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What is the "role" in roleplaying
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<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6962748" data-attributes="member: 42582"><p>Re-reading <a href="https://www.rpg.net/oracle/essays/gamesatplay.html" target="_blank">Christopher Kubasik's "interactive toolkit" essay</a>, I found the following (in Part 2) which seemed relevant to this thread (the author uses "Story Entertainment" to describe his preferred approach to RPGing):</p><p></p><p style="margin-left: 20px">The basic plot form of a story is this: A central character wants something, goes after it despite opposition, and arrives at a win, lose or draw. All roleplaying games involve this basic plot in one form or another.</p> <p style="margin-left: 20px"></p> <p style="margin-left: 20px"><em>Dungeon & Dragons</em> fulfilled this requirement brilliantly and simply. Characters wanted experience points and wanted to gain levels. Any other want they might have had - social, political or personal - was subsumed within the acquisition of levels. Did you want social recognition? A greater understanding of the ways of magic? Influence over people as a religious leader? Pretty much anything your character might have wanted was acquired by gaining levels.</p> <p style="margin-left: 20px"></p> <p style="margin-left: 20px">Dungeon modules worked for this very reason. A D&D character who wanted to become a lord didn't go off and court a princess. He became a lord by wandering around dungeons, killing monsters and overcoming traps. The game offered no rules for courting a princess, but did provide rules for becoming a lord at 10th level, after looting enough arbitrarily placed holes in the ground.</p> <p style="margin-left: 20px"></p> <p style="margin-left: 20px">Modules disintegrated the moment a player got the bright idea of having his character become a lord by courting a princess. Suddenly the world opened up. Instead of getting what they wanted by pursuing a single activity - namely, overcoming traps and monsters characters now wanted to interact with people, gaining what they wanted through individual action and detailed plots. . . .</p> <p style="margin-left: 20px"></p> <p style="margin-left: 20px">In most roleplaying stories, the plot is indifferent to the characters. You can drop any character in, and it works fine. This phenomenon goes back to roleplaying's heritage in wargaming. It didn't matter why armies fought. All that mattered were choices during battle and the battle's outcome. The same can be said for a dungeon crawl or mercenary adventure story.</p> <p style="margin-left: 20px"></p> <p style="margin-left: 20px">But as you build more sophisticated characters, characters with more detailed dreams, desires and quirks, stories much change correspondingly. If not, they remain clunky, leaving players and GMs with a vague dissatisfaction: "How come we did all that work on our characters if it didn't matter?" . . .</p> <p style="margin-left: 20px"></p> <p style="margin-left: 20px">In a Story Entertainment, no one knows how the thing's going to end or even what the story is. The plot is unknown. What is known are the characters' goals, the fact that the [referee] is going to provide opportunities for those wants to be met, and the fact that the [referee] is going to impose obstacles for the characters. It's also known that at some time those goals are going to be pursued to a win, loss or draw in terms of their fufillment.</p><p></p><p>To me, the 2nd ed AD&D approach seems intended to make it palatable to the players that "the plot is indifferent to the characters". Whatever the plot, the players can manifest their PCs' unique and entertaining personalities.</p><p></p><p>Whereas the functional approach - once PC function is taken to be not just a fairly generic function for (say) dealing with dungeons, or being part of a mercenary strike team (the sorts of functions that Traveller PCs often have), but to include PC goals and motivation - requires that the game proceed in something like the fashion that Kubasik describes. It must provide scope for the players to engage their PCs' functions/capabilities/responsibilities, which means opportunities to realise those goals but also obstacles in the way. This makes it impossible to have adventures whose contents, unfolding, etc is indifferent to the PCs.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 6962748, member: 42582"] Re-reading [url=https://www.rpg.net/oracle/essays/gamesatplay.html]Christopher Kubasik's "interactive toolkit" essay[/url], I found the following (in Part 2) which seemed relevant to this thread (the author uses "Story Entertainment" to describe his preferred approach to RPGing): [indent]The basic plot form of a story is this: A central character wants something, goes after it despite opposition, and arrives at a win, lose or draw. All roleplaying games involve this basic plot in one form or another. [i]Dungeon & Dragons[/i] fulfilled this requirement brilliantly and simply. Characters wanted experience points and wanted to gain levels. Any other want they might have had - social, political or personal - was subsumed within the acquisition of levels. Did you want social recognition? A greater understanding of the ways of magic? Influence over people as a religious leader? Pretty much anything your character might have wanted was acquired by gaining levels. Dungeon modules worked for this very reason. A D&D character who wanted to become a lord didn't go off and court a princess. He became a lord by wandering around dungeons, killing monsters and overcoming traps. The game offered no rules for courting a princess, but did provide rules for becoming a lord at 10th level, after looting enough arbitrarily placed holes in the ground. Modules disintegrated the moment a player got the bright idea of having his character become a lord by courting a princess. Suddenly the world opened up. Instead of getting what they wanted by pursuing a single activity - namely, overcoming traps and monsters characters now wanted to interact with people, gaining what they wanted through individual action and detailed plots. . . . In most roleplaying stories, the plot is indifferent to the characters. You can drop any character in, and it works fine. This phenomenon goes back to roleplaying's heritage in wargaming. It didn't matter why armies fought. All that mattered were choices during battle and the battle's outcome. The same can be said for a dungeon crawl or mercenary adventure story. But as you build more sophisticated characters, characters with more detailed dreams, desires and quirks, stories much change correspondingly. If not, they remain clunky, leaving players and GMs with a vague dissatisfaction: "How come we did all that work on our characters if it didn't matter?" . . . In a Story Entertainment, no one knows how the thing's going to end or even what the story is. The plot is unknown. What is known are the characters' goals, the fact that the [referee] is going to provide opportunities for those wants to be met, and the fact that the [referee] is going to impose obstacles for the characters. It's also known that at some time those goals are going to be pursued to a win, loss or draw in terms of their fufillment.[/indent] To me, the 2nd ed AD&D approach seems intended to make it palatable to the players that "the plot is indifferent to the characters". Whatever the plot, the players can manifest their PCs' unique and entertaining personalities. Whereas the functional approach - once PC function is taken to be not just a fairly generic function for (say) dealing with dungeons, or being part of a mercenary strike team (the sorts of functions that Traveller PCs often have), but to include PC goals and motivation - requires that the game proceed in something like the fashion that Kubasik describes. It must provide scope for the players to engage their PCs' functions/capabilities/responsibilities, which means opportunities to realise those goals but also obstacles in the way. This makes it impossible to have adventures whose contents, unfolding, etc is indifferent to the PCs. [/QUOTE]
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