Role-playing Structures

I’ve often struggled with the definition of games. What is it that makes role-playing role-playing? How is it different from board-gaming or wargaming? These terms may be useful but the boundaries they set are fairly arbitrary, and they could be abandoned.

The phrase “role-playing” often suggests teenagers in the basement or something psychiatric. But I believe role-playing can be more than either, which is to say, more than it has been: it can be art, political commentary, advertisement, and so on. “Role-playing” belies this potential diversity. There are diversities purpose and diversities of method. Many possible games may fit no classification that now exists. We need more terms just to talk about the range of play that can occur.

Two Structures

RPGs consist of mechanisms on one hand and imaginings on the other. We could mean many things by these terms. But by “mechanisms,” I mean solid, hard, mostly immutable “rules” that the game text identifies, and the players talk about and adhere to. Mechanisms tend to be numerical or, if qualitative, very categorical; mechanisms aren’t fuzzy. “Imaginings” refers more to the experience of the players, the world they keep in their heads, the much fuzzier thinking that underlies most of what goes on in role-playing. Imaginings are not divorced from the text of the game (the “rules” in another sense) but use the text only as a starting point; whereas mechanisms are provided mostly complete.

There is a lot more to say about such a distinction, but let’s accept it for now and focus on one thing: the difference between board games, RPGs, and other games. Let us say a game can have or not have the two types of structures, mechanisms and imaginings. One class of game has no imaginings but mechanisms: something like tiddly-winks. Then there are games that have imaginings but no real mechanisms: kids playing “let’s pretend” in some cases (though kids do often invent rules). And there are games with both, or at least the potential for both.

Checkers falls clearly in the no-imaginings category. Some are not quite so dry, and establish a theme through artwork and “flavor” text. There may then be a bit of imagining in a Settlers of Catan game. However, you don’t get rewarded or encouraged to take the imaginings beyond a stage set: play is all about the mechanics and someone who bases his decisions on “what my settlers would really do” would be seen to be missing the point. Going that route is also hard because the text doesn’t provide much help to you; and indeed the mechanisms themselves are both fairly abstract and not on a human scale.

A RPG is obviously very different. You’re encouraged to base your decisions on your imaginings, which you are aided in devision through various devices: the mechanisms are described at a personal level, and concretely, in terms of the imagined world.

Joins

I think it would be a mistake to say that board games don’t encourage imaginings while RPGs do. This is true to a large extent, but the real different is that there is an interaction between imagining and mechanism in RPGs that is absent in board games. A player in the old Hero Quest game (by Matel, ripped off from Warhammer) can imagine quite a lot if he likes; he can try to “immerse” himself in the experience imaginatively. But unless he’s willing to piss off his friends, he doesn’t play the game from that stand-point: he plays the board game to win, because that’s the goal, and he’ll rationalize that inside his imagination.

Now you might say our player can take his imaginings further, and start moving his barbarian around because of “in game” reasons; and isn’t this role-playing? Yes, you can do this, and use Hero Quest pieces as a prop for role-playing—it could be a good way of synchronizing your imaginings with those of the other players. But this isn’t playing the published game named Hero Quest is it?

In an RPG, everyone keeps two “boxes” of ideas in their mind: one with an alternate, physical world; and another with abstract mechanisms. The structures are distinct but their contents interact where there are joins between them. Each join is different and allows only a particular interaction to take place under a particular set of conditions. We can thus analyze games based on the number of joins it has, and their direction. When playing Hero Quest with some immersive imaginings, joins between the two structures are present but are essentially one-way: the rules and mechanisms change the imaginings, but not vice-versa. So that’s board-gaming. To move into role-playing territory, we need two-way joins. (It’s not immediately clear what a one-way join in the opposite direction would be.) There is is more to joins than direction and number though.

Looking at joins

Two-way connections are very diverse. There are large difference in the elements they affect and the information transmitted through them. Let’s begin by again considering the example of a Hero Quest player departing from the original game, using the product as a prop for RPing (with collusion from friends we assume). If he stills tries to use the mechanisms of Hero Quest but justifies his actions via the fiction, we have one of the simplest kinds of join: the motivational one, whereby one structure informs the player’s decisions in the other very generally.

The existence of such joins bring us to something else fundamental to all role-playing. No RPG text has mechanisms for everything. This is not just a deficiency or necessary practicality, but very important to how they function. Very broadly, if there were mechanisms for everything we would have just a pile of rules that could be followed by a computer; a simulation, in essence, with no input from players along the way. There are spaces left “in between” a game’s mechanisms, to make room for this input.

Often these spaces are occupied by character motivation and decision-making: we imagine what the character himself would do, and insert it into the mesh of mechanisms. Returning to the RPing-with-Hero-Quest scenario, the (two-way) join between imaginings and textual mechanics occurs largely in the motivation of the characters: why “my guy” does this or that. And we make such a determination by referring to the imagined-world structure, not to mechanics. Thus is motivation a join.

In fact, it’s virtually a given in today’s games that motivation is the primary type of join, and we’re very used to it. This creates, I would say, a certain kind of RPing, but a limited kind. Such joins are tenuous, and operated on an ad hoc basis. This means that the mechanisms and the imagined world are almost unconnected: they are just barely held together, and in danger of splitting completely, at which point role-playing collapses.

Trying to ignore joins

Many people see this disconnect as a virtue and a necessity: players are supposed to split their thinking into emotional and rule-focused halves which interact only indirectly. Then, the thinking goes, the “impure” rules do not sully true purpose of role-playing, “immersion.”

Perhaps the logic here is sound, given a particular (hardly necessary) set of goals, but it also problematic: It seeks to ignore joins or pretend they do not exist. Joins are necessary, though, because fundamentally the human mind cannot be split into two halves. And for a game to hold together, everyone at a gaming table must create and use them in the same way. This becomes very difficult when they are not discussed or considered.

When ignoring joins, role-players must resort to a trial and error process to assemble the “right” gaming environment, including system, tone, group and scenario. They are attempting to generate, subconsciously, the bare minimum number of joins necessary for the game to work, but so few that they’re invisible. A balance must constantly be negotiated, but silently. The fragility of such a set-up is acute and imbues play with a perceptible brittleness.

This approach is absolutely the norm in role-playing. It often creates frustration as players fitfully search for an agreeable environment, and is the source of much acrimony and talk of “bad role-playing” by players who are simply interested—at that moment—in an incompatible method of play. Gamers are thus prone to accepting merely “okay” gaming experiences, and are reluctant to leave a troubled group, because the process of experimentation is so arduous.

I criticize this form of play but it can work. More problematic is dogmatism: the insistence that this is the only way role-playing can happen, and an accompanying hostility to consciously thinking about many aspects of role-playing, especially joins.

Different Joins

Any mechanism can be joined to the imagined world by dictating what occurs in at upon a certain outcome. But if the players merely have a mental picture of what occurs upon using a mechanism it is a one-way join, and therefore not role-playing as I’d define it. A simple two-way join can be made by applying character motivation to the question of how or if the mechanism is used. This is the most minimal kind of join though, with little information being exchanged.

There are many alternative kinds of join, some having nothing to do with characters at all, let alone their imagined intent. Below are several very common ones, though their use us often implicit to reserved for a single game master.

  • Do we need a conflict roll?
  • How likely should the character’s success be?
  • What class should this character be?
  • In Ron Edward’s Sorcerer: Does this act warrant a humanity check?

Some of these may seem to deal exclusively with the operation of mechanics, and not relate to the imagined world at all. But players constantly make judgments about not just the details of a mechanism (How many energy points do I use? Do I aim low or high? Etc.) but when to use them: every mechanic must be called for by another mechanism specifically, or because the players deem it appropriate. These decisions are usually not identified or discussed in game manuals, but are incredibly important and in a role-playing game, will be made with reference to the imagined world, qualifying them as joins.

Why has such an important procedure for play been largely ignored? I think their importance is actually the cause. Without them no play can occur, so any group will invent them on the fly. This means that descriptions are not strictly necessary; and because role-players have tried to avoid discussing joins when possible, the excuse is taken. The problem is that ad hoc joins are unreliable. The better choice is for designers to think and write about them very consciously, because joins are the critical glue that make role-playing happen.

(The second part of this essay can be found here.)

Sep 19, 2009 | Filed in design | Tagged: , , ,