What is a role-playing game?

Can’t we just go with Potter Stewart’s definition of obscenity, “I know it when I see it?” We could and, for most purposes, that definition would be fine. If we are going to design games or adventures for other people, then we need to go a step further. We need to be clear on what we are designing.

Two important questions in design thinking are, “What’s it for,” and “Who’s it for?” If we know who it’s for and what it’s for we have a much better idea of what it is.

What is it for?

A lot gamers assume that roleplaying games are for fun. Fun or enjoyment is the experience that nearly all RPGs are intended to produce, but not all of them.

A small but non-zero number of game are not for the purpose of “fun.” Some players want an exhausting mental challenge. Some games are for exploring difficult social issues, creating a romantic atmosphere between two players, or therapy. There are also Serious games; a kind of role-playing used by the military, think tanks, government agencies, and businesses to simulate a real world crises.

Serious games might be “fun” in some way to the players but that is not their purpose. “Fun” is incidental. A public health official might enjoy the work of thinking through how they are going to respond to the next major pandemic but the point isn’t to have fun. It is to play the role of decision maker and deal with a disaster. “Fun” is not required or the intent of the designer.

These kinds of games aren’t the sort of thing that most gamers want. However, I want to include them in this thought process because they are the same category of game as Dungeons & Dragons, Shadowrun, and Call of Cthulu. They are all role-playing games.

Including serious games and fun games into the same category means that, “Tabletop role-playing games are for having a social, intellectual, or emotional experience that is novel, unusual, or impossible to have in normal conditions of the participants’ life.” 

This is a purpose that encompasses fun games and serious games which use roleplaying game methods. We are getting together to make decisions, to play a role, in a situation that we couldn’t otherwise experience. That roleplaying may be fun, it may be deadly earnest.

Who is it for?

That leads us to, “Who is it for?” Broadly speaking, RPG’s are going to be for people who want to have those experiences they don’t get to have in their everyday lives. They want to be a hero, a homicidal transient wizard, the pilot of a space freighter, a cybernetic hit man, a vampire grasping to their last shred of humanity, or any of hundreds of other personalities. It is fun to play the role of a star-ship science officer attempting to communicate with the alien who keeps eating your security team. When you can do that with your friends, even better.

Tabletop RPG’s are for people who want to have the experience of playing the role of a person in a situation unlike their own everyday life.

That seems a bit redundant from our “What’s it for?” discussion. I’ve bashed my head on this one for a while and don’t have a better answer than that. A good designer will be far more specific about who a specific game is for. A Cthulu Mythos game set in ancient Babylon is going to be for an audience that wants that game. A serious game for the New York City Crisis Management Team might be about a mass casualty event caused by a hurricane.

We have the what and the who. Tabletop role-playing games are for people who want to play the role of a fictional character for the purposes of experiencing problem solving and decision making for a person in that role.

This tells us a lot about what RPG’s are. It tells us their essence.

Why am I so sure it’s not a story?

Recently, I took an online workshop about storytelling for marketing. The course material defined story as follows, Characters- In a situation- Making choices. Red Riding Hood (character) is walking through the woods (situation) and talks to a stranger (makes a choice).

You might, think to  yourself, “Self, he’s just defined what happens in an RPG! RPG’s are stories after all,  ya jerk!” Not so fast. My definition of a role-playing game is similar but slightly different.

A role-playing game is a game in which player controlled characters, in a situation, making choices that have outcomes resulting from the choices the players make.

The players are making the choices. That is the essence of a game; player decisions. Remember our “who”. People who want to make choices in the role of fictional characters. They want to be in control over those characters.

A lot of gamer designers believe that RPGs are collaborative storytelling. I disagree.

A story is an analogy. Here is what happens if you do this in that situation. Everything in a story (a good one anyway) is constructed to produce the specific outcome and express a specific solution to the central conflict of the story. The choices of the protagonist makes lead to outcomes which supports the thesis the storyteller(s) are trying to convey to the audience.

In a game, the mechanisms of the game have a say in the outcome. Those mechanisms may produce an outcome the players and game masters did not want, or did not expect. The narrative of what happened in the game emerges from the interaction of the situation presented by the game master, the choices of the players, and the mechanisms of the game. Any game that has a random resolution mechanic like dice or cards will sometimes produce unintended and even undesirable results. That is what makes them games and not stories.

Roleplaying games use story to establish the context of the game. They produce stories but are not stories during the moment when players are making choices. They are a complex blend of story and game but not solely story.

Putting it all together

My definition of a roleplaying game:

A game which utilizes narrative to communicate the context of a fictional situation and the game state. Players make choices as fictional characters in a the fictional situation. The outcome of choices by players are resolved by the combination of rules, adjudication by a game master/referee, or computer software. The outcomes of these choices are communicated using narrative so that they may be intelligible to the players and game master or referee.