Role Versus Player

The Original Dungeon Master has passed away, but his legacy lives on in all of us.

The other day, I placed one of the PCs in my Amber DRPG in a difficult situation. This was my most Player-oriented player, by the way, to put everything into an understandable context.

The conundrum was that the PC, who has been essentially coasting through his existence looking for a fight, suddenly found himself stuck in a room with two people who could take his godlike character down, being asked on which side of a succession crisis he belonged to. Now this guy has avoided conflict so far by sitting on the fence, which is of course what a good Player would do while assessing his options. Heck, I would do that.

But the dilemma essentially forced his hand. What would his character do in such a situation?

This is where the gaming session broke down.

The player running the PC began to look for the ‘answer’ to this ‘puzzle’. Ten, twenty, thirty minutes passed as he attempted to find some way out of this quest puzzle. Except it’s not a quest puzzle. It’s a trial I custom-made for this particular character because of his chronic fence-sitting.

Why would I do that? The question is only really puzzling if you look at it from a Player perspective.

A Player is naturally looking for the most efficient way to win the game. Nothing wrong there, really — if you’re playing that sort of game. Let’s say you’re looking to defeat the dungeon boss. Naturally you want to avoid traps, minimize encounters that can use up your healing spells and potions and whatnot, so you’ll be in the best of shape when you get to the dragon or whatever the hell is waiting for you at the end, standing between you and the treasure.

You are, in essence, looking for the path of least resistance to achieving your goal. Pretty sensible.

But this is not that kind of game. This is an artsy-fartsy Role-type game. I completely admit my bias. I’m Role, after all.

The character is being subjected to a trial because trials define characters. Let me expound on this point.

Where would Hercules be without his Twelve Tasks? Where would Odysseus be without the Odyssey? Where would Edmond Dantes be if he was never betrayed? Where would Luke Skywalker be if his aunt and uncle weren’t killed and his father hadn’t fallen to the Dark Side? What if Conan’s village was never ransacked by the raiders of Thulsa Doom?

Probably farming. Or sailing. Having peaceful little lives. This is great as a life aspiration but terrible as far as stories go.

Stories arise from conflict. Someone has to want something and must be prevented from having it by some obstacle. What makes a character great is not that he got the coolest sword or most powerful spell, but that he faced adversity and overcame it. And the greater the challenge the better when it is overcome. This is what epic adventures are made of.

Sure, a hero (or anti-hero — see Elric, Raistlin, or Gully Foyle) can still try to find out the best way to approach a conundrum, try to conserve his strength for the fight ahead. But when the time comes for bold action, he must take it according to the principles that he lives by. This is, btw, what the D&D Alignment system was designed to do — make your choices clear given a certain situation. Amber characters aren’t bound by strict alignment rules but they should be bound by their character. This is not so much a restriction as it is a compass, to guide your actions at any given point.

Let’s go back to the Amber PC at hand. If he was a heroic character bound to protect Amber from its enemies then he would speak and act accordingly. If he was more mercenary and opportunistic, he would not hesitate to give his potential killers a false face, waiting for the proper moment to strike. If he was a sheltered and inexperienced novice, he would also act accordingly.

In any single case, no matter what character concept was being portrayed, the choice during the trial is clear. But if you are a Player-type, and you’re trying to find the ‘right answer’ then you are lost.

Don’t’ flee from your character trials, embrace them. These are your opportunities for greatness.

Somewhere in the emerging megapolis that is Metropolitan Manila is a unique individual. He has many titles: The Cheese, The Keso, Kitsu-Keso, and Da’man. Yet for the purposes of this post we shall gift him with another title: The God of Players.

Gifted with the extraordinary, some would say miraculous, ability to twink any game system, he is the epitome of a natural-born Player. Indeed, he even trumped Role in his Amber game, where character development reigns supreme. This is the story on how he twinked a game system whose rules he had not even read…

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My post at the beginning of the year made reference to a new game I was running, the Amber Diceless Role-Playing Game. For people wholly unfamiliar with the world of Amber, as written by Roger Zelazny, imagine that all possible worlds exist, and that they are all reflections of the One True Eternal City, Amber. An Amberite (which is what my player characters are) can simply walk, ride, drive, or otherwise travel to any of these possible worlds simply by, desiring it and by being in motion, using the power of Pattern.

On top of this, your average Amberite can outfence Zorro, outfight Bruce Lee, outwit Napoleon on the battlefield, can bend anyone to his or her will given enough time and contact, and can sprint for a day. And most PCs are even more uber than that.

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Situation #1

Storyteller (as NPC): I am…
Solar Players (in unison): KILL!

Situation #2

Storyteller (as NPC): I am Peleps Deled. I seek an Anathema rumored to be in this area.
Solar Player 1: (Activating First Presence Excellency) Thank the Immaculate Dragons that you have arrived to save us! The Anathema was last seen headed south. His blasphemous words have enticed several village youths and we fear for their souls.
Solar Player 2: (Attempting to assist Solar Player 1 to gain a limited coordinated bonus) Lord, there are rumors that there is a tomb south from here. It may be that that is where the Anathema is headed. What will happen to us if he manages to open it?
…

What’s the difference between these two scenarios? Scenario #1 is an example of Playing while Scenario #2 is Playing smart.

“Playing? Isn’t that role-playing?” you might ask. One has to distinguish between Role-playing, Playing, and Playing smart. Scenario #2 is Playing smart and not Role-Playing. Following are some of the reasons why this is so:

1. They didn’t kill the NPC immediately.
2. The players assumed that they would know who Peleps Deled is instead of asking the Storyteller whether they would have heard of the leader of the Wyld Hunt.
3. The players immediately entered into Social Combat to lead Peleps Deled away and give them an opportunity to disappear.

Now why would not killing the NPC be considered Playing instead of Role-Playing. Simple, when you Play you should play smart. Just because there’s an NPC doesn’t necessarily mean your character has the ability to kill said NPC outright. In this case the players in Scenario #1 would most probably end up dead, while those in Scenario #2 have a chance to escape.

Part of the enjoyment of RPGs is seeing your character survive and grow stronger. You cannot do that if you try to lop off the head of every NPC you encounter. You have to work within the game setting and you have to stay one step ahead of the referee.

Greetings netizens! I am Player #2.

Now, what makes me qualified to be a Player? I have been playing RPGs since I was 11 years old, which means I’ve been playing for over a quarter of a century. I started out with First Generation RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. I have played Second Generation RPGs like GURPS and Mechwarrior. Finally I have also played in Third Generation RPGs like Vampire: the Masquerade and Exalted.

I also have the dubious honor of having played CRPGs and MMOGs, but let’s not get into that since that’s Player’s cup of tea.

I have experience, and in the words of the immortal Stan Lee: ‘Nuff Said!

Do you know what makes playing RPGs as a Player so good? It’s because RPGs are non-zero-sum games. But that is a topic for another time.

Greetings, RvP fans! I’ve been taking a holiday break from writing, but I’m popping in to greet everyone a Happy New Year!

Actually I’ve been busy running an Amber DRPG online game while waiting for Player to respond, but if the response takes a while to arrive I’ll be talking about my experiences as a Role-type GM here soon. So far it’s been a lot of work but also a lot of fun, since Amber is a very rules-light and diceless game, which tends to force people to focus on their roleplaying instead.

Happy New Year everyone!

First, let me say: Wow. A lot has happened since my last post, and considering I left off because I wanted to give Player’s post enough airtime before I wrote a rebuttal, it almost seems like I should leave well enough alone and simply move on to whatever point I was going to make next.

Almost.

I don’t know where Player gets off claiming that the most egregious railroading is done by ‘GMs like Role’, considering that in order to make sure their canned-module-type games get off the ground, players of Player-types have to accept the fact that they can’t deviate from the module. Refuse to enter the dungeon and instead start a lucrative pickled-herring-in-a-cart business? No can do, you must go into the dank dungeon and defeat the evil bugbear. (Although my gaming group did confound a Player-type GM several years back using the exact same scheme. His solution: Draconians destroyed our cart and took us prisoner. No, we weren’t on Krynn. No, draconians weren’t native to the game world.)

Player seems to be under the delusion that rules run themselves, creating a wonderful, engaging chocolate cake of a game all by themselves. A cake without a baker, so to speak. For Player, GM choice undefined by the rules is The Evil — and so let us let our robotic overlords run all our games using rules that are completely free from human intervention.

Except, of course, humans wrote the rules, made the game world, and spent their hard-earned cash buying the games they wanted to play and run. Oh, evil human choice! People should be told which robotic games to play and how to play them! Well, that’s what the online gaming companies would probably want, anyway.

Anyway, moving on: I’ve always been skeptical of the idea that somehow computer and console RPGs are an improvement on tabletop gaming. True, some of the best games I’ve ever played were cRPGs. Final Fantasy, Chrono Trigger, the Elder Scrolls games, and so on. Some of the most intense stories are found in these games.

But they’ve never struck me as a substitute for tabletop gaming. They’re more of something you play when you can’t cobble together a gaming group and you really have a craving to roll dice and simulate the slaughter of randomly-encountered monsters.

So it was a pleasant surprise for me when, while reading a twenty-year Final Fantasy retrospective on Racketboy, I stumbled upon a letter from RPG Granddaddy Gary Gygax, who had this to say:

The computer search and destroy games erroneously called RPGs are not actually in the role-playing game genre. Why? Simply ask yourself: To whom does one role-play to when engaged in such a game? The answer is also evident: No one.

This is not to say that the “CRPG” is not a worthwhile playing experience. The size of the audience for such games demonstrated unequivocally that they are compelling, nearly addictive. Unlike a true RPG, where there is a game master and assembled player group, the CRPG can be played whenever the individual wishes, for as long a period as desired, without having to have a game master or associated players there.

Furthermore, the CRPG captures vividly most of the essential features of the true RPG–exploration, problem solving, combat, acquisition. What is missing is the inter-personal role-playing and the vast range of possibilities provided by the game master.

Clearly many people find the trade off well worth the immediate availability of CRPG play.

Cheers,
Gary

(emphasis mine)

Now astute readers will note that Player has declared his intention to bring the greatness and splendor of cRPGs in order to modernize tabletop gaming for the new millenium. But is this really such a good idea?

Well, clearly Player also finds the loss of flexibility and possibility in favor of a more streamlined experience an acceptable trade-off and aims to bring this innovation to the tabletop genre.

Wait a minute, I think there’s a word for that! It starts with an R…

 There’s a recent article in CNN which was about a woman, her boyfriend and her mother were arrested by the police after stealing 7.4 million dollars in Ohio.

They just HAD to mention D&D.

And prominent in a paragraph all by itself was the fact that they loved to play Dungeons and Dragons and it was implied that they were immersed in roles that were not their own, as if this was preparing them for their life of crime.

See, it’s this kind of stereotype that we need to break if we want roleplaying games to get out of the small dark and dying niche that it’s crawled into. And for years, roleplaying games have been marketed as something weird and strange using taglines like “Use your imagination” and “play a person that’s not yourself.”

See the problem is most people aren’t too interested in roles of other people. They ARE interested in themselves. Most players aren’t playing other people, they’re really playing idealized versions of themselves. Only a few gamers can truly play the role of another person convincingly enough that they’ll even step back and laugh at the trials and tribulations of their character.

But for most people, you can’t separate the fact that we mostly play ourselves.

So instead of relying on marketing roleplaying games as immersive experiences where you play another person, why not market roleplaying games as a fun social activity, where the PERSON can indulge themselves in ACTIVITIES that they normally cannot do.

Focus more on the action, not the role of the character. That will get people interested… then later, they can be initiated into the facinating activity that is separating themselves from the character they play.

Really, we need to have other people see that roleplaying games are a fun game, like poker or monopoly or scrabble. We need to draw attention to the fact that the games are fun social activites, with rules that regulate behaviors. Maybe once we get that down pat, we won’t have the press bashing roleplaying games like they were freak behaviors indudged in by the criminally insane.