D&D 5E What is the "role" in roleplaying

[Aenghus]

Anyway, I have a nice simple example from a recentish game. Epic-level pathfinder. We're fighting epic-level people. One of them has a sword which is probably worth more than everything our party owns put together. And he is a total jerk, and he waits until the last minute, then holds the sword out and offers his surrender to the lawful-good dwarf. The dwarf is really really mad at the guy.

Turn comes up...

Bill: I take my full round of attacks on his sword.

Now, the thing is, Bill's got an adamantine weapon. He will destroy that sword. This will cost us more money than we, as a party, have ever seen all put together. It's worth significantly more than the full-sized magical ship we're capturing. This is an atrociously bad idea in terms of "fulfilling a role within the party". But it is absolutely, unambiguously, in-character and correct for Kal to do that. Bill did it, not because it was a good choice in terms of the party's goals, but because it was what Kal would do.

And in the 40+ years I've been playing D&D, outside of your threads on this forum, I've never actually seen anyone use "role-playing" to refer to anything other than "trying to play the character true to their personality and nature".

There's no statistic for "would rather destroy several million gold of treasure rather than let some jerk have the satisfaction of being smug about this".

Roleplaying as an overall concept is complex, more complex than it seems, as it's based on lots of spoken and unspoken assumptions on a huge variety of issues.

For instance take the example above, which you obviously consider an example of good roleplaying in the context of that particular gaming group. The exact same behavior at a different group could be considered problematic, or even a violation of the party social contract. Let me explain.

One adventuring party could consider themselves in it for the loot and professionals about it, so destroying an immensely valuable item would be anathema to them, they would find some other way to express their anger in the situation above, or risk being hit by a huge compensation claim from the rest of the party. In some cases the PC might be placed on probation or fired outright.

In a game where the sword concerned was an important plot device in the ongoing story and happened to be vital to ultimately resolve it, destroying it might doom the world or some section thereof, and place the DM with the conundrum of allowing mindless rage to derail his/her epic campaign or change the setup to accomodate random vandalism by PCs. I have seen destructive spirals happen in some games where PCs destroy stuff that was needed, and cross DMs just let it happen and let the campaign go down in flames.

At least some of the time the player in the above scenario may subsequently utter the dread words "I was only playing my character". IMO nothing justifies totally selfish play, not even roleplaying. RPGs are a group activity that demands a minimal level of compromise from all participants - what this entails will vary from group to group.

Roleplaying is complex, context matters.

 

[seebs]

The key question is:

Is that a social contract between the players or between the characters?

Because what you describe sounds to me like cases where the other characters would be expressing displeasure because of things the characters believe.

Basically, say the PC is "fired outright" from the party. Does the same player roll up a new character and continue play? If so, then that was an in-character dispute, not an out-of-character dispute. And that's fine, and can be good roleplaying fun if that's the game people want to play!

 

[Aenghus]

The key question is:

Is that a social contract between the players or between the characters?

Because what you describe sounds to me like cases where the other characters would be expressing displeasure because of things the characters believe.

Basically, say the PC is "fired outright" from the party. Does the same player roll up a new character and continue play? If so, then that was an in-character dispute, not an out-of-character dispute. And that's fine, and can be good roleplaying fun if that's the game people want to play!

It's not as simple as it sounds because players often aren't aware of their own play preferences or those of others, which makes negotiating such things problematic.

So maybe it's a player dispute, maybe it's a character dispute, maybe it's a little of both.

So probably the player rolls up a new character, but if the PC turns out to be Angry Dwarf II the Revenge and behaves exactly the same way, or possibly a half-orc or halfling with similar behaviour, the problem could arise again and second time around the issue could be more heated with player expulsion one option on the table.

I've seen plenty of groups weary of the player who always plays an angry barbarian who habitually ruins every tactical plan more complex than "charge in" and every attempt at subtlety or diplomacy. I've seen other groups who enjoy the hell out of such shennanigans, and just don't bother with the planning or diplomacy any more as its wasted effort.

People play RPGs for different reasons, and some of those reasons are not compatible, just like some peoples personalities are incompatible.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Just a nitpick, but the two sides of a False Dichotomy aren't necessarily wrong. They just aren't the only two possible answers

'Excluded Middle,' then?

 

[seebs]

It's not as simple as it sounds because players often aren't aware of their own play preferences or those of others, which makes negotiating such things problematic.

So maybe it's a player dispute, maybe it's a character dispute, maybe it's a little of both.

Totally possible.

But they are distinguishable things, and in general, when people have talked about "roleplaying", they have consistently meant it in terms of character. There's cases where it might be a bit ambiguous, and there's cases where you can read it that way if you don't mind unambiguously changing the entire thing.

Mostly, though, it comes down to "you can describe nearly anything as fulfilling a function, and thus claim that anything means that". And it's not really interesting or productive to do so.

 

[pemerton]

Maybe, but he opens up with the referee "sets the stage". You set a stage for actors. That's what the phrase means, so personality(which is a part of acting) is implied.

"Setting the stage" here clearly means establishing the fiction. I mean, it's in inverted commas (scare quotes) - and so is not being used literally - and he goes on to say exactly what setting the stage consists in: describing the scenario, establishing imaginary geography and situation, etc.

 

[pemerton]

The passage I quoted doesn't explicitly say "hey, just so someone who comes along 40 years from now doesn't get confused, I want to clarify that I'm talking about the personalities, not just the raw statistics, of these characters".

Okay, so that's a "no".

Now reread Gygax's discussion of playing the game ("successful adventuring"), as he calls it, on the closing pages of his PHB (before the Appendices). He talks about choosing equipment, memorising the right spells (with no suggestion that spell selection might reflect personality), the right balance of capabilities (including magic items), etc. In your words, the characters are "pawns".

If you're just "fulfilling a function" within your group, you are still interacting as Jim, Bob, and Mary who work at the office together. You're just modern people playing a game. The characters don't actually participate in this, and are not the ones interacting; the players are interacting, the characters are just the pawns.

The players inhabit their characters in the shared fiction. This is the difference from a board game. In order to understand your "permissible moves", you have to think yourself into the fictional situation, which includes your fictional positioning vis-a-vis the other characters.

This is why the emergence of PC personalities is a natural byproduct of playing the game even in the Gygaxian approach - it's not as if rhe change in conceptions of roleplaying between the mid-to-late 70s and the late 80s/early 90s came from nowhere!

But look at (just as one example) this exchange in Gygax's example of play in his DMG (pp 99-100):

LC [= Leader Character]: "Let's change the plan a bit. The cleric and I will hoist the gnome up and hold his legs firmly while he checks around for some way to open the secret door. Meanwhile, the halfling and the magic-user will guard the entrance so that we won't be attacked by surprise by some monster while thus engaged."

. . .

OC [= Other Character] (the gnome): "Then I'll see if I can move any of the stone knobs and see if they operate a secret door! I'll push, pull, twist, turn, slide, or otherwise attempt to trigger the thing if possible."

DM: "The fist-sized projection moves inwards and there is a grinding sound, and a 10' X 10' section of the wall, 10' above the floor in the center part, swings inwards to the right."

OC: (The gnome) "I'l pull myself up into the passage revealed, and then I'll see if I can drive in a spike and secure my rope to it, so I can throw the free end down to the others."

DM: . . . "You see a sickly gray arm strike the gnome as he's working on the spike, the gnome utters a muffled cry, and then a shadowy form drags him out of sight. What are you others going to do?"

LC: "Ready weapons and missiles, the magic-user her magic-missile spell, and watch the opening."​

Here we see the players interacting as their characters, inhabiting the fictional situation and relating to one another in that manner. But there is not the least hint that establishing an interesting and entertaining personality (as the 2nd ed AD&D PHB talks about) is relevant to the game. Searching for an opening the secret door is an operational problem, not a dramatic one; and the attack upon the gnome creates a tactical problem, not an emotional one.

the primary level of interaction is in terms of these fictional persons and their stories, not in terms of the numbers used to do the thing.

Of coures the primary level of interaction is in terms of these fictional persons! That's the difference from a board game. But that doesn't mean that distinctive, entertaining personalities are relevant. Just look at the example of play in the DMG. Look at Gygax's advice on how to play the game in his PHB.

Or look at the quote from MAR Barker, not far upthread. The "stories" of these persons are envisaged as being stories of gaining power by exploring and looting dungeons. When they talk about challenges to be faced, they are clearly envisaging tactical and operational challenge, not emotional or dramatic challenges.

Are you saying that you can't comprehend anything which could ever exist which would be "portraying a character" rather than "fulfilling a function", or are you saying that you can't see why anyone would think that D&D's "role playing" is closer to the former than to the latter?

Neither. I'm saying that there are different ways of thinking about roleplaying (in D&D and other RPGs), and that not all of them invole "portraying a character" by conceiving of and then acting out a distinct, entertaining personality.

I am also saying that we can see these different ways expressed in different D&D books. Gygax's PHB, Moldvay Basic and Empire of the Petal Throne (which for current purposes can be safely treated as a D&D variant) all present roleplaying in terms of taking on a certain set of functions and capabilities and deploying them to meet the challenges of the game. Whereas the 2nd ed PHB says that roleplaying means coming up with a unique and entertaining personality.

Those early texts present the goal of roleplaying - what Gygax calls "successful adventuring" - as extracting loot from a dungeon so as to earn XP and thereby go up levels. The 2nd ed PHB presents the goal as being to have fun acting out your PC's personality and reacting to how other players act out theirs.

I have a nice simple example from a recentish game. Epic-level pathfinder. We're fighting epic-level people. One of them has a sword which is probably worth more than everything our party owns put together. And he is a total jerk, and he waits until the last minute, then holds the sword out and offers his surrender to the lawful-good dwarf. The dwarf is really really mad at the guy.

Turn comes up...

Bill: I take my full round of attacks on his sword.

Now, the thing is, Bill's got an adamantine weapon. He will destroy that sword. This will cost us more money than we, as a party, have ever seen all put together. It's worth significantly more than the full-sized magical ship we're capturing. This is an atrociously bad idea in terms of "fulfilling a role within the party". But it is absolutely, unambiguously, in-character and correct for Kal to do that. Bill did it, not because it was a good choice in terms of the party's goals, but because it was what Kal would do.

And in the 40+ years I've been playing D&D, outside of your threads on this forum, I've never actually seen anyone use "role-playing" to refer to anything other than "trying to play the character true to their personality and nature".

Roblin Laws has a similar discussion, I think in Over the Edge, where he refers to the birth of roleplaying (in your preferred sense) as occurring "The fist time someone took a sub-optimal action because 'that's what my guy would do'." (I don't have the book with me, so I'm paraphrasing, but I hope not too loosely.)

This doesn't mean that that's the only way of thinking about roleplaying, though. As I've said, literally nothing in those early rulebooks suggests that this is an important part of playing a character. And Laws himself, in his Dying Earth RPG, has written a RPG where creating a unique and interesting personality is expressly stated not to be an important part of playing the game. The reason for this, as explained in the rulebook, is that most people in The Dying Earth stories have more-or-less the same peronality and motivation (basically greedy, self-serving, etc but not unutterably ruthless).

I think it's not a coincidence that there is a similar non-emphasis on personality in The Dying Earth RPG and Gygaxian D&D, given the influence of Vance on Gygax's conception of the fantasy world. I also think it's why Vincent Baker, when he set out to run Lamentations of the Flame Princess (an OSR game) found that "the only way for me to reconcile my expectations with the reality of the rules was to go all frickin' Vance with it. The moral underpinning has to go out the window, to be replaced by an ironic and cynical relativism".

As I've been posting in this thread, I think that one way of trying to understand indie-style games is that they want to use the functional/capabilities approach to produce something other than Vance, and so they change what counts as a character's functions/capabilities/responsibilities.

 

[pemerton]

"you can describe nearly anything as fulfilling a function, and thus claim that anything means that". And it's not really interesting or productive to do so.

See, here we do have a disagreeement.

I think the question "what is the function of this character", given a set of mechanics and assumed goals of play, is a hugely interesting and important question for RPG design and play.

For instance, if the function of the character is, esssentially, vehicle for player to show off his/her idea of a unique and interesting personality - which is certainly how I've seen some 2nd ed AD&D tables approach the game - then basically I'm out.

A minimum requirement for me to want to play D&D is that the play of my PC can actually change the events that are central to the unfolding fiction (what is sometimes called "the plot"). Which depends upon there being reliable ways for me to impact the fiction via my PC. Those ways, and the feedback loops etc that they generate (eg via earning XP which changes/improves my ability to impact the fiction via my character), establish the function of my character. To play my character well I need to know what these are.

 

[Manbearcat]

OK, a fourth interpretation I missed - not a player lifetime limit, but a player campaign limit.

Yup!

Well, from "mostly superfluous" to "interesting but not the most important thing" is a spectrum, not a quantum leap!

Very much so.

I agree that the basic adventuring paradigm speaks againt being Chaotic. And the alignment section itself pretty much says the same thing. I think "Chaotic" is mostly a device for justifying non-cooperative dungeon denizens who, rather than ganging up to utterly crush the PC incursion, sit around in largely autonomous groups of small to moderate size.

But I think L vs N can interface: with monster/NPC reactions, if the GM wants it to (the rules canvass GM modifiers to reactions, though it's left pretty hand-wavey); and with magical effects also ("tricks" and the like, eg healing fountains or trick doorways/archways, etc).

It finds its way into scenario framing ("A magic portal of Chaos in the bottom of an ancient is spewing aberrations from another world") and in some dungeon architecture components (like you mention).

On to Torchbearer (most of this will make sense to you but it is there for comparison and setting up my last quesion). I'm not going to go into the entirety of the system (there is a fair bit), but I'm going to highlight where its different (more robust with regard to the topic of this thread).

First off, this game is not about big damn heroes pursuing (and fulfilling) their romantic destiny to save the kingdom/world/celestial order. Its about grimdark adventurers trying to re-establish a toe-hold (or just pilfer a tattered tapestry or a golden cuff-link) in a desperate world where the wild, the monstrosities, and the ancient evils have pushed back against civilization's hubris...and cowed it. It is a game of struggle, desperation, flagging spirits, and ebbing torchlight. Gripping victory doesn't look like a haul of treasure. It looks like starving, angry souls who are happy that only one of them died from exhaustion and that they've plundered enough to pay down their Town debt, sponsor their next adventure, and earn a modicum of respect.

The game proceeds in roughly the same procedure paradigm (with very different resolution mechanics) as Moldvay Basic; Town Phase > Adventure Phase > Camp Phase (etc). Players still assume Mapper and Caller roles. PCs are built with several of the same components; Class, Ability Scores (different), Languages, Alignment (more thematic and nuanced but even pithier imo), Gear.

There are a few components of Moldvay's PCs and resolution mechanics that are (shallowly or broadly) analogous to Torchbearer's Circles, Resources, and Skills. However, I don't want to focus on those.

I want to hone in on the major areas of divergence that is relevant to this thread:

1) Beliefs, Goals, Instincts, Nature, and Traits

These are (of course) the things that drive you on a fundamental level; your personality, your ethos, your ticks and scars, and the general disposition of your genetic and cultural stock.

Through the pursuit and invocation (and ultimately the evolution/change) of these facets of your character you (a) earn rewards/advancement, (b) complicate your life, (c) earn resources that get you out of those complications (or save you from others), or (d) lose yourself entirely.

Sounds like real life to me!

2) The Inventory/Encumbrance system

The system is explicit, intuitive and just granular enough to keep overhead low but cognitive workload prominent in this oh so important part of the game; Gear/plunder management. Your body has slots, your sack/pack has slots, a pack carries more than a sack, stuff that goes in is in a particular order comes out in the same, if you burden yourself with a pack then you can't wear plate mail. These kinds of things.

You've got decisions to make. Their central to your survival and central to your prosperity (which are put at tension by the game's mechanics!)

3) The Condition track

Its not easy to die or outright lose yourself, but it’s so very hard to get things done because everything is complicating your life; the environment, its denizens, your logistical issues...and finally, your psycholigical/physiological issues. You need to manage your wits, your camping, your supplies, and maybe your retreat in order to keep your character’s conditions from spiraling out of control (there are eight of them and 7 of them, Fresh brings a boon, they carry different problems...well, maybe 6...is "Dead" technically "a problem?"). But in order to make camp and do anything during the Camp Phase you need to spend "Checks" (earned when your Traits complicate your life).

The mechanics are so beautifully integrated with the fiction and they so intensively marry your character's disposition and personae to both your micro-status and your macro-outcomes that you can't help but feel (as a player) that all which comes to pass is a natural outgrowth of your PC inhabitation and attendant decision-making. Its hard, its a grind, but its rewarding as hell.

---

Now. The question is:

What do these two system's have to say about the nature of roleplaying and PC habitation and personae/disposition rendering as a priority of play?

It is trivial, intuitive and inferrable from the game text to play Moldvay Basic in something resembling pawn stance or utterly vanilla and cartoonishly flat tropes. Those two are all I have seen.

Torchbearer is impossible to play in this way. It won't work. Even if you tried (and why would you?), you would fail (because the tightly integrated systems push back so deeply against such an approach). Your personae/disposition will emerge, it will change, it will drive play, you will inhabit it.

Is Torchbearer, then, a more legitimate roleplaying game than Moldvay Basic? That question seems absurd to me to even ask, but given many of the replies I see in this thread, I would have to think that some would have to contort themselves significantly to maintain their positions on roleplaying while simultaneously making an equivalence between the two games.

 

[pemerton]

What do these two system's have to say about the nature of roleplaying and PC habitation and personae/disposition rendering as a priority of play?

It is trivial, intuitive and inferrable from the game text to play Moldvay Basic in something resembling pawn stance or utterly vanilla and cartoonishly flat tropes. Those two are all I have seen.

Torchbearer is impossible to play in this way. It won't work. Even if you tried (and why would you?), you would fail (because the tightly integrated systems push back so deeply against such an approach). Your personae/disposition will emerge, it will change, it will drive play, you will inhabit it.

Is Torchbearer, then, a more legitimate roleplaying game than Moldvay Basic? That question seems absurd to me to even ask, but given many of the replies I see in this thread, I would have to think that some would have to contort themselves significantly to maintain their positions on roleplaying while simultaneously making an equivalence between the two games.

I'll leave your particular question to others, as I've got no horse in the "what is roleplaying really race".

But I'll answer a slightly different question by reference to the dichotomy/contrast set out in my OP.

I think Moldvay fits into my "functions/capacities" picture of roleplaying: a character is first-and-foremost a set of abilities to do stuff relevant to getting loot out of the dungeon.

Implicitly, a Moldvay PC also has certain responsibilities - eg on the section on party composition that you mentioned upthread, the book says that MUs can give wise advice. But there is no mechanic for that. It is more-or-less implicit that that's how one plays an MU. (I think this is why Gygax is moved to try to incorporate these ideas of how one plays an MU, a fighter, etc into his level advancement rules; he wants to give these ideas more teeth.)

I don't know Torchbearer directly, but know of it and can see the obvious points of resemblance to BW. I see the aspects of these games that make belief, nature etc so important to play, and a source of feedback loops for success and advancement in the game, as an attempt to "functionalise" personality in a more sophisticated way than Gygax's level advancement penalty for poor play. It's not about making up an interesting personality, as the 2nd ed PHB talks about. Even if you don't do that at all, the game will force you to engage with it because it's built into your PC's functions/capacities/responsibilities.