The Many Faces of Roleplaying: How ‘RPG’ Became Everything and Nothing

[pemerton]

Neither D&DOE, T&T 1e, nor Traveller '77 include the term "roleplay" nor "role-play." I don't have RQ 1e, but 2e is the oldest I have seen using the term, and it's 1980.

Gygax's PHB (1978) has this on p 7:

Swords & sorcery best describes what this game is all about, for those are the two key fantasy ingredients. ADVANCED DUNGEONS & DRAGONS is a fantasy game of role playing which relies upon the imagination of participants, for it is certainly make-believe, yet it is so interesting, so challenging, so mind-unleashing that it comes near reality.​

Page 18 goes on:

Character class refers to the profession of the player character. The approach you wish to take to the game, how you believe you can most successfully meet the challenges which it poses, and which role you desire to play are dictated by character class . . .​

I think this shows us what Gygax, at least, had in mind by "role play" or "role adoption": he was not particularly concerned with pretending to be a particular individual but rather with taking on a particular suite of abilities for engaging with the challenges of the game. These "roles" correspond, loosely at least, to the idea of distinct "unit types" in a more traditional wargame.

What distinguishes a RPG, of the sort that resembles D&D, from a wargame are two main things:

*The players (cf GM/referee) predominantly control, and engage the game, via one imagined person within a first-person perspective (ie they imaginatively insert themself into the player's character's imaginary circumstances) rather than from the typical wargame god's eye general's perspective;

Those imagined circumstances - the *fiction - matter to resolution. The game is not just a boardgame.​

But this combination of arrangements can be used to play many different games, just as is the case for moving tokens on a board in accordance with rules and dice rolls; or as is the case for dealing and playing hands of playing cards. (@Campbell has made this point upthread too.)

Gygax worked out one game in detail - the dungeon-crawl, exploration-oriented, skilled-play game (and its hexcrawl variant). But that hardly exhausts what can be done using the combination of players imagining their characters having to confront situations and what is imagined mattering to the way the game participants agree on what happens next.

 

[Retros_x]

I think it’s worth asking why we’ve stopped noticing that the label itself can still be so generic

Did we though? I never heard someone thinking its not a generic label. As others pointed out its a term on a high abstraction level similar to "book" "game" "sports" etc. Its absolutely normal to have a hierarchy of definitions with more abstract, generic ones being at the top and more concrete, specific ones being down at the leaves of the hierarchy tree. In a discourse you use the term that is appropiate to context and person you speak to. For example when I would try to explain D&D to my grandma the term "RPG" would already be too specific, I would start with even more generic "game". But when I discuss on enworld neotrads vs OSR vs whatever I would of course need more specific terms than just "rpg" or "game".

Thats nothing people usually focus on in meta discussions because its so common to language and discourse. Its just levels of abstraction and "RPG" is a bit more abstract and generic. So what. Use whatever is appropiate to the current discussion.

As an example one possible expression of such a hierarchy:
abstraction <---- ----> concretization/specification
"something" -- "activity" -- "hobby" -- "game" -- "roleplaying game" -- "tabletop roleplaying game" -- "OSR game" -- "Knave 2"