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November 02, 2005
Welcome to Post-Roleplaying
Paul Tevis responded to Clinton's OgreCave interview in Have Games Will Travel (see the audio file here). For the lazy, I've transcribed you an excerpt:
I find it really interesting that when I talk with people who are primarily boardgamers about roleplaying games, their impressions of what a roleplaying game is are very different from what mine is. And I think Clinton has really hit on why. A lot of people have said that Arkham Horror is a lot like a roleplaying game. Not for me it isn't. When I play Call of Cthulhu, it doesn't look anything like Arkham Horror. If it did, why would I bother? Why not just play the board game?
Here's the way I see it: I want to play to a game's strengths. If I wanted to play D&D, for example, it would be a game about killing monsters and taking their stuff, because that's what D&D does well. Sure, I could play D&D, but why would I, when games like Neverwinter Nights and World of Warcraft take what D&D does well and do it better? I could play an RPG that works a lot like Arkham Horror or Return of the Heroes, but those two board games capture that feel better.
What does that leave me with? It leaves me with the sorts of things that roleplaying, as a uniquely interactive storytelling medium can do that nothing else can touch. That's why I play games like Polaris, and Dogs in the Vineyard, and My Life with Master, and The Shadow of Yesterday. Those games play to the strength of the medium and capture the kinds of experiences that board games, card games, computer games, any other type of game can't do.
At the same time, in the last three weeks I've gotten into three different discussions with people about how some of these games aren't really roleplaying games. And at GenCon, when I interviewed Ken Hite, he described Bacchanal as "not quite a game, but close." Clinton's right that roleplaying game as a term, covers at least three distinct types of games, and I think the gaming community is finally starting to come to terms with that. Now that people have started to realize that, I'm very curious to see what comes of it.
In short: Roleplaying is dead. Long Live roleplaying!
Even shorter: About damn time.
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Comments
There's something Mike Holmes said, and which has stuck with me for a while: a roleplaying game is a game in which you can justify a move based on the fictional logic of what is happening. If you have the lead pipe in Clue, you can't smash a window and flee -- the lead pipe is just a token, and "lead pipe" is just color. But in a roleplaying game, you could, because that's something you could use a lead pipe for.
This is something that is very hard to mechanize or formalize, and ties in to this post by Jess about why she doesn't like competitive storytelling games -- too many contradictory ideas about what the narrative is make it difficult to use the narrative as a justificatory tool.
Posted by: Neel Krishnaswami at Nov 2, 2005 2:54:15 PM
hmmm. maybe the difference between ordinary games and roleplaying games is that regular games are all System and Color, with no real interdependence of the two: Color at best acts as a mnemonic for some System rules. anything that looks like Character, Setting or Situation is also just Color and has no effect on System, as you mention.
roleplaying games, on the other hand, add Character, Setting and Situation; they use Color to help maintain these three as a unit, and all four act on System.
Posted by: John Laviolette at Nov 2, 2005 4:30:33 PM
Hm.
Sometimes, what I want is to play a game in which I adopt a persona, kill monsters, and take their stuff. I also want to have that experience with a few people around a table, rather than in an online environment.
D&D works darned well for me there.
Which, I think, speaks to Paul's point. It's OK not to pigeonhole.
Posted by: Bryant at Nov 2, 2005 5:14:16 PM
Well, yeah. I would think that anyone interested in the genre would have recognized that there are many different types of games called RPGs. I have a section in my introduction to RPGs on Types of RPGs.
I mean, you can use this for justification for why you like to play Polaris -- but the same logic is behind why I played Champions, James Bond 007, HarnMaster, Ars Magica, and nearly all the other games that I've played. I played them because they offered something different than what was offered by traditional boardgames and card games -- and also something different than reading a gripping novel or watching a dramatic film.
Role-playing games are their own form.
(And for what it's worth, when I talked to Ken Hite at ConQuest, Bacchanal was the one game he recommended most highly that I check out. So don't mistake his calling it "not quite a game" as an insult.)
Posted by: John Kim at Nov 2, 2005 7:08:15 PM
I think what's really happened here is that I've fallen into my own trap. That, and I'm no longer sure what the heck my point was.
There's really three things going on here, I think. First, there's me relaying the idea that "roleplaying game" is useless label because it tries to contain to much. Second, there's me reacting to people saying that things are "like a roleplaying game" when they're nothing like the gaming that I do. Third, there's me trying to justify why I consider the type of gaming that I do to be roleplaying. And I pretty much failed spectacularly at all of them, because they're rather contradictory goals.
Time to think about this some more.
Posted by: Paul Tevis at Nov 2, 2005 7:21:26 PM
Well, as one who totally got what Paul and Clinton were getting at, I feel the need to jump in here.
Remember, this discussion started not as a crack on traditional roleplaying but as a recognition of a new trend in design. Clinton, Paul, and Ken were all acknowledging that many newer games are leaving the traditional roots of roleplaying behind in favor of building new structures. In my opinion, they haven't really gone far enough along this road yet to be called something else, but there are hints. I mean, hell, if we're calling Shreyas' Mridangam (and exercises in that vein) a roleplaying game, then things do get interesting.
Indie roleplaying, even at its most progressive, is hardly avante-gard. All the games Paul mentioned are primarily intended to be played as games. The statements they make about roleplaying or how they push the idea of "games" is of secondary importance. Progressive roleplaying games, for the most part, define themselves within roleplaying instead of trying to be outside of it. They're not really trying to make something new, they're just trying to go about things differently.
So, my title of "post-roleplaying" was meant to be a bit ironic. We're not there yet, but I do think Paul, Clinton, and Ken are correct in speculating that we're heading in that direction. And I, for one, couldn't be more pleased or excited.
Posted by: Jonathan Walton at Nov 2, 2005 10:39:03 PM
Hi Jonathan, my comment wasn't meant as a criticism, just as a reaction it inspired.
Anyway, I don't really understand what you mean by "post-roleplaying". It seems to me that what people are doing is steadily broadening the set of games that are considered rpgs, and as a result it's getting harder and harder to define something that is deliberately outside that set.
Posted by: Neel Krishnaswami at Nov 3, 2005 4:22:46 PM
I think that broadening of definition is certainly happening, Neel. And I think the growing distance between games like Mridangam, Lexicon, and D&D (for example) makes it hard to call them all the same thing. So maybe we do need to start specifying more clearly, sorta like John's categories. This is a "X-type roleplaying game" instead of just "a roleplaying game."
In any case, my concept of "post-roleplaying" (not that I'd probably ever use that word in a non-cheeky sense) would be something that was informed by the practice of roleplaying, but significantly removed from the methodology normally associated with roleplaying. And that was where Mridangam came from, actually, a challange I issued to create games as if roleplaying developed from something besides wargaming. I'd say Lexicon fits that model pretty well, actually.
Is that clearer?
Posted by: Jonathan Walton at Nov 3, 2005 5:00:59 PM
If I wanted to play D&D, for example, it would be a game about killing monsters and taking their stuff, because that's what D&D does well. Sure, I could play D&D, but why would I, when games like Neverwinter Nights and World of Warcraft take what D&D does well and do it better?
The part that bugs me about this is that I really don't see Neverwinter as comparable to D&D. Admittedly, I've only been GMing for a year or two and I only played Neverwinter for a few weeks at most,but the two experiences are not at all comparable. Even playing D&D via the Internet (OpenRPG) is nothing like Neverwinter.
For me the biggest part of roleplaying is the social experience. In my last session, one rogue kept being knocked unconscious, being healed back to consciousness, then charging back into the fray. It was hilarious, but how funny would this be in Neverwinter?
There's also the fact that computer games don't even give you an illusion of freedom. If the story is derailed by a dice roll, load from your last save (or respawn) and get back on track. You follow the plot, or you don't play.
I'll admit that my games will never make an epic story like the Odyssey, Lord of the Rings, or even the Shannara schlock. However, what makes them fun is getting together with friends and seeing what happens at the players and their characters interact with the world. A big part of that interaction is killing things and taking their stuff, but it's a very different experience from playing Neverwinter or Diablo.
Equating D&D with Neverwinter is incorrect because Neverwinter does not give even an illusion of freedom and it is not fundamentally social.
Posted by: Joel Tone at Nov 5, 2005 5:21:01 PM
I agree, Joel, but there's also that point about what Mike Holmes said: a roleplaying game is a game in which you can justify a move based on the fictional logic of what is happening. you can't do that in a computer game, period. that, for me, is more important than the social aspect, because I have other ways I can be social.
Posted by: John Laviolette at Nov 5, 2005 5:38:18 PM
How is Mridangam that different from other (indie) role-playing games? I don't believe what the indie RPG movement is doing is changing or even broadening the definition of "role-playing". I believe what the movement is doing is recognizing/acknowledging what the essence of role-playing as a unique activity/artform *IS*.
If you look at what ties all "role-playing" games together, what you find is the SIS, a collectively & socially created imaginary construct. What the indie RPG movement has done is recognize that the SIS is the real thing that makes RPGs as an activity unique. Who cares what the "rules" are, if the "game" or activity shares this feature?
It's like trying to say that script writing is somehow different from novel writing is different. Sure, they each have their own idiosychroncies, but at their core they are the same activity---storytelling.
I admit, though, that this is a... err, qualitative definition of "role-playing". I think where the confusion comes in is when people use a historical definition.
Posted by: timfire at Nov 5, 2005 11:38:37 PM
Debates about definitions ("what is a roleplaying game?") are tricky and sticky, especially if there's any hint of prescriptive evaluation behind the semantics (ie "X is not real roleplaying."). For me the most interesting part of Paul's comment is when he says:
What does that leave me with? It leaves me with the sorts of things that roleplaying, as a uniquely interactive storytelling medium can do that nothing else can touch. That's why I play games like Polaris, and Dogs in the Vineyard, and My Life with Master, and The Shadow of Yesterday. Those games play to the strength of the medium and capture the kinds of experiences that board games, card games, computer games, any other type of game can't do.
Neither he nor I are the first people to point this out, but there's a thing that often happens when a new medium emerges to compete with an old one: the old medium moves towards the things it can do that the new medium can't. So: the spread of television in the 1950s didn't kill the movies as many feared it would. What television did do was encourage movie makers to make big, epic movies in widescreen and technicolor - "playing to the strength of the medium" in ways TV couldn't then match. The spread of computer publishing - online books, PDFs, etc. - does not seem poised to eradicate the book as printed object. Instead what seems to be happening is that some things are being published electronically while the remaining books are becoming more attractive physical objects. It's logical to expect, then, that the spread of computer rpgs can help us discover or rediscover -- in games like Dogs in the Vineyard but also in D&D campaigns, why not? -- what it is that tabletop rpgs do well that computer games do not.
Posted by: Rob at Nov 7, 2005 3:23:06 PM
And I should be clear: I'm not saying Paul or Jonathan were saying "X is not real roleplaying" - I'm just saying that debates about definitions can turn into that without anyone meaning them to.
Posted by: Rob at Nov 7, 2005 3:25:34 PM
Joel,
A friend of mine, who used to play in my D&D game, back when I ran one, and who now played in another local Shadowrun game, plays World of Warcraft as a social game. Granted, it's a social game about leveling up and getting cool powers, but he's said before that he probably wouldn't be playing it without other people.
I think Rob's on the right track here. With the emergence of MMORPGs and their increasing sophistication, I see more potential D&D players moving towards computer games. Not necessarily current D&D players, mind you, but the sorts of people who might play D&D-type games if MMORPGs didn't exist. I say that because, as a GM, playing to D&D's strengths is hard. It takes a lot of skill to run a good D&D combat, for example, because there are so many things to keep track of, and unless you're really good at it, you're going to get overworked and burned out. (Been there, done that, got the T-shirt.) I believe that we're now getting to the point where computers can be better GMs for certain types of games, and I think gamers would be crazy not to take advantage of that. I think that computer games are going to be the "movies" of gaming, to use Rob's analogy. I think it's going to take the types of things that didn't work as well in tabletop form and do great things with them. At the same time, we're going to see more games that go the opposite direction, emphasizing exactly the sorts of things that computer games can't do. Both of these developments make me really happy. It's all about grasping the full potential of your medium.
--Paul
Ritual disclaimer: When I say "D&D-type" games, I mean fantasy games about killing monsters and powering up, because that's what's D&D does really well. Yes, you can use D&D for other types of games, but then you're not really living up to D&D's potential, and I don't believe in doing that.
Posted by: Paul Tevis at Nov 7, 2005 7:46:11 PM
I'm with Rob re: social aspects of CRPG. I used to be somewhat into the Diabolo scene a few years back, it was without a doubt an intensively social interaction, at least to a significant number of diehard fans.
Maybe what sets paper RPG/CRPG apart is that in a wholly imagined SIS (ie, paper RPG) there is space for the *unimagined*. In CRPGs, everything in the SIS (apart from the social interaction between live players, whcih has its own limits) has to have been put there by the designers, in a very concrete way. It's possible to forsee this changing (as per 'The End Of The World game' in Card's [i]Ender's Game[/i]) but we're not close to this yet, so far as I know.
Although, many paper RPG's seem to do as much as they can to crowd out the unimagined, whether uniwttingly, through narrowness of design, or because of commercial imperatives, I'm not sure.
Perhaps 'designing for the unimagined' is part of the post-RPG RPG?
Posted by: charles ferguson at Nov 18, 2005 8:43:58 PM
