primeval games press

Although I’m not one to usually be bound by divisions or definitions, I do think we need to know what this "role-playing" thing is in order to better understand it. Consider this post a tentative step or musing, and add to it appropriately. My current thinking says that all role-playing meets three key requirements. Role-playing is…

1. a group activity, where the participants
2. imagine a fictitious world (and negotiate correspondence between their respective imaginings), and
3. control characters who are protagonists in the world.

Are there a lot of other things usually assumed (by some people but not others) to be necessary for RPing? Definitely. But that’s baggage. As I see it, if you have all three of the above, you’re role-playing. I’ll elaborate.

The social aspect is key, since "role-playing" by yourself is just daydreaming.

The fictitious world is key because without it, there’s no place for anything to happen. Boards, miniatures and other props can help a group negotatiate correspondence, but are supplemental to the actual imagined world. If there’s nothing but props, then you’re playing a board game (or boffing, or whatever), not an RPG.

Finally, characters are key. Characters don’t have to be human. Ghosts, artificial intelligences and anything else sentient count as characters. If the characters aren’t protagonists, then you have some kind of imaginative exercise, but not role-playing. If you have a protagonist who isn’t a character (i.e. posessing attributes of humans, like emotions) then it’s actually just an agent, not a protagonist at all. If you have agents then you’re playing some other kind of game, maybe a tactical "what if?" but, again, it’s not role-playing.

Obivously then, the line between role-playing and other kinds of activities can be pretty fine. You can pick up an RPG book and use it to do other things than role-playing. Like using the combat rules of D&D to play a tactical game, maybe with miniatures.* Or conversely, you can play a game like Warhammer Quest and turn it into role-playing by using the board as a prop and imagining the agents of the game as actual characters.

* Note that I’m not disparaging D&D. I also don’t think it’s very common for a group to think it’s role-playing but not actually be role-playing. Even a group that plays D&D and focuses primarily on combat, using minatures, is still role-playing if the members imagine their characters as more than just pieces on the board—and I think this is usually the case.

Jun 18, 2005 | Filed in design