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

[chaochou]

"A roleplaying game is a game of character development, simulating the process of personal development commonly called 'life'."

 

[pemerton]

"A roleplaying game is a game of character development, simulating the process of personal development commonly called 'life'."

Runequest?

 

[Jester David]

Runequest?

According to my Google-fu, yes. From the second edition, published in 1980, and one of the earliest RPGs to attempt to define what an RPG is.

 

[chaochou]

Yes, I just opened the rulebook and that's the first sentence

 

[pemerton]

"A roleplaying game is a game of character development, simulating the process of personal development commonly called 'life'."

The interesting next question - if we have to force that statement into one of my two boxes, which one?

I'm going to push it towards the "function" box - if we're simulating life, we're simulating a process in which external circumstances and institutions make demands upon a person and thereby shape his/her choices. Unless we're Nietzschean or Foucauldian supermen, we're not, in living our lives, self-consciously cultivating and acting out particular personalities.

 

[Maxperson]

The interesting next question - if we have to force that statement into one of my two boxes, which one?

I'm going to push it towards the "function" box - if we're simulating life, we're simulating a process in which external circumstances and institutions make demands upon a person and thereby shape his/her choices. Unless we're Nietzschean or Foucauldian supermen, we're not, in living our lives, self-consciously cultivating and acting out particular personalities.

You may not be conscious of it, but your personality determines your reactions to everything. If I'm trying to simulate that in a game, I have to consciously choose a personality for my PC and follow it.

 

[chaochou]

The interesting next question - if we have to force that statement into one of my two boxes, which one?

Well, we don't have to. A game, and its players, can be sophisticated enough to overlay both - they aren't mutually exclusive...

But if forced, I would also be inclined toward function, certainly in the era when it was published. RQ of that time was built around being part of societal responsibilities and conflicts - Orlanthi resisting Lunar conversion, Storm Bull hunting chaos, 'barbarian' nomads and townsfolk - rather than individual character portrayal.

 

[Greenstone.Walker]

It could mean filling a role that is defined by functions, capacities, responsibilities, etc.

Would this definiton mean that chess is a RPG?

 

[pemerton]

Would this definiton mean that chess is a RPG?

No. This has been covered multiple times upthread.

A chess has no resolution-relevant fiction. A game of chess is an abstract series of moves governed by abstract rules/ (Those few parts of chess that aren't abstract, but that relate to the concrete reality of the game - eg touch, move; or rules about the use of clocks - aren't about fictions either. They're about real physical events involving the players and their tools.)

A RPG becomes an RPG because (i) there is fiction that is relevant to resolution, and (ii) a player engages the game primarily through the vehicle of one particular imagined person within that shared fiction.

In chess it simply makes no sense to ask "What happens if my knight gets dismounts?" Whereas that sort of question is a paradigm of RPGing.

 

[pemerton]

You may not be conscious of it, but your personality determines your reactions to everything. If I'm trying to simulate that in a game, I have to consciously choose a personality for my PC and follow it.

Simulating a process of determination that operates in a manner that is not self-conscious by means of consciously choosing certain things is, in my view, a very dubious mode of simulation.

Life might sometimes imitate art, but art is not a simulation of life.