Gary Gygax RIP; Lore on Roleplaying

On Roleplaying 9:25 am, March 4, 2008 I’m still reading a lot about the upcoming D&D edition, and I’m noticing something interesting about the “role-playing” part of roleplaying games. When I was younger, it was commonly accepted among gamers that D&D — or rather AD&D — wasn’t a real roleplaying game, because it didn’t have rules for roleplaying. There were reaction checks, and Charisma stats, but no mechanics to govern fast-talking a guard or bluffing an ogre. Clearly it was actually a ROLL-playing game! What a piquant pun!

So D&D 3rd Edition came out, and it had some basic rules for social interactions: actual skills for diplomacy, intimidation, and bluffing, and specific ways that those skills could be applied. The reaction? Well, for a lot of people this proved that D&D wasn’t a real roleplaying game. How could it be, when bluffing an ogre was a die roll, just like hitting him? Now you don’t have to role-play at all! Just roll the die! It’s as if it’s some sort of, I don’t know, ROLL-playing game!

Now 4th Edition is on the way, and we’ve seen a bunch of the combat mechanics, but none of the social mechanics. Some people have inexplicably decided this means that there aren’t any social mechanics, in spite of announcements to the contrary, and they’re back on the old-school complaint that everything in the game is designed for killing things and while it’s some sort of game, one perhaps involving rolls rather than roles, it certainly isn’t a roleplaying game.

However, the developers have said that there are going to be rules for social encounters, including experience points for them, and that the rules are going to have more depth than the equivalent rules in 3rd edition. And when they’re revealed, people will of course return to the other side of the teeter-totter and complain that by making social interactions governed by an in-depth set of mechanics, they’re just making social interactions another form of combat. These people will suggest pointedly that perhaps this so-called roleplaying game is actually something homophonic, but not at all identical.

My take is that the system is, at best, tertiary to roleplaying. The first and second factors, or perhaps second and first factors, are the gamemaster and players. The gamemaster can encourage roleplaying by creating situations where roleplaying can take place, and by making roleplaying count. But in the end you need players who want to roleplay. The guy who pulls out his best Scots accent for his dwarf would do that in any fantasy game, possibly including World of Warcraft. The person who’s just in it for the die rolls and the loot might be shoved into occasionally saying “I hereby proclaimate thy curse,” but it’s not going to make anyone happy.

Actually, I think one of the underlying difficulties in discussing the subject is that most people use “roleplaying” to mean “playing the way I want to play.” I’ve seen people seriously suggest that if the wizard isn’t much, much more powerful than the fighter, you’ve taken out the roleplaying. More common is the idea that fighting is never roleplaying, and talking always is. Some people equate roleplaying with accents, props, and candles. Some say that if characters don’t have a good mechanical chance of dying permanently, you’re not roleplaying. Others say that if they don’t have control of their characters’ destiny, they can’t roleplay. I could go on and on, the point is that even if there aren’t as many types of roleplaying as there are roleplayers, there are at least as many as there are roleplaying games.

9:25 am, March 4, 2008 3 Comments » Jesse said: (On March 4th, 2008 at 10:23 am) Gary Gygax has died. Raise your d20 and remember the original DM.

Stefan Jones said: (On March 4th, 2008 at 10:59 am) Lore, you should turn this into an essay. Maybe for the Escapist, or the WIRED site if they let you.

CortJstr said: (On March 4th, 2008 at 11:00 am) I saw this post right after reading the unconfirmed reports on Gygax. Weird. Eerie. I’m sort of hoping that Order of the Stick doesn’t something akin to Chris Onstad’s “Achewood Calling” when Joe Strummer died.