Jan 9·edited Jan 9Liked by The Scholarch Sorcerous
A good read and I thank you for the shout-out. To put a finer point on it, my argument is two-fold:
1. The term “tabletop role-playing game” is a very broad canopy under which a wide variety of games have evolved over the course of the last fifty years or so, each of which caters to different tastes that have developed and different desires to be met.
2. Trying to redefine the term role-playing game to exclude some evolutionary branch of that particular tree is kinda pointless.
The TL;DR of the latter being that even if you could come up with a really good definition that promoted one’s own preferences while excluding the Other, you aren’t actually accomplishing anything useful. The Other will continue calling their preferred games Role-Playing Games and they aren’t liable to stop on the basis that someone revised a definition they won’t agree with. If anything, the most likely response is a counter-revision in order to promote their preferences in exclusion of your own. Case in point, that’s basically how we got here in the first place.
There is no version of this conversation in which someone finds a precise combination of terminology to present and the folks playing (Apocalypse World, or Fate, or Blades in the Dark, or whatever the argued Not Real Role-Playing Game of the week is) go ‘Oh. You’re right. I now see the error of my ways.” The people who are into those games will continue to be into those games and the attempts to redefine their preferred games out of being role-playing games is ultimately just going to be perceived as trying to gatekeep those people from discussions on the hobby.
This is why the OSR conversations are so much more productive, by comparison. The OSR created a new positive definition and identity for itself that did not require anyone else to change their own identities by comparison. No one had to change their minds about their own preferred games for OSR to exist as its own independent entity in the way that trying to change the definition of “role-playing game” does. The most useful thing for discourse in the hobby is for more play styles to be positively defined so people can pursue the things they want, rather than arguing about the things they don’t.
That said, I also didn’t disagree with anything you posted in your article. The four proposed promises seem fair, in my estimation and I don’t see them as a contradiction to anything I’ve written so far, at least not in the spirit I intended it.
The point I would be interested in is the very last bit you mention:
“The problem is that much of the gameplay style and behaviours of such games are closer to the attraction of board games or creative writing circles than traditional roleplaying games.”
I hear people say these sorts of things, but I’m never actually sure what they are referring to. Perhaps that’s a discussion for another day?
Regards,
Brooks
PS: I admire your footnote strategy and will absolutely be stealing it for future writings. Lord knows I need all the help I can get, putting my thoughts in order.
I appreciated your post, even if it did not exactly align with my thinking.
My response would be:
1. "Tabletop roleplaying game" is far too broad a definitional umbrella for the reasons you have listed. It is a cumbersome term that covers about half a dozen styles of game and is held together for reasons of diplomacy rather than conceptual cohesion.
2. I do agree that it is somewhat pointless for the reasons you list.
I do think it is ironic that narrative games explicitly evolved from a philosophy that claimed non-narrative games were second rate role-playing games, and they are the largest contingent that gets very upset at people trying to put genre thresholds in place.
I would like to see a forward facing "second world" movement. (It definitely needs a reasonable acronym.) I think that would be very interesting overall, and likely deliver on a lot of the promise that exists within the tabletop realm. ruleofthule writes on it a bit more here:
On gameplay style and behaviours, where would you stay the defining line between a board-game and a tabletop roleplaying game actually is? Similarly, where is the defining line between a creative writing circle and a traditional roleplaying game?
There clearly exists one, otherwise we could not define them mentally. I do not wish to overly prescribe it for fear of having Plato's man on my hands, but there is something there that makes them fall onto one side or the other.
I had one response written and managed to run afoul of an undisclosed word count limit for the comment section. Go figure.
> Please type a shorter comment.
I will wear this like a badge of honor.
Instead, I am going to post this in two comments and hope that the thing ends up displaying them correctly. This is the first:
> I do think it is ironic that narrative games explicitly evolved from a philosophy that claimed non-narrative games were second rate role-playing games, and they are the largest contingent that gets very upset at people trying to put genre thresholds in place.
I disagree with this comment for roughly three different reasons, all of which seem to grow out of an unfortunate kind of tribalism that has emerged in the hobby.
The first implicit claim is that there was ever a single philosophy from which narrative games emerged. That’s a kind of ideological unity that never existed. When the Forge et al was really humming, the sole truly unifying thread was massive experimentation. It was an attempt to analyze everything and deconstruct it to the base parts and then see in how many ways they could be reassembled and still be functional. There were a lot of terrible, unplayable things that came out of this, and a handful of really interesting ones… but that’s how experiments work. Failures always outnumber successes. That’s how you learn.
To that end, there were very few points upon which the indie community had anything approaching universal consensus. Most of that involved some basic methodology and shared vocabulary. Most of this was just to facilitate common grounds upon which they could argue with each other. Ron Edwards et al has a huge place of prominence whenever people talk about the Forge and related communities, but there is almost nothing that ol’ dude proposed that wasn’t controversial with some section of that community. Even ideas like The Big Model/GNS weren’t universally accepted even within the Forge.
The idea that any of these things were a unified monolith is something that can only be read into it after the fact. The reality was much closer to the state of OSR in the mid/early 2010s. There was some broad, vague idea of what should be OSR, and some very specific points of general agreement, but outside of those if you asked 10 different people you’d get 10 different answers. The indie/narrative crowd was even worse because they didn’t even share a unified explicit goal in any way other than “make better games.”
That brings us to the second point I’d disagree with. Even if we could take those few general points of agreement and argue that to be the philosophy in question, it wouldn’t make the claim you’re assuming. One of the core conceits that was agreed upon was the (I’d argue, self-evident) notion that no game can be successful being all things to all people. Thus, to make better games, you have to design them for a specific purpose. This is where so many games from that camp get hung up on play-style in a way that is sort of unique in the world of TTRPGs — or, at least, was, until the OSR came to be and embraced the same concept but towards a different creative agenda.
In this context, a claim like “narrative games are superior” or “non-narrative games are inferior’” is malformed. It’s a bit like asking which is better: a hammer or a screwdriver? It’s a nonsensical question until you add the context of “for what?” Games competently designed explicitly to support certain kinds of narrative are almost certainly better at delivering experiences focused on creating those kinds of narrative than games that were not designed with that intent. That does not inherently make them universally better games than a game designed to do something else. “Non-narrative games are second rate role-playing games” does not gel with one of the few points of philosophy which actually were commonly held.
That said, there are definitely people who argued “my subjective preference is objectively superior,” but we can say that about basically any preference anyone has about anything because there are always people making dumb claims of the sort. I hear prominent OSR folks make the same arguments about their preferences, too. It’s silly regardless of who does it, but that is the unfortunate nature of humans, particularly those with internet.
That brings us to the final point in this line: the idea of a “they” as a contingent in the first place is the same error as assuming a single philosophy existed. There were absolutely people who got all born-again enthusiastic about the thing and thus conducted themselves like twerps. There were absolutely purists like Ron Edwards and John Wick who turned around and argued their preferences like they were wisdom received from on high. There were also many, many people who took part in those communities and engaged with those ideas and yet still thought the aforementioned folks were silly. There were plenty of people even within the broadest definition of “those communities” who rolled their eyes at the self-adulation, purity spirals, and arguments about badwrongfun. This is, in point of fact, why the Forge spawned some offshoots like the story-games forums.
It’s also silly to assume that any significant portion of “they” were in any way separate from the broader TTRPG community and that their interests didn’t massively overlap with everything else. Case in point, I first heard about the OSR as a concept on said story games forums where there was an entire series of conversations about rpg archeology, experimentation on the design formula and play styles, yada yada.
This is then even further muddied because all of this was 15+ years ago. The “they” now is not even the “they” then. The most common examples of “story game not roleplaying game” I see now argued now points to games like Apocalypse World, or Blades in the Dark, both of which are actually far more traditional than a lot of forge nonsense -and- both of which were published after the Forge closed its doors and whatever community had existed scattered to the winds. A huge number of people who have embraced those kinds of games now were in diapers when the Forge was at its peak.
Imagine trying to have a conversation with someone today about political philosophy and they come at it from the position that all US citizens today are a single monolithic bloc defined by a complete support for all personal, philosophical, and political positions taken by George W Bush on the basis he was elected president. That’s not even close to an accurate read of the political opinions of the people at the time he was elected, much less a thing that you can assume about people today, a full-ass generation later, in a time when the political realities are very different and the actual population is different.
And I can promise you, Ron Edwards failed to achieve even that much consensus.
[As they did not display in the correct order, Part 2]
As for the questions:
> Where would you stay the defining line between a board-game and a tabletop roleplaying game actually is? Similarly, where is the defining line between a creative writing circle and a traditional roleplaying game?
I take the relatively broad position that role-playing games are generally defined by the following points:
1. A system of rules that structure play and facilitate interactions with a fictional world, particularly in regards to resolving conflicts between players. E.g., rules are the difference between playing cops & robbers on the playground and playing an actual game.
2. The assumption of a fictional layer to play such that events form a shared, ongoing narrative. E.g., going into a dungeon and stealing some treasure requires an interaction with a fictional layer above and beyond just reading the numbers on your sheet. The events that transpire form a shared, ongoing narrative about what happened. Contrast with tic tac toe, which has rules for how to play, but does not require forming a shared narrative.
3. An asymmetrical relationship between players, wherein most will take on the role of a single (or sometimes, several) characters and interact with the fictional world through those characters, as those characters. One specific player will take on the role of GM/DM/Whatever and be in charge of both running the game and playing all of the other parts in said fictional world.
4. “Open-ended” play based on the fictional circumstances, which is to say that the players can attempt to do whatever it is they can come up with that makes sense within the shared fictional space. They are not limited to specific prescribed options from which they must choose in the manner of, say, a choose your own adventure book or a computer game.
That list should be fairly uncontroversial. Beyond that, it gets grey and fuzzy and you start getting exceptions creeping in.
The space between “Creative writing circle” and “traditional role-playing game” is an odd one to argue because you fall out of one into the other pretty quickly with the above. Technically, fiction-writing can fulfill 2 and 4, but the moment you go from “I control all things as the narrator” to “I am controlling my character alone” or “I am controlling a world in response to inputs from other players” we’ve moved from creative writing to role-playing by definition. This is what a ton of ye olden chatroom RP was back in the AOL or yahoo chatroom days. The line between this and “role-playing game” is the point at which you introduce a system of actual rules to it.
The space between board game and role-playing game is actually a lot more muddy, to my mind. In theory, the primary differences between the two are points 3 and 4. Most board games fail some or all of 3, as few require a GM -or- require you to in any way inhabit the character. Nearly all board games, by definition, fail 4. The open-ended quality is the biggest piece of what separates TTRPGs from board games.
It’s actually much easier for me to find places where the ttrpg/board game line gets weird. A piece of low-hanging fruit would be to point at 4e, wherein the action economy, movement rules, etc all played very much like a tactical fantasy board game. Play felt nowhere near as open, RAW, as in previous editions. Early demos run by Chris Perkins didn’t help this, as the videos I watched of people playing 4e were almost universally ones in which the entire session of play took place on a single board and the entire session was conducted in combat rounds, with PCs moving their minis in numbers of squares. But even then, I don’t think it’s fair to actually argue that 4e is a board game because plenty of people ran it in the way they ran every other D&D edition, largely eschewing many of the cumbersome mechanics until time for combat.
My real question to you is: where do you think these things overlap? What are examples of games you think blur the lines between “creative writing exercise” and ttrpg? Or board game and “ttrpg?” My initial comment on the subject was due to the fact that I often hear people make allegations about “story games” “Story-telling games” and so on being No True Role-Playing Game but instead creative writing exercises, improv theater, or whatever else — but those arguments very rarely point at a specific example of a story/telling/game and make an argument for where and why that is the case. Instead, they try to treat the entire concept like a unified class and then argue against the class itself. This is ultimately why my instinct was to dive into taxonomy. It was an attempt to get more specific about what we are talking about in the first place.
A good read and I thank you for the shout-out. To put a finer point on it, my argument is two-fold:
1. The term “tabletop role-playing game” is a very broad canopy under which a wide variety of games have evolved over the course of the last fifty years or so, each of which caters to different tastes that have developed and different desires to be met.
2. Trying to redefine the term role-playing game to exclude some evolutionary branch of that particular tree is kinda pointless.
The TL;DR of the latter being that even if you could come up with a really good definition that promoted one’s own preferences while excluding the Other, you aren’t actually accomplishing anything useful. The Other will continue calling their preferred games Role-Playing Games and they aren’t liable to stop on the basis that someone revised a definition they won’t agree with. If anything, the most likely response is a counter-revision in order to promote their preferences in exclusion of your own. Case in point, that’s basically how we got here in the first place.
There is no version of this conversation in which someone finds a precise combination of terminology to present and the folks playing (Apocalypse World, or Fate, or Blades in the Dark, or whatever the argued Not Real Role-Playing Game of the week is) go ‘Oh. You’re right. I now see the error of my ways.” The people who are into those games will continue to be into those games and the attempts to redefine their preferred games out of being role-playing games is ultimately just going to be perceived as trying to gatekeep those people from discussions on the hobby.
This is why the OSR conversations are so much more productive, by comparison. The OSR created a new positive definition and identity for itself that did not require anyone else to change their own identities by comparison. No one had to change their minds about their own preferred games for OSR to exist as its own independent entity in the way that trying to change the definition of “role-playing game” does. The most useful thing for discourse in the hobby is for more play styles to be positively defined so people can pursue the things they want, rather than arguing about the things they don’t.
That said, I also didn’t disagree with anything you posted in your article. The four proposed promises seem fair, in my estimation and I don’t see them as a contradiction to anything I’ve written so far, at least not in the spirit I intended it.
The point I would be interested in is the very last bit you mention:
“The problem is that much of the gameplay style and behaviours of such games are closer to the attraction of board games or creative writing circles than traditional roleplaying games.”
I hear people say these sorts of things, but I’m never actually sure what they are referring to. Perhaps that’s a discussion for another day?
Regards,
Brooks
PS: I admire your footnote strategy and will absolutely be stealing it for future writings. Lord knows I need all the help I can get, putting my thoughts in order.
I appreciated your post, even if it did not exactly align with my thinking.
My response would be:
1. "Tabletop roleplaying game" is far too broad a definitional umbrella for the reasons you have listed. It is a cumbersome term that covers about half a dozen styles of game and is held together for reasons of diplomacy rather than conceptual cohesion.
2. I do agree that it is somewhat pointless for the reasons you list.
I do think it is ironic that narrative games explicitly evolved from a philosophy that claimed non-narrative games were second rate role-playing games, and they are the largest contingent that gets very upset at people trying to put genre thresholds in place.
I would like to see a forward facing "second world" movement. (It definitely needs a reasonable acronym.) I think that would be very interesting overall, and likely deliver on a lot of the promise that exists within the tabletop realm. ruleofthule writes on it a bit more here:
https://primevalpatterns.substack.com/p/the-nature-of-the-ttrpg
On gameplay style and behaviours, where would you stay the defining line between a board-game and a tabletop roleplaying game actually is? Similarly, where is the defining line between a creative writing circle and a traditional roleplaying game?
There clearly exists one, otherwise we could not define them mentally. I do not wish to overly prescribe it for fear of having Plato's man on my hands, but there is something there that makes them fall onto one side or the other.
I had one response written and managed to run afoul of an undisclosed word count limit for the comment section. Go figure.
> Please type a shorter comment.
I will wear this like a badge of honor.
Instead, I am going to post this in two comments and hope that the thing ends up displaying them correctly. This is the first:
> I do think it is ironic that narrative games explicitly evolved from a philosophy that claimed non-narrative games were second rate role-playing games, and they are the largest contingent that gets very upset at people trying to put genre thresholds in place.
I disagree with this comment for roughly three different reasons, all of which seem to grow out of an unfortunate kind of tribalism that has emerged in the hobby.
The first implicit claim is that there was ever a single philosophy from which narrative games emerged. That’s a kind of ideological unity that never existed. When the Forge et al was really humming, the sole truly unifying thread was massive experimentation. It was an attempt to analyze everything and deconstruct it to the base parts and then see in how many ways they could be reassembled and still be functional. There were a lot of terrible, unplayable things that came out of this, and a handful of really interesting ones… but that’s how experiments work. Failures always outnumber successes. That’s how you learn.
To that end, there were very few points upon which the indie community had anything approaching universal consensus. Most of that involved some basic methodology and shared vocabulary. Most of this was just to facilitate common grounds upon which they could argue with each other. Ron Edwards et al has a huge place of prominence whenever people talk about the Forge and related communities, but there is almost nothing that ol’ dude proposed that wasn’t controversial with some section of that community. Even ideas like The Big Model/GNS weren’t universally accepted even within the Forge.
The idea that any of these things were a unified monolith is something that can only be read into it after the fact. The reality was much closer to the state of OSR in the mid/early 2010s. There was some broad, vague idea of what should be OSR, and some very specific points of general agreement, but outside of those if you asked 10 different people you’d get 10 different answers. The indie/narrative crowd was even worse because they didn’t even share a unified explicit goal in any way other than “make better games.”
That brings us to the second point I’d disagree with. Even if we could take those few general points of agreement and argue that to be the philosophy in question, it wouldn’t make the claim you’re assuming. One of the core conceits that was agreed upon was the (I’d argue, self-evident) notion that no game can be successful being all things to all people. Thus, to make better games, you have to design them for a specific purpose. This is where so many games from that camp get hung up on play-style in a way that is sort of unique in the world of TTRPGs — or, at least, was, until the OSR came to be and embraced the same concept but towards a different creative agenda.
In this context, a claim like “narrative games are superior” or “non-narrative games are inferior’” is malformed. It’s a bit like asking which is better: a hammer or a screwdriver? It’s a nonsensical question until you add the context of “for what?” Games competently designed explicitly to support certain kinds of narrative are almost certainly better at delivering experiences focused on creating those kinds of narrative than games that were not designed with that intent. That does not inherently make them universally better games than a game designed to do something else. “Non-narrative games are second rate role-playing games” does not gel with one of the few points of philosophy which actually were commonly held.
That said, there are definitely people who argued “my subjective preference is objectively superior,” but we can say that about basically any preference anyone has about anything because there are always people making dumb claims of the sort. I hear prominent OSR folks make the same arguments about their preferences, too. It’s silly regardless of who does it, but that is the unfortunate nature of humans, particularly those with internet.
That brings us to the final point in this line: the idea of a “they” as a contingent in the first place is the same error as assuming a single philosophy existed. There were absolutely people who got all born-again enthusiastic about the thing and thus conducted themselves like twerps. There were absolutely purists like Ron Edwards and John Wick who turned around and argued their preferences like they were wisdom received from on high. There were also many, many people who took part in those communities and engaged with those ideas and yet still thought the aforementioned folks were silly. There were plenty of people even within the broadest definition of “those communities” who rolled their eyes at the self-adulation, purity spirals, and arguments about badwrongfun. This is, in point of fact, why the Forge spawned some offshoots like the story-games forums.
It’s also silly to assume that any significant portion of “they” were in any way separate from the broader TTRPG community and that their interests didn’t massively overlap with everything else. Case in point, I first heard about the OSR as a concept on said story games forums where there was an entire series of conversations about rpg archeology, experimentation on the design formula and play styles, yada yada.
This is then even further muddied because all of this was 15+ years ago. The “they” now is not even the “they” then. The most common examples of “story game not roleplaying game” I see now argued now points to games like Apocalypse World, or Blades in the Dark, both of which are actually far more traditional than a lot of forge nonsense -and- both of which were published after the Forge closed its doors and whatever community had existed scattered to the winds. A huge number of people who have embraced those kinds of games now were in diapers when the Forge was at its peak.
Imagine trying to have a conversation with someone today about political philosophy and they come at it from the position that all US citizens today are a single monolithic bloc defined by a complete support for all personal, philosophical, and political positions taken by George W Bush on the basis he was elected president. That’s not even close to an accurate read of the political opinions of the people at the time he was elected, much less a thing that you can assume about people today, a full-ass generation later, in a time when the political realities are very different and the actual population is different.
And I can promise you, Ron Edwards failed to achieve even that much consensus.
[As they did not display in the correct order, Part 2]
As for the questions:
> Where would you stay the defining line between a board-game and a tabletop roleplaying game actually is? Similarly, where is the defining line between a creative writing circle and a traditional roleplaying game?
I take the relatively broad position that role-playing games are generally defined by the following points:
1. A system of rules that structure play and facilitate interactions with a fictional world, particularly in regards to resolving conflicts between players. E.g., rules are the difference between playing cops & robbers on the playground and playing an actual game.
2. The assumption of a fictional layer to play such that events form a shared, ongoing narrative. E.g., going into a dungeon and stealing some treasure requires an interaction with a fictional layer above and beyond just reading the numbers on your sheet. The events that transpire form a shared, ongoing narrative about what happened. Contrast with tic tac toe, which has rules for how to play, but does not require forming a shared narrative.
3. An asymmetrical relationship between players, wherein most will take on the role of a single (or sometimes, several) characters and interact with the fictional world through those characters, as those characters. One specific player will take on the role of GM/DM/Whatever and be in charge of both running the game and playing all of the other parts in said fictional world.
4. “Open-ended” play based on the fictional circumstances, which is to say that the players can attempt to do whatever it is they can come up with that makes sense within the shared fictional space. They are not limited to specific prescribed options from which they must choose in the manner of, say, a choose your own adventure book or a computer game.
That list should be fairly uncontroversial. Beyond that, it gets grey and fuzzy and you start getting exceptions creeping in.
The space between “Creative writing circle” and “traditional role-playing game” is an odd one to argue because you fall out of one into the other pretty quickly with the above. Technically, fiction-writing can fulfill 2 and 4, but the moment you go from “I control all things as the narrator” to “I am controlling my character alone” or “I am controlling a world in response to inputs from other players” we’ve moved from creative writing to role-playing by definition. This is what a ton of ye olden chatroom RP was back in the AOL or yahoo chatroom days. The line between this and “role-playing game” is the point at which you introduce a system of actual rules to it.
The space between board game and role-playing game is actually a lot more muddy, to my mind. In theory, the primary differences between the two are points 3 and 4. Most board games fail some or all of 3, as few require a GM -or- require you to in any way inhabit the character. Nearly all board games, by definition, fail 4. The open-ended quality is the biggest piece of what separates TTRPGs from board games.
It’s actually much easier for me to find places where the ttrpg/board game line gets weird. A piece of low-hanging fruit would be to point at 4e, wherein the action economy, movement rules, etc all played very much like a tactical fantasy board game. Play felt nowhere near as open, RAW, as in previous editions. Early demos run by Chris Perkins didn’t help this, as the videos I watched of people playing 4e were almost universally ones in which the entire session of play took place on a single board and the entire session was conducted in combat rounds, with PCs moving their minis in numbers of squares. But even then, I don’t think it’s fair to actually argue that 4e is a board game because plenty of people ran it in the way they ran every other D&D edition, largely eschewing many of the cumbersome mechanics until time for combat.
My real question to you is: where do you think these things overlap? What are examples of games you think blur the lines between “creative writing exercise” and ttrpg? Or board game and “ttrpg?” My initial comment on the subject was due to the fact that I often hear people make allegations about “story games” “Story-telling games” and so on being No True Role-Playing Game but instead creative writing exercises, improv theater, or whatever else — but those arguments very rarely point at a specific example of a story/telling/game and make an argument for where and why that is the case. Instead, they try to treat the entire concept like a unified class and then argue against the class itself. This is ultimately why my instinct was to dive into taxonomy. It was an attempt to get more specific about what we are talking about in the first place.
Next up, part II, where we discuss how ACKs already does all that :)