Roll-Playing Versus Roleplaying
Ron Edwards:
Hello,
I apologize for taking so long. I didn't intend to shut the thread down. My goal here is to outline some points which were discussed here in detail, leading to the conclusion that "roll/role," as a commonly-mentioned contrast in role-playing, is a false dichotomy. I also think that we can stick specifically to the game being described and address a real issue without getting distracted by presumed higher principles.
A few years ago, I coined the term "Murk" to describe a phenomenon which I hadn't been too familiar with myself, but seemed to be widespread in the hobby. I focused strongly on when and how a role-playing, collectively, could not manage to know when to apply any particular rule, especially those concerned with resolution. Joel's thread Mother-May-I and 20 questions: Games GMs play helped clarify the issue a lot. Callan's thread Warhammer; Chaos! Order! Molasses! is a great introduction to it, including his term "Molasses," meaning what it was like actually to get anywhere or do anything during play - slow, sticky, attention-draining, and often pointless. Also, the embedded threads in that one provide a good background.
As a role-player, I didn't experience much Murk in the late 1970s and 1980s; play ran into trouble more often due to clashes in Creative Agenda, or in a certain mis-match between investment in character and investment in play. I can't speak for the wider range of role-playing beyond my experience, except that I was in contact with quite a few Champions groups across the U.S. for a long time, and they didn't seem to run into it much either. It seems to be more common now.
I have some ideas about how it became a major feature of the hobby. These are probably doomed to speculative status forever and best suited to face to face discussions. I do think it's fair to identify the three primary rules systems that settled into primary status during the early 1980s: AD&D in the form of the three late-1970s hardbacks, plus books like Unearthed Arcana and the Wilderness Survival Guide; BRP in the form of RuneQuest (1978, plus Cults of Prax, Cults of Terror, Trollpack, and the three Pavis boxed sets) and Call of Cthulhu (a mash-up of its first two editions across three versions); and Champions, across three editions each with useful supplements, prior to the generic form of the Hero System.
During this time, people grappled a bit with how to resolve interesting problems and conflicts when the characters were not fighting, because most of the resolution rules were concerned with, hell, drooling obsessed with, combat. But I think ... only think, mind you, that the default engagement with one another about what was being imagined tended to hold together pretty well.
I'm thinking as well that the trouble mainly arose when people were confronted by the combination of novels and games, as with Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms. I alluded to this in my recent thread on TFT: Wizard,
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with books like Forgotten Realms and however many similar ever since, there's a purported connection between a DM's vision of the campaign's story and a novel (or series), in which references to system are more like product placement. So the message to the hopeful user of the game is, the story-of-play is the same as write-my-novel. I think this is exactly the origin of the "system doesn't matter" claim in the hobby, as well as the grotesque confounding of "story" with metaplot.
In other words, and putting aside the merits or lack of merits in something like the Forgotten Realms books or The Wheel of Time, "a good story" or "a real story" was perceived to emerge from a DM/GM with a story-vision, to be visited upon the players, exactly in the same way that a novelist's story is visited upon the readers - as opposed to play itself, with decision-making spread across the participants in distinctive ways, and with its mechanics inserting good and bad bounces for characters, to produce such a thing.
Not only is this potentially a broken creative model from the outset, but trying to do it with legacy systems is nearly unimaginable. Murk arose instantly - what the hell is rolling for? When the hell do you do it? The threads I linked to at the top of the post are all about this.
Two profiles evolved over time from group to group, and new games began to be written from the perspectives of those profiles. The first is perhaps best termed dice-phobic, composed of people who'd learned that the only way to avoid their characters looking stupid or dying was to get things done by maneuvering away from the dice, and devaluing the dice' input in the terrible event that they had to be rolled for some reason. The second is to attempt to use the skills and dice systems as constantly as possible, applying them whenever the characters perform any sort of tasks, perhaps in the assumption that the "game universe" is composed of such rolls. I don't mind saying that both of these, in practice, tended very fast to suck donkey dick. It's true that both represented more genuine system than the rather unconstructed, rather weird tacit system that this generation of gamers inherited ... but two dumb solutions to a problem aren't much of an improvement. Nor is reversion to the original problem, as exemplified by Exalted, as I see it.
I'm not talking about difference in style, or Agenda, or any kind of comparison among functional options. Here, when I say "suck" I don't merely mean something I personally happen not to like. I'm talking about observable lack of enjoyment and at times, outright social disaster including life-disrupting crisis. Perhaps that's why Zilchplay is also more common than I would have believed, based on my older-school experiences that were somewhat isolated from the hobby subculture through the 1990s. If trying to find real enjoyment is disastrous, then better to settle for bland, Agenda-less activity that only rarely accomplishes imaginative fun.
So that puts us when ... probably right around 1990, when the original communities of RPG design had aged into their 40s and the new crop of designers was old enough and spunky enough to define a new standard for RPG content. At this point, each of the defensive approaches then evolved further, representing relatively desperate attempts to fix their inherent flaws. The fixes usually relied on designating idealized social roles to establish creative authority, such that "The GM" took on a lofty degree of artistic and social power well beyond what healthy human interactions can sustain. Yet another secondary effect was to bolster one's own choices in this weird constellation of bad options by labeling others' versions of it inferior, compounding broken local social interactions with identity politics. That is what Roll vs. Role is all about.
What I'm saying, by contrast, is that successful play relies on being Not Murky. If you know when you roll (or use any formalized mechanics for resolution, including formalized dialogue alone!), and when you don't, then the rolling is good and the not-rolling is good. In fact, in Non-Murk play, they are complementary and necessary. In more recent games like Universalis and Polaris, for instance, there is no point in distinguishing between mechanics of resolution and the modes of dialogue among the players - they are the same thing. Apocalypse World does something similar by categorizing participants' significant input into formal "moves," and outlining the exact circumstances that require Move mechanics both fictionally and in reality. As I see it, all three of these games are putting names and terms into techniques of play which had proven themselves under fire for decades in preventing Murk, and organizing them better.
That was really long and maybe boring. Let me know whether we need to discuss it more. I'm particularly stressing the point that "rolling" is a terrible and inappropriate term for what is better understood as formal procedures for determining the course of and consequences of certain fictional situations. The procedures in question can be anything! This is key because the "Roll/Role" phraseology creates this picture:
i) Anything with dice
ii) Anything without dice
Whereas the real contrast should be
i) Anything Murky
ii) Anything not Murky
Hence Amber was called "Diceless" in the sense of (ii) in the first group, whereas in fact, its system is sufficiently formal to place it into (ii) of the second group. (OK, granted, Amber is not without its own brand of confusion here and there, but the use of dice or its lack is not the source of that.) Or any number of games claim to be "Diceless" despite using, for instance, cards exactly as one uses dice, or various quantitative techniques that introduce unknowns without rolls or draws. Or "dice pool" gets co-opted into meaning solely the White Wolf Storyteller system including its idiosyncrasies. In other words, blithering idiocy prevailed.
Let me know if any of this is interesting and/or makes sense. I have a whole new post drafted to talk about your game and points specifically, but let's check on things this far.
Best, Ron
Ron Edwards:
Ah, why not, here's what I was working on. It was easier to finish it than I thought it would be.
When dice are a pretense, then fuck them. Clearly this goes for any kind of formal procedure for resolving something (or better, to establish consequence) ... and that includes dialogue.
It's not surprising that system-as-pretense shows up consistently in all the following circumstances, here all phrased as the GM might say it : "Do their characters notice this thing? And shit! If they don't, then my STORY loses all that important stuff like foreshadowing it's supposed to have, but if they do, then they might do something and screw up the STORY." "Do they alter my NPC's planned behavior? Shit! Can they do that? If they can, then what do I do?" "Are they in a position of advantage relative to physical danger, altering my planned use of combat mechanics? Shit! If they are, then I don't have as good a feel for how this is supposed to turn out. They need to respect my characters' danger to them so they can ally with them later with the proper amount of respect, or my STORY won't have the scene I'm playing in my head."
Here's my point to you: as far as I can tell without having been there myself, when play is Murky in this fashion, then not rolling is not going to be a solution either. The problem was not how to find out how the negotiations went - no! The point was to get you (the players) into putting the characters where they were supposed to go, while maintaining the desperate illusion that all such events were being internally and causally generated, instead of imposed. If I really had to guess, I think the GM called for a roll in hopes that it would turn out the way you were supposed to go. And now, not guessing but speaking from extensive experience, I know a skilled Illusionist GM uses non-formalized mechanics, "just talking," "role-playing," even more manipulatively.
In fact, I realize you didn't tell us whether your negotiation check succeed. Did it? Either way, what happened? Did you stay on the rails? If so, did you know that was happening at the time? If so, did anyone overtly indicate his or her knowledge of that?
I'm beginning to think this thread should reach back even further into The Impossible Thing, Illusionism, Force, and the Black Curtain. But I'll do that another day.
Best, Ron
masqueradeball:
When I referenced Amber, that was exactly my point, that Amber doesn't use dice but it has some solid guidelines for determining what happens in the narrative, and despite the fact that you do compare numbers (in the game), it is very very free form. A conversation like the one that Nicks talking about would be handled in one of three ways: 1)The merchant is way better at talking than you, the GM tells you you lose, 2) Your way better than the Merchant, the GM lets you get what you want, 3) your close enough at being good/not good at talking: you and the gm describe exactly what happens, word for word, and see what results, the GM uses Good Stuff/Bad Stuff as a guideline when he doesn't have an idea of how thing would go. Its not a free form discussion, but its close.
Frank Tarcikowski:
Wow, looks like a freight train hit this thread, there are so many points that have been raised, I've lost count. I'll say the thing that immediately came to my mind when reading the first post anyway, in the hope it's not too confusing.
Nick, I can totally relate to your disappointment. What I read from your first two paragraphs is this: There you were, picking up all the bits and pieces of fiction that had been created along the game's way, building on them, transforming them into an argument that was rooted in the fictional situation and simply made sense. You were making a good case, and you were probably also acting in character, putting up some performance. And the GM acknowledged you when he said, "good point". You were connecting, he was confirming your interpretation of the fictional situation, your understanding of the NPC and his motivation. The fiction was coming alive between the two of you, you were "getting into it", assessing it, judging it, and this meant something. And then the GM stepped back, taking away the acknowledgement, interrupting the connection by asking for a roll. So it didn't matter after all. You might as well just have said: "My guy tries to convince that guy that it's not our fault", and rolled.
Now that's not to say that the GM was wrong, it's simply what I read from your post as how you felt about it. Maybe I'm projecting, because it's sure how I would have felt. This is something I've been bringing up before, concerning involvement and dedication with the shared fiction, and concerning real judgement of quality contributions. A provocative take on your first two paragraphs would be that you and the GM lingered, for a small moment, at the threshold of entering a higher level of play (higher level of skill, higher level of engagment, higher level of shared understanding, higher level of satisfaction). But I'm afraid bringing all this into the discussion on top of everything that Ron and Adam have already raised would be way too much for this single thread. Let me know if anything I've written resonates with you, then we might spin it off (now or later).
- Frank
Callan S.:
Ron,
I think the overview is a useful historical document to gain perspective by. But in terms of this:
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When dice are a pretense, then fuck them. Clearly this goes for any kind of formal procedure for resolving something (or better, to establish consequence) ... and that includes dialogue.
Is this advice for if your in such a game now? Or is it advice for designing new games (which includes taking an old game and bolting some house rules onto it)?
What is or isn't pretence seems something it takes a human to determine? If the game relies on this to work, then it's not the game/mechine making itself work? By a machine making itself work, I'd say a piano or guitar makes itself work. Yeah, I know 'they don't play themselves', but making themselves work is different from playing themselves.
Or are you refering to a third thing I haven't thought of?
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