A thought came to me fully formed, like a dictum, as I was doing the dishes. Help me find the ore inside the dross here:
RPG rules should be designed to work smoothly even when no one is actually roleplaying.
Is this true? Discuss.
A thought came to me fully formed, like a dictum, as I was doing the dishes. Help me find the ore inside the dross here:
Is this true? Discuss.
Plenty of ore there. 🙂
I’ve done my share of playtests, and one thing that always frustrates me during a playtest is when the designers ignor the rules they wrote and just ‘wing it’. That’s NOT testing, and that’s not creating playable rules.
I’ve heard, at least once: “We just added that rule because people expected to see it, we don’t actually USE it.”
I’m absolutely of the opinion that the rules need to work. The gamemaster may decide that they want to get rid of a rule, but that’s their call. And a novice gamemaster, in particular, is less likely to have good judgement on whether a rule should be changed.
The obvious question is “what does it mean to ‘work smoothly’?”
Taking a stab at it:
1. A rule should be easy to explain.
2. A rule should be easy to implement.
3. A rule should enable plausible play. I avoided the word realistic because not all RPGs are about reality. But the RPG needs to make sense to the players.
4. A rule should not have easily exploited problems– weird edge cases.
5. A rule should not inhibit roleplaying.
If your rules work fine even when no one is roleplaying, then in what sense have you written a roleplaying game?
Codrus, does an RPG need rules for every eventuality, then? Can an RPG fairly set a tone and mindset for improvisation, and a system for resolution, in addition to its mechanics? Can great GM methods or instincts be packaged or evoked by a game?
Paul, are you saying D&D is not an RPG?
That does seem to be logical extension of what I’ve said.
But to think about it a little more, it depends on what you mean by “roleplaying.” Which is why you have people saying things like “D&D 4e is not a roleplaying game.”
So when you say, “when no one is roleplaying,” what do you mean?
Nope, I don’t think a roleplaying game needs to be exhaustive in what it provides. I think that’s a different problem from the original question. I think that the rules a game does provide should do what they set out to do.
A game has some control over what that means though. Just because a gamemaster wants all his games to be gritty and dark doesn’t mean he gets to proclaim all heroic systems as ‘broken’, for example.
It may be fruitful to examine the proposition from an inverse angle. So, true or false: It’s ok if your RPG rules fall apart because the players aren’t roleplaying.
Paul’s question about definitions remains legitimate, I think. My answer would that “no one is roleplaying” when the game is being addressed in the same way that you’d address a board game or card game. You move the pieces in accordance with the rules (only); you don’t take—for example—a character’s personality into account (unless there are rules for that).
4e can be addressed as a board game, but I don’t think it’s “not a roleplaying game,” because it does still make the required genuflections (weak-ass though they are) toward the idea that you can tell a story, have an interesting character, and so on.
To answer Paul’s question, “In what sense have you created a roleplaying game?” I’d say that “roleplaying game” has a traditional meaning rather than a literal one. “Roleplaying game” means, for better a worse, “a game where you dictate the actions of a single avatar, whom you level up without end.” A roleplaying game is thus not about roleplaying as I’d define it, nor is it properly a game, because you can’t win or lose it.
In what circumstances might some people be playing an rpg without actually role-playing?
* They are novices to rpgs, and don’t know exactly how to go about it.
* They are novices to the system, and are spending their time and attention making sure they get the rules right.
* Their hearts aren’t in it this session.
For the third you can argue they should pack up and do something else, but if they want to slog on to a conclusion you need rules to guide them to a place they can leave it, without the entire edifice falling apart. Universalis is an example of a game that can’t survive even modest dip in interest.
For the first two, it is very important that the rules ‘work’ as much as they can in that environment- to make sure the game is rewarding enough that the time isn’t wasted. In both cases, rp will only get a chance to blossom if the players become comfortable enough with the rules- which means they have to meet criteria like the ones Codrus mentioned. Of course, this means that the D&D most of us cut our role-playing teeth on is objectively poor in this sense.
RP can be applied to just about any game, from Robo Rally to Lunch Money to Settlers of Catan- it’s more how you do it than what you do. A controversial definition of an rpg would be any game that can’t sustain interest and enjoyment without the filigree of rp.
In what circumstances might some people be playing an rpg without actually role-playing?
Isn’t there also a pretty big class of players who just like to roll the dice, kill the monster, take the treasure, and level up?
(Or would you say that those people are roleplaying?)
Personally, I’ve always been of the opinion that roleplaying doesn’t actually require any rules. In a good roleplaying session, we can go all night without touching the dice. The question to my mind is whether or not the rules work when the player *is* roleplaying.
If the player makes a beautiful, impassioned speech to enlist the Duke’s aid and then rolls a 1 on the skill check, what do you do? If the player decides not to fight the big bad alongside her companions, but rather to free the slaves chained to the wall instead, is this change in the balance of the fight going to doom the others?
Staying true to character often leads a player to make non-optimal decisions from a game theory perspective.
Paul saith, “So when you say, “when no one is roleplaying,” what do you mean?”
Beat me to it!
Now, I’m reading the underlying point of the Thought as being this: “RPG rules should be designed as strongly as boardgame rules, without relying on a GM to design rules in-game”. If that’s what we’re saying, then that’s absolutely true.
However, you could *also* mean something like this: “RPG rules should be able to function independently of the SIS/diagesis/fiction that is created in play.” In this case, I’d have to disagree. I do think that rules that refer materially to the fiction[*] have been a normal part of RPG design. Playing an RPG without the shared fiction is like playing chess without a board. Or pieces.
([*]Vincent Baker discussed some of this? Whatever are you talking about? ;-] )
To me, this statement made as much sense as “The rules for football should work smoothly even when nobody is playing football.” If nobody is playing football, what are the rules for? A thought experiment, like 43-man squamish? Or do you mean, “The rules for an rpg should work smoothly even when nobody is doing things not in the rules, but are commonly associated with role-playing, like eating Doritos.” In which case, yes, the rules should still work even if nobody is eating Doritos. Or talking with funny voices. The rules should be a self-consistent set of things to do. That doesn’t seem terribly insightful, though, unless you can think of a counter-example of a game that only works when you’re eating Doritos, and the rules don’t actually mention Doritos.
I would argue Hack n Slash is roleplaying, because in real life you don’t run around killing monsters and taking their stuff. Just because in that fantasy world there isn’t a lot of what we consider “character development” doesn’t make it any less roleplaying to put yourself in that role.
I think we spend too much time debating on what makes roleplaying fun instead of just enjoying whatever it is we find fun.
The question is loaded with slippery or vague notions, most of which were there when it popped into my head (because, I guess, I was just fucking with myself), but I honed them and left them in because this is a subject in where a neutral question illuminates less, I think.
The next part of the thought experiment, though, may be to find arguments (perhaps online) where people implicitly fall into this line of thinking when they become frustrated with (usually, I submit) a specific play experience.
There are things we think and things we don’t think but act on anyway.