale and recruitment.

AD&D 2e and BECMI (and very late 1e) also had the non-weapon proficiency system, which included charisma-based skills like Singing, Etiquette, Intimidate and Story-telling, which could also influence NPCs with a successful check.

What all these system lacked is a grand, unified mechanic for NPCs to be influenced. All of these mechanics are scatter-shot and relied heavily on DM adjudication, to the point most DMs just skipped them utterly.

This, of course, was lampooned by Futurama, when Gary Gygax (a member of Al Gore's Action Rangers) meets Fry, and says "Hello! I'm Gary Gygax and I'm (rolls) pleased to meet you!"