(This is a based on an earlier draft entry. I thought it'd be better to repost with edits than to edit the original.)

This goal of this post isn't to define RPGs. Rather it's to provide a categorical survey of defining characteristics, as suggested by various observers.

First note that all games except a very few have elements of freeform, and even those that don't still have a fiction; otherwise, they are merely (virtual) kinetic art. (By the first I mean, very few games tell you precisely what to do at every step. Chutes and Ladders does. Chess and Monopoly do not. By the second I mean that the game proposes a set of meanings--often the concept of "winning and losing"--that have no real impact outside the game.)

So what is an RPG? What distinguishes it from other games? Markus Montola has proposed some criteria for roleplaying. An earlier discussion on rec.games.frp.advocacy also comes to mind.

Lea Crowe wrote:

Specifically, I think, a wargame does not concern itself with "literary" issues: character, plot, mood, etc. In a wargame, the action is all. [1]

This may be a side point, but in the majority of (modern) wargames, action is delimited by the rules, rather than merely being guided by them. For example, you can only use the tactics of spying, seduction and assassination if there are rules for them -- you can't just come up with a "spy" unit, any more than you can arrange a Mafia hit on someone in Monopoly. [2]

Lea's first paragraph refers what I'll dub the thematic or aesthetic criterion. It's been a problem for RPGs for a long time. Arguably this criterion underlies GNS (in the sense that aesthetic goals are what GNS is about instead of formalism and procedures). It's also related to some of Markus Montola's criteria.

The second paragraph is the freeform procedure criterion. I think this is a weak criterion for RPGs but it's advanced frequently. Essentially it's the criterion which says that the vision of the world overrides formal rules, or rather the vision of the world and how it can be acted on by the players cannot be encapsulated in formal rules.

In response to Lea, I added:

--Wargames generally have unambiguously defined "victory conditions" as part of the rules. RPG's generally don't. [3]

--Wargames have well-defined conditions for when the game ends. RPG's generally don't. [4]

The third criterion, which I proposed, is the motivational criterion. The claim here is that RPGs do not provide clearcut purpose, within the game, to guide player "moves". Consider: tennis, within the game, is motivated by scoring points and winning the game/set/match. (The goal of winning the match might conceivably override the goal of winning the game. As e.g. if you make shots which your opponent can score on provided he or she exhausts herself. But there is a unitary goal guiding your strategy, tactics, and technique/skill.) Outside the game, tennis may be guided by things like trying to impress someone on the sidelines or not making your boss look bad. But the goal is in the fiction of the game and the metagame goals are achieved via the game fiction.

By this criterion, an RPG explicitly does not have a formal goal in the fiction. I think this is an essential criterion, but it is sometimes excluded (generally only provided freeform criterion is satisfied; otherwise you have a closed system that becomes boardgame-like).

The fourth criterion, above, is the endgame criterion, but I think it's been basically disproved. At most it's a special case of the third criterion. Nevertheless it's still expected by many that RPGs will either go on indefinitely, or end only when some non-formal condition is reached, such as general agreement that all the "story arcs" have been played out.

[The rest of this post remains highly sketchy. Sorry.]

Now compare: pictionary, charades, the imagine-a-journey game, etc.

added: note that I don't use the word role above. So let's read what Jonas Dagar has to say about "not an RPG" and Wittgenstein. I find it very exceedingly useful to imagine that "these games" are not being called "RPGs" or even "storytelling games". These terms imply motivation and may (1) constrict play and (2) give a designer an excuse not to really explain their game. Charades doesn't have that problem. Nor does Werewolf. So what are "these games"?

Also look at this rpg.net thread about Capes.

This is prompted by a current thread at theRPGsite, where I took Levi to task for bringing up "Lumpley Principle"-esque definitions.

Anyway, I'm going to make my own set of definitions, not as a bid to impose them on the rest of the world, nor as an attempt to "interpret" the essential meanings of terms as used in Forge/Story-Games circles. These definitions may be influenced by earlier ones but they're completely de novo. Also, they're just a stepping stone to talking about the underlying concepts as they relate to design and play, in less jargonistic fashion.

Here goes.

System: the formal rules governing the distribution of authority in an RPG, and the transformation of participant declarations into game-world "facts". Systems are concerned with explicit rights and procedures.

Paradigm or ethos: a collection of common or mutually-complementary understandings regarding the responsibilities of the participants and the purpose of play.

Even these definitions aren't so important in their particulars as they allow us to talk about these things separately in design and play. In design, they're fully distinguishable. A rule that says, "The GM may not declare a conflict without the agreement of the players" is formally the same as "the players may veto any conflict proposed by the GM". Both are part of the system. A "rule" that says "The GM should avoid killing player-characters unless they do something stupid" isn't a part of the system, because it doesn't formally address rights or procedures: it doesn't alter the fact that, presumably, the GM has ultimate say over life & death, or at least the right to over-rule the results of other procedures in the system. But it is an attempt to impart or explain a paradigm or ethos.

As a bit of an aside, an explicit paradigm or ethos may or may not be necessary. As I've argued in the past, many games do have a paradigm that guides play even though we tend not to be aware of it. Namely: winning and losing, concepts that are seemingly meaningless outside the "game-space", but which we allow ourselves to care about. The only exceptions to this are activities such as gambling and professional sports, which do have extrinsic outputs that clearly intrude on "real life". But most of the games we play are not of this nature.

Still other games operate on sub-cultural paradigms that barely need explaining to the initiated--and, in any case, can't be fully explained any more than other cultural activities, whose "purposes" and "language" are diverse, and constantly being transformed through use. For example, "going to a club to see a show" has so many possible functions, each understood in varying degrees by different subsets of the club attendees, that one ought to resort to a meta-paradigm of sociality, the idea of a "scene", if one wants to capture the "aboutness" of the activity. (I've never played a LARP, but I'm pretty sure this idea will ring a bell to those who have.) I think it's undeniable that tabletop can have the same quality. In fact most interactions between humans have this quality, but RPGs are one of those activities that can thrive on it. Furthermore there's a wide range between "using an RPG as a general excuse to hang out with friends" and "using an RPG as the focus for a particular mode of socializing". Even if one did seek a method to group the varies "modes" into categories, that would not in itself allow us to directly impart a specific mode.

Finally, some people wish to assert that certain paradigms are "natural" and don't need to be taught. Personally I think this is more likely to be true of "playing pretend" than various varieties of "telling a story", but that's neither here or there: I'm just including this possibility for the sake of completeness. If you can believe that dogs instinctively communicate with barks, growls, and whines--even if they've been separated from "dog culture" since weaning--then maybe it's possible that significant portions of human culture, or its "substrate", are innate and do not need to be taught.

Let's return from the digression. As I said, the distinction between system and paradigm as I define them is absolutely clear when it comes to the designer's job and the rules text itself. A system may be incomplete--for example, it may describe how to resolve combat, without instructing you how to tell if combat occurs: can anyone declare that it's started, or only the GM, or is there some set of objective conditions which automatically triggers combat? But that doesn't stop it from being a system. Implicitly the holes will have to be filled by a paradigm, such as "the group decides collectively based on common sense".

However, once we move to actual play, the system may or may not survive, but the paradigm goes through a complete transformation. It is no longer text, but action, and the difficulties I alluded to with regard to transmission of paradigms now applies much more widely (to virtually all RPGs, if not to all games), regardless of whether the designer made an effort in the "rules text" to impart a paradigm.

The importance of this observation can be seen by briefly returning to the concept of "System" that I've previously dubbed "LP maximalism". Under this concept, it's commonly been noted (usually as an epiphany) that "systemless" or "freeform" RPGs have infinitely complex "Systems" (LP sense) rather than simple ones. But the nature of paradigms in actual play reveals that this is a completely banal assertion: all RPGs work by means of, through, and indeed upon the paradigm, the web of social interactions and understandings, that guide play. A "systemless" game is only "complex" if it requires a drastic shift on the part of the observer: otherwise it's easy as pie.

Conversely, no matter how much or how little system (my sense) a game has, there are very few ways to avoid the complexity of social interaction. One is to sew up as much as possible under formal procedure, or to fall back on very well-worn paradigms like "win/lose". Either way, you impinge on the quality that distinguishes an RPG from a board game. (The effect varies from group to group: if you strongly buy into the notion that "you aren't really playing the game if you never roll the dice", to the point that you're always trying to hammer on the mechanics, then you're more likely to fall into this trap than if you take a light system as an invitation to apply it only when necessary, on top of your largely-freeform style of play. Viz.) Finally, you can pretend the complexity isn't there, either by appealing to naturalism (see "Brain Damage") or by culture-formation and identification.

See also Jim Henley's recent post about the different perspectives on rules, with a dash of polemic from Malcolm Sheppard (eyebeams) in the comments.

Ah, almost forgot: the next step should be to take all this and translate it back into English.

http://theminiaturespage.com/boards/msg.mv?id=136167

Note rmaker's post. I don't know what sources it's based on.

I've gotten a little encouragement to post more often, not sure I'll actually do so but I do have a couple of "meaty" topics in my head that I'd like to post about either here or on a forum. So these are just notes toward more expansive treatments.

1. Exogenous vs. endogenous fun in mechanics

Noting that what everyone nowadays sees as the "core" of D&D's mechanics, i.e., the hit tables and hit dice, was originally just something slotted in to replace Chainmail. And Chainmail was also just grabbed off the shelf by Arneson to fill a fairly small role in his Blackmoor game--the point of impact in combat. The full game (including OD&D) was actually one of exploration, puzzle solving, characterization, spells, mysteries, etc. blah blah blah. The combat rules by themselves were really pretty pathetic, not a very fun game, but they filled a necessary role and yielded output that enriched the game as a whole. This is exogenous fun.

Compare the combat mechanics in The Fantasy Trip, or (very likely) D&D 3.x and up: here the combat rules are inherently fun, a minigame. In fact TFT started as a couple of arena combat games. In games that swing this way, the module/campaign is in a way an adjunct to the central mechanic--it provides an excuse or framing mechanism for generating scenarios or skirmishes or what-have-you, and enhances it by adding some stakes to the outcomes. This is endogenous fun.

It may be worth constructing a third category, essentially encompassing the pure stakes+narration-trading style of many new games, where the core mechanic is neither inherently fun nor particularly "productive"--it doesn't by itself generate stuff to play around with, instead it just arbitrates between options proposed by the players. Personally I don't care for this style but it seems to exist, apparently has its fans, and I believe it's worth distinguishing from the other two. But perhaps you can see that I'm struggling to describe exactly how, and what it does.

2. Getting beyond System Doesn't Matter and System Does Matter

Really, the whole thing is silly, these are presented by the naive in maximalist fashion, and it's a mistake to take them seriously. What should be done is to examine a little more how system matters; this is related to point 1 above, and is nicely shown up by arguments over what people are concerned about with D&D 4e. There are issues both of formal mechanics, dress (i.e., hype), and informal guidelines. There's also a historical dimension here as it seems with many games there's been a natural progression from system mastery to transcending system--and I wonder why that can't happen with 4e.

3. Finally, why houseruling isn't the same as creating a new game--the point I made which generated the abovementioned encouragement. This is really a return to Chris Lehrich's talk about bricolage but it may need to be said again in a new way with different emphases.

People who are betting real money on the election appear to believe that Obama has a better chance than Hillary in the general election against McCain.

Note that movement in pricing for Hillary and Obama is inversely related--not surprising given that it's a two-person race. However, the betting also shows that Hillary's fortunes are positively correlated with McCain's, while Obama's are inversely correlated with McCain's. I.e., the more likely it is that Obama wins the Democratic nomination, the more likely it is that the Democrats will win in November--or so say the punters.

(Yes, the horizontal scales are off a bit, and the vertical scales are all different, but fixing them won't change anything. Obama up, McCain down.)

You might also want to look at this:



It shows the ongoing pricing for McCain to win the Republican nomination. While some of the movement in McCain's general election prospects is due to some weekend jitters over Huckabee, the Democratic nomination outcome seems to be the major influence.

This shows the trading in the overall Republican chances. Again, it seems to be correlated with the Democratic race, with only a hickup due to Huckabee over the weekend.

Continuing a strain of research from my previous entry, I just came across another account of early pre-D&D roleplaying. Someone had pointed to this in a comment over on Rob MacDougal's site (down page here) but I'd overlooked it. What do we have? An account of the first "dungeon" adventure run by Dave Arneson, as told by one of the players, Greg Svenson. Another slightly different version can be found here. While similar to other accounts, in that it follows the story of how he ran a dungeon as a break from playing Napoleonics wargames, there's a tantalizing tidbit.

So, as a diversion for the group, one weekend Dave set up Blackmoor instead of Napoleonics on his ping pong table. The rules we used were based on "Chainmail", which is a set of medieval miniature rules with a fantasy supplement allowing for magic and various beings found in the "Lord of the Rings". I had never played any games like it before, although I had read "Lord of the Rings". Other members of the group had played the game before, but always doing adventures in and around the town of Blackmoor. By the end of the weekend I had fallen in love with the game.

On this particular weekend, Dave tried a new wrinkle for the game. He had been working all week to prepare a map of tunnels and catacombs under the town and especially under the castle.

(Emphasis mine.)

So before that first dungeon expedition, people were already playing fantasy adventures, presumably with 1 player = 1 character (or close to it)?

This bears additional digging, including looking up the other people whom Greg Svenson mentions as participants.

This is a followup on my earlier notes on Braunstein and the roots of RPGs.

I had some sour comments about Rob MacDougal's article over at theRPGsite.

One thing that Rob probably gets wrong, and certainly doesn't demonstrate adequately, is the "specialness" of Totten in the RPG lineage. I.e., there's nothing there which shows Totten was much different from any other teacher of Kriegsspiel concepts, either "free" or "rigid". He may have been the first American to bring them over from the Prussians, and he may have been the direct source for other American military wargame developers (such as Farrand Sayre), but Rob doesn't make the case. Instead he talks up Totten's eccentricities and connects them tenuously to modern geek personality traits. In the process, the nature of the "referee" in wargaming--in terms of responsibilities and prerogatives--is relegated to a side-note that obscures both the nature of the game and the radical changes (in responsibilities and prerogatives) that only occurred after D&D hit a mass audience.

So in regard to the role of Totten in Kriegsspiel development and transmission, it was interesting to find this article.

In the United States, Army Major William R. Livermore introduced his The American Kriegsspiel, A Game for Practicing the Art of War on a Topographical Map in 1882. The game was complex and similar to Reisswitz' system, but did attempt to cut down on the paperwork involved by the introduction of several training aid type devices. At the same time Lieutenant Charles A. L. Totten introduced a game entitled Strategos: A Series of American Games of War. Totten's game was as complex as Livermore's, but he appealed to the amateur through the inclusion of a simplified, basic set of rules.

Neither was wargaming neglected by the US Navy, thanks to the efforts of William McCarty Little. [Goes on to talk about the development of wargaming at the Naval War College up to the turn of the century.]

Regarding Livermore, you can find more on Google by searching on his last name along with "Kriegsspiel". Perhaps most interesting is an overview of the history of American wargaming which he delivered in his own words at M.I.T. circa 1889.

BTW, I don't know what source gave Rob a date of 1871 for Totten's original publication; everywhere I look, including both antiquarian booksellers and university libraries, I see a date of 1880.

The message here is that while Weseley happened to use Totten as his vector for transmission of Kriegsspiel methods into a hobby context, I do not see anything to particularly distinguish Totten from Reisswitz or Livermore in terms of the nature of the game he developed, and thus Totten's personal eccentricities have, in my opinion, little bearing on the intellectual lineage of the practices that eventually produced RPGs. What should be emphasized, instead, is the nature of the referee or "umpire" who ran both the military games and Weseley's. In Livermore's words:

When the position of the blocks indicate that the hostile troops are within sight and range of each other, they are supposed to open fire, if the players desire it, and in this case it becomes the umpire's duty to decide the result upon the basis of experience. The rules of the game explain to him how to estimate the loss from this fire [...] Since the time of Von Reisswitz the game has been much modified ; and the different forms which it has assumed may be classeed in three groups. [...]

The third form is employed when an officer of much experience can be found to take the position of umpire ; one who from long familiarity with the Minor Kriegsspiel [the second type, essentially, a detailed skirmish wargame with rigid rules], and from practice in leading troops in action, can form a correct judgment of the possibility or results of any movement, without the necessity of making any calculations or referring to any rules.

In other words, the role of the umpire was to act as an "expert simulation" by guesstimating results from the interaction of the players' initiatives. To a wargamer this is probably obvious, but in the RPG context it seems it must be emphasized: the innovation of the umpire or referee was not that he could tell a story, but that he could substitute for complex rules in representing an external reality against and through which the players would act.

Why is this depiction of the Battle of Agincourt (which I referenced under my previous post) "S&S" (to me)?

To begin with, there's the hunched, hulking, almost dripping quality of the way human figures are drawn. Beyond that, there's no beauty in a conventional sense: the most handsome face is that of Henry V in the first panel we see him, but he becomes grotesque in the next panel, as he orders his archers to fire. Next is the delight in violence, but not just violence: the horror of violence (this isn't Batman knocking out a few crooks) and a (masochistic?) focus on death, including a view of death from the perspective of the about-to-be-killed. This isn't the uplifting victory of Shakespeare & Branagh, it's a "massacre". A further element, consistent with the way that S&S combines horror with fantasy, is that the person whose death is depicted in seat-squirming detail is the protagonist through much of the story--but not a very likeable one; like the "bad teens" who die early in a splatter flick, he gets his because he's both morally defective and arrogantly incautious.

Maybe there's more...but batteries are low on this notebook and it's late, so...

I honestly believe the title of this post. Way, way back when I first encountered D&D (white box edition), I wanted to try to edit it into a perfect representation of Middle Earth. No campaign developed from that. Instead, as I played and thought about the game, working on a setting, I realized that the basic idea of characters as adventurers trying to improve their lot in the face of a dangerous world was more Old West than Tolkien, and I embraced that. And really, Old West is only a short jump away from S&S.

Now I'm wondering (but only wondering) if efforts to impose story on the basic paradigm necessarily means either

(a) Epic via GM-led plotting
(b) Epic via Anti-immersive player empowerment via metagame
(c) Sturm und drang via focus on character "issues"

Eh, whatever.

The main reason for this post is really to link to two threads from theRPGsite and Dragonsfoot:

Sword & Sorcery in a Nutshell
Swords & Sensibility: the evolution of tone in D&D

I think it will be good read & reread them as inspiration, guidance, and corrective to both romanticized tropes and anti-immersive/disempowering setting and design.

For example, I'm realizing that a key to good setting design is: there are no good guys. In fact, most everyone is a bad guy. If you design a kingdom or empire, the dominant social system, government, and rulership should be neutral at best. Societal norms should offend modern sensibilities (e.g., slavery). If you make up an NPC, always remember Jeff Rients's dictum: Your NPCs suck and they are all going to die.

I'm taking a break from participation in RPG forums; however I've indulged in reading theRPGsite over the past couple days. I've especialy enjoyed threads on Gonzo Gaming and Notes towards a critique of embedded themes in Forge narrativist games (which are ongoing).

But what I want to write about here, very briefly, goes back to an old thread entitled The need for Conflict Resolution?, which I still think is one of the clearest discussions of the topic if not definitive.

Nevertheless I think I got something wrong in that thread, here, where I wrote,

A[n] example [of a player's intentions being achieved without working through the character's actions] would be something like a character sneaking around the enemy camp, tasting the enemy captain's dinner, mistakenly pouring alum instead of salt onto the potatoes before running away to avoid a guard, and unintentionally causing an argument that results in the cook killing the captain.

To achieve something like this, either the GM has to exercise "narrative control" or the player does--there's basically no way to go from the character's intentions, whatever they were, as expressed via the tasks attempted/performed, to the outcome.

Basically, the bolded part is wrong. Nobody needs to "exercise narrative control". E.g., the shelf of ingredients/chemicals could have been prepared in advance by the GM (or via a random table); the character could have failed a roll to accurately choose/identify the vial of "salt"; the guard's appearance could have been via a random "encounter check" or a chart of the guard's patrol. The captain's reaction could be reasonably extrapolated, possibly based on a personality sketch; ditto for the cook. Reaction rolls & combat rolls could take care of the rest. There may be a stretch or two there but the point is that nobody has to take responsibility for whether the player's intentions are realized. There's no need for "intentions-based resolution". No need for "fiat". Basically the whole thing can be produced through subordination to the fiction in terms of rules & a common understanding of the fictional reality.

Hmm. "common understanding" is really the most problematic issue here. As clashes are possible.

But even if the GM has a different understanding from the player, that isn't the same as the GM imposing an outcome via "fiat". We're talking about disposition of responsibility as well as authority here, and as long as the GM is understood by all to be subject to the fictional reality, we have a very different situation from the GM who endeavors to "tell a story" in terms of selecting and/or resolving conflicts.