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"

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

I appreciate the insight, and for pointing me to that book. Where I’m trying to focus is less on the origin of those debates and more on how the term is still used today as a broad marketing umbrella. The interesting part to me isn’t that this was never discussed before, but that the same tension persists in modern contexts — particularly when products present themselves as serving different styles of play, often leading to mismatched expectations.

Maybe most people don’t question it because we all know what it means in context, but I think it’s worth asking why we’ve stopped noticing that the label itself can still be so generic, even as the games themselves have evolved and generated far more precise ideas within the genre of roleplaying.

I highly, highly, highly recommend the book (The Elusive Shift by Jon Peterson) because, um, it's awesome. And also because it really does shed a lot of debate not just on this topic, but also on a lot of the recurring ... topics we have here on EnWorld.

I think it would be almost impossible to read that book and not have a new perspective on a lot of the issues we talk about here today- it might not change your opinion on things, but it will certainly provide fresh insights into how far back a lot of the debates we are having go- and also provides an excellent resource showing that the early days of TTRPGs were an explosion of creativity and experimentation and intellectual debate that cannot be captured in the typical grognard's tale of, "I played a third level Magic User who was killed by a kobold with a rusty butter knife, and that's how it was, and we loved it that way!" that we often see today.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

I had to double check to make sure you weren't the OP.

While I appreciate the OP, and anyone who makes the attempt to present an argument in the form of an essay ...

I certainly hope that there are stylistic indicators for "Snarfness" that are more than just "amount of verbiage."

I mean ... How is Snarf like Tolstoy?

...no one bothers to read either.

 

[Jacob Lewis]

The broader issue is people assuming all roleplaying games should fit a specific mold. I don't see why roleplaying game as a label should be more specific than video game, board game or card game.

I think you were on to something at first, but that comparison doesn’t hold up under closer scrutiny. “Card game,” “board game,” and “video game” describe form — the physical or digital medium that defines how they’re presented and played. “Roleplaying game,” by contrast, describes function more than anything else. It can apply to anything from Gloomhaven to Fiasco to Baldur’s Gate.

To be fair, I don't feel that this is a "problem" requiring a solution; and I don't believe I actually suggested one. But I think it deserves a little more awareness on occasion, and maybe a little deeper consideration. Or maybe not, considering how strongly (surprisingly) people seem to be feeling about it.

However this does make me wonder: should we consider that a Baseball player is also a Football player because, you know, they're both "sports"?

 

[Micah Sweet]

I think you were on to something at first, but that comparison doesn’t hold up under closer scrutiny. “Card game,” “board game,” and “video game” describe form — the physical or digital medium that defines how they’re presented and played. “Roleplaying game,” by contrast, describes function more than anything else. It can apply to anything from Gloomhaven to Fiasco to Baldur’s Gate.

To be fair, I don't feel that this is a "problem" requiring a solution; and I don't believe I actually suggested one. But I think it deserves a little more awareness on occasion, and maybe a little deeper consideration. Or maybe not, considering how strongly (surprisingly) people seem to be feeling about it.

However this does make me wonder: should we consider that a Baseball player is also a Football player because, you know, they're both "sports"?

Yeah, I don't believe "sports" and "rpg" are the same level of generalization (though both generalize of course).

 

[billd91]

However this does make me wonder: should we consider that a Baseball player is also a Football player because, you know, they're both "sports"?

They're sportspeople, jocks, athletes, or whatever because both of those games are sports/athletics. Just as we'd call Traveller players, D&D players, Masks players, and Warhammer Fantasy Role Playing players RPGers.

 

[TiQuinn]

However this does make me wonder: should we consider that a Baseball player is also a Football player because, you know, they're both "sports"?

Is a football player a football player or a soccer player?

Is a video game something I play in an arcade, or a computer, on a console, or on a phone?

 

[Agamon]

Labels are useful, but wow, are they ever super important to internets folk for some reason lol

 

[payn]

Labels are useful, but wow, are they ever super important to internets folk for some reason lol

But we are only in 90% agreement on definition!!!