The New Paradigm
There’s a new way of looking at role-playing. It turns a critical eye toward this creative “game” we play, questions a lot things we never used to, tosses them out, and builds on a base of renewed understanding. It’s been spearheaded by a few key individuals online, and probably piece-meal all over, but now is gaining wider acceptance.
Parts of this new paradigm can seem frightening and alien at first. Yet the proof is in the pudding of play. The new paradigm works, because its fruit is role-playing that rocks—not role-playing that’s better than T.V., or that props up a gamer’s identity, but that actually rocks. Now that the box is open, we can’t go back.
The points below are what I expect—nay, demand—from games at this point. I have seen what most role-players consider normal gaming (at least in my area and online), and I remember doing it myself. But this model of role-playing is broken. This is a harsh evaluation, but the simple truth is that I cannot countenance this kind of play any more, except as some kind of nostalgia trip. A big part of the problem with conventional play is its piles of inherited wisdom, much of which is, in fact, narrow and fallacious. What’s most painful is that a lot of these new “insights” are blindingly obvious, and should seem so when you read them. Yet gamers have long rejected these ideas.
The point of this essay is not, however, to disparage conventional role-players or even their methods per se, though it does harshly criticize those methods. If you recognize your play in what I describe as “conventional”, I hope you won’t be too offended. I used to play that way too, because it was all I knew. But the “new paradigm” goes beyond that kind of play, and it works: it produces really good play. You owe it to yourself to see what I’m talking about.
1. Rules that actually work
- Rules that simply work to produce good play reliably. You thus get better play when using the rules than when ignoring or changing them—and ignoring rules is not expected or encouraged. In general, if play is reliably not good, or the rules are always ignored, then clearly the rules are broken.
- Rules that tell you what kind of play they’re going to produce and actually help you get there. No lies or contradictions in the books about what their purpose is, or how they’re going to be used. (See below for an example.)
- Rule texts that actually tell the players, as people, what to do to play. That is, they give real instructions that you can reliably follow. They don’t force you to imagine how to play. (The test is this. When you read the rules, do you know what it will be like to play the game? For most games so far, the answer is no.)
2. Everyone actually plays
- Everyone is responsible for everyone else’s fun. If, on a given night, you suck, then you ruin the game—not just for yourself but for everyone. This puts pressure on all the players, yes. You have to have this pressure, though, because there’s only one alternative: The only way for one player’s sucky play not to matter, is for none of his play to matter. In other words, he’s not contributing at all. Personally, I don’t want to play in a game where I’m not contributing. Yet I remember many games where I didn’t, and this was normal.
- The “Game Master” is not doing anything fundamentally different from anyone else. He’s still role-playing and the gap between GM and player isn’t so great. A GM is not, in fact, even necessary, but even if there is one, he needn’t have domineering authority over the social situation or the events of the game. Genrally, when one player has lots of power like GMs traditionally do, you have to trust him. The question is, in traditional play, why don’t you trust the other people sitting around you, and why you don’t trust yourself?
- The old wisdom of controlling a protagonist while the GM controls the plot, or “story,” is contradictory and a fundamentally broken idea. The actions of the protagonists are an essential part of any plot. If the GM controls the plot, then either the GM is also controlling the protagonists, or the “protagonist” is taking action that has no effect on the fiction of the game. Either way, he’s clearly not a real protagonist, and his player is not contributing. Non-contributive play happens all the time under this rubric. (You could, if trying to apologize for this system, imagine the GM as a screenwriter and the players as actors…but that’s acting, not role-playing, right? Go join the actor’s guild.)
3. Insight: Not everyone can play in every game
- People can have different goals when role-playing (besides the asinine “we play to have fun”). This is the case in every social activity and role-playing is first and foremost a social activity. Some goals deal with the game itself, others with the social situation, like, “Make up with so-and-so for coming late.” You can have some goals just for a single game and others for all the role-playing you ever do.
- Not all goals are compatible. Playing with people who have different goals produces poor play. There’s no way around this: You can’t wave the magical GM wand and make everyone have the same goals. Thus, you will not want to play in every game that you theoretically could. This doesn’t mean that you can’t be friends with those other people, that you or they are “bad role-players,” or anything like that. (You learned this in grade school: different does not equal bad.)
- Every game system is better at fulfilling some goals than others. No system can do everything (or do it well). Some systems will not work for you, either in general on a given occasion. Thus, what system you choose matters.
- (There are just plain bad systems out there, often because they try to do everything at once and end up a muddle. Most published games, in fact, are very mediocre because they don’t understand role-playing very well: they haven’t questioned old dogmas and so have slavishly imitated their predecessors, never really knowing what goals they’re trying to support. It’s pretty much the first rule of everything: know what you want to do before you attempt doing it. But self-analysis has come late to role-playing.)
Further Reading
This essay is essentially a reiteration of ideas seen in many other places. If not for other writers, I wouldn’t be where I am now, in terms of thinking about role-playing. Go to the sources, below, and find out more.
- Articles at The Forge. Start at the bottom, and especially read anything by Ron Edwards. Do it now.
- This is My Blog. Ben Lehman distills to-date Forge theory down to a series of essays.
- anyway, a blog by Vincent Baker. More wading to do then at This is My Blog, but lots of deep discussion of theory, a lot of it very accessible.
- Deep in the Game, a blog by Chris Chinn. He rants and raves, and describes just what’s so wrong with “the land of broken wheels.”