What Is Role-Playing?

Part 1: Identity

What is Roleplaying?
A Column by Jonathan Walton

Part 1: Identity

Have you ever wrung your hands in helplessness as you tried to explain roleplaying to a layperson and kept running into a wall of incomprehension? ...It is very hard to explain the essence of roleplaying to someone who is totally unfamiliar with it...


-- De Profundis (Oracz/Pica, 2001)

You hear opinions like this all the time. For some reason, there exists the general belief that roleplaying is hard to describe. It's complicated. It's something you have to experience for youself in order to understand. Granted, every so often, someone will put forward a definition of the activity, but it inevitably gets rejected by the rest of the community, each person responding that one part of the definition doesn't fit properly. So, in an effort to be true to everyone's personal roleplaying experiences, we often end up with no definition at all. Instead, we fill the hole with a kind of "wink wink, nudge nudge, say no more" understanding, one shared by experienced roleplayers but completely opaque to those outside the community.

What is a roleplaying game? If you're reading this book, you probably already know.


-- Fvlminata (Roberts/Miller, 1994)

What is roleplaying? An assumption. Most of the people who will buy this game are experienced gamers, so no effort will be made to explain the concept of roleplaying.


-- The Whispering Vault (Nystul, 1994)

This is the tactic that we have taken, over and over again. The inevitable "What is Roleplaying?" section at the beginning of game books has become redundant. Do people really decide to pick up a roleplaying text, without any background in the hobby, and invite their friends over to try it out? Sometimes, perhaps, but not often. Instead, roleplaying culture has learned to depend on a strong tradition of apprenticeship. You pass along the knowledge that was given to you (along with anything you've learned along the way) and train the next generation of roleplayers. Consequently, there's no need to articulate what roleplaying is or why we do it. Anyone involved in the hobby was midwifed into it by someone else, so explanatory texts are increasingly unnecessary.

If this is indeed the case, why bother to define roleplaying? Wouldn't it simply be an exercise in futility? Assuming you could even create a generally applicable definition, someone would eventually write a game that broke all the rules. The history of art illustrates this situation over and over again, with non-representational art, found art, and conceptual art all reacting against established understandings of what was and wasn't art. Perhaps, then, we should give up trying to articulate what we do and simply focus on designing and playing games. After all, that is the point. Right?

Some people get all tangled up in definitions of what is and isn't a roleplaying game. ...If you see anyone getting hot and bothered over this issue on the internet, be sure to mock them for us.


-- Pantheon (Laws, 2000)

Mock me. I think this is important.

Not the definition itself. Not coming up with a perfect, self-evident description of roleplaying. That's the grail-shaped beacon, a misguided illusion of something that doesn't really exist. Definitions are like the icons of Orthodox Christian traditions, assemblies of words that point at the actual truth of something, similar to how an icon points to the truth of a divine being like Christ, the Blessed Virgin, or the Archangel Michael. No one would ever dare to suggest that the icon itself was divine. That would be idolatry. However, we are often guilty of idolatrous definitions, confusing them with a reality that is inevitably too complex to express. Will any short definition ever describe all the various interactions that make up roleplaying? No, but that's not the purpose of definitions. That's making the icon into an idol.

So if we can't have a single succinct definition, what can we have? Multiple competing definitions? Certainly, but they are only "competing" when each tries to assert that it alone represents the Truth of roleplaying. If we agree from the beginning that no single description can cover all the intricacies of gaming, the multiple differing views don't compete at all. We can compare them all we want (and we certainly will, over the course of this column's run), but, at the end of the day, one is just as "true" as any other. A definition, under these auspices, is simply an articulated perspective on roleplaying. It can be focused or general, can describe one aspect of play or another, and we have seen a great many perspectives over the course of roleplaying's three centuries.

As a quick review, consider a few of perspectives that were popular at one time or another, the remnants of which can be seen everywhere you look:

Three Traditional Ways of Viewing Roleplaying

You vaguely know that a roleplaying game is a strange hybrid of strategy game and interactive storytelling, but aren't clear on the details.


-- The Dying Earth (Laws/Etc, 1992)

Roleplaying games are about interactive storytelling.


-- HERO System (McDonald/Etc, 1992)

The player is placed in the midst of an imaginary unknown or dangerous situation created by the referee and must work his way through it - surviving the process. This is the heart of roleplaying.


-- HackMaster (Blackburn/Etc, 2001)

Roleplaying is a confusing amalgamation. It emerged as kind of imaginative strategy wargame in the mid-70's, but later was adapted to support stronger narrative structures and extended play based less on numbers and more on personalities. The resulting hybrid can occasionally seem to be two-minds on certain issues. Nowadays, is it about strategy or storytelling? This perceived duality is partially responsible for the infamous "roll- vs. role-playing" dialectic, which still occasionally returns from the dead to fill bulletin boards with passionate posting. It's mostly a question of how to interpret the history of roleplaying and what it means for modern roleplayers. It's also a matter of developing tastes and community identity. People who are self-described "old school gamers" will probably say you can pry their dice, miniatures, and hexgrids out of their cold, dead hands. Other "progressive" gamers, including those from the rather different European community, are likely to see tabletop play and dice as relics of the past, useful occasionally, but not essential or even desired. Most of us fall between these two extremes and live with this duality (if it really exists) all the time.

Perspective #1 = Roleplaying is a mixture of strategy and storytelling.

Consider roleplaying as "Let's Pretend" with rules.


-- TORG (Gordon, 1990)

So what is a roleplaying game? ...a more mature version of the games of "Let's Pretend" that we all played as children.


-- All Flesh Must Be Eaten (Vasilakos/Etc, 1999)

Remember when you used to play "make believe" as a child? Roleplaying is a more adult way to play "make believe."


-- Chill (Ladyman, 1990)

Storytelling is a sophisticated way for adults to play make-believe. ...In order to prevent jaded adult imaginations from being bored quickly, the setting is much more intricate and complex than most people's childhood fantasies.


-- Exalted (Grabowski/Etc, 2001)

Dungeons & Dragons (1974) was firmly fixed in the world of wargaming. By the time Call of Cthulhu (1981) went on sale, roleplaying had already distanced itself from its roots. And by the 90's, there was more of an effort to take roleplaying out of the box of strategy games and connect it with ordinary social activities, especially the games we reminisce about from our childhood. Despite the fact that not everyone actually played "make believe," the idea immediately caught on. Roleplaying was described as something so natural, so innocent, and so fanciful that children did it all the time without even knowing why. The bomb, of course, was eventually dropped by Vampire: The Masquerade (1991), which replaced all references to roleplaying with "storytelling," attempting to distinguish itself from everything that had come before. As with calling on "Let's Pretend," appropriating the word "storytelling" emphasized the natural, instinctive nature of roleplaying, connecting it with the rich tradition that has existed in every culture throughout time.

Perspective #2 = Roleplaying is a natural expression of the human imagination.

...the primary goal of RPG theory should be to enhance communication among RPG players, critics, and designers. Too often, gamers find it impossible to discuss how games really work. If someone asks for advice on a specific problem of his game, she gets five contradictory answers on how to solve it. Discussion becomes mired in assumptions of a particular system, or paralyzed by stating only obvious generalities.


-- The Purpose of RPG Theory (Kim, 2003)

When a person engages in role-playing, or prepares to do so, he or she relies on imagining and utilizing the following: Character, System, Setting, Situation, and Color.


-- GNS and Other Matters of Roleplaying (Edwards, 2001)

Along the way, theorists within the community began considering roleplaying in ways that hadn't been done before. If roleplaying was a form of narrative just like theater or literature, could it be analyzed as such? In recent years, supported by the rise of the internet and the ease of communications, theory has been the big dog of roleplaying. While applying logical analysis to an art form is nothing new (Aristotle was doing it 2300 years ago in the Poetics), theory began to have a huge effect on not just how people thought about games, but how designers went about creating games in the first place. There had always been individuals or groups who created game systems based on their own experiences and theories, but, now, a collectively-generated body of roleplaying theory began to grow, first among friendly groups of designers and then through newsgroups, mailing lists, and bulletin boards. Theories of Aristotelian complexity emerged, often requiring extensive familiarity with increasingly obscure terminology, but containing great insights for those willing to put in the effort to understand them. At least, that's what they claim...

Perspective #3 = Roleplaying seems to be X, based on my careful analysis.

What's Next?

So what do these all tell us? As much as we want them to. After all, they are merely perspectives through which we can examine this activity that we all share. However, while we'll definitely touch on these three viewpoints in this column, our main purpose will be to try out less commonly practiced perspectives, putting on new glasses and looking at things from a different point of view. In case it isn't obvious yet, my personal belief is that there's no single "best" way to look at roleplaying. In the end, you'll have to come to your own conclusions, based on what we've discussed here and your own experiences and thoughts.

Next time, we're going to tackle... The Purpose of Roleplaying.

See ya then.
Jonathan