After reading the last page of posts and giving the whole thing some thought, I happened to suddenly realize something. Now, none of us (our gaming group) have ever had a discussion like the one currently going on, but whenever we talk about out-of-combat events, we call that role-playing. For instance, if the DM says that in order to do something, we have to convince so-and-so that it is the right thing to do, and it will take some role-playing, we all understand he means we are going to be talking to somebody. It isn't a conscious decision on our parts, and none of us have thought anything of it. I think I will bring this discussion up during our next session and see what they have to say.
Anyway, I thought that was enlightening... for me anyway
"Is it just me or does HATED look like an evil mastermind?"- Pigknight
A military solution isn't the only answer, just one of the better ones.
After reading the last page of posts and giving the whole thing some thought, I happened to suddenly realize something. Now, none of us (our gaming group) have ever had a discussion like the one currently going on, but whenever we talk about out-of-combat events, we call that role-playing. For instance, if the DM says that in order to do something, we have to convince so-and-so that it is the right thing to do, and it will take some role-playing, we all understand he means we are going to be talking to somebody. It isn't a conscious decision on our parts, and none of us have thought anything of it. I think I will bring this discussion up during our next session and see what they have to say.
Anyway, I thought that was enlightening... for me anyway
A specifically defined meaning? I gave three different meanings for the term roleplay in a prior post.
I thought it was clear that I meant "a specifically defined meaning in the context of playing roleplaying games", but apparently I should have made that explicit.
Decivre wrote:
That said, while there are at least three different current meanings for the term roleplay, they all have at least one thing in common: they all require you to portray a role. Kaldric's new definition does not require the portrayal of a role at all, and is solely based on the label stuck to the game for merit.
But "portray a role" is so loosely defined as to fit in any activity where someone is pretending (using the loosest possible defnition of the term) to be someone else, or in a different situation. In fact, it seems to include any activity except boardgaming - and why that is excluded, I don't know.
Take the following situation: A company wants to test some potential manager candidates by putting them through a roleplaying session. They are split into three groups in separate conference rooms, each of them is assigned a role (sales manager, HR manager etc), and on the whiteboard are representations of the assets they have available: employees, funds and so on. They get told to do their best to make the company run well.
One group really gets into their roles: the sales manager tries to be as smarmy as possible, the CEO is demanding and arbitrary, the HR manager complains about his training budget and blurts "I cannae give ye any more men, captain! She'll blow!" to much hilarity, and the CTO tries to build his own little empire by conspiring with the CFO to get more funds than anyone else.
The other group doesn't do any of that. They discuss the various options and come to a conclusion they can all agree on, dividing the assets in the way they think will be best for the company. The most they get into their roles is "Well, as sales manager I could use a bit more money for an aggressive ad campaign, but I guess I can do without it too." They approach it as a puzzle to be solved with their roles being entirely secondary.
The third group contains most of the "young and hungry" candidates who have figured out what is going on and want to impress the presumably watching managers. They make bold moves: slashing budgets, outsourcing everything, making plays for each others' departments, some sticking to their assigned roles and some ignoring them completely - "I may be the HR manager but surely that doesn't mean I can't make marketing suggestions to the CEO!"
Compare this to three groups playing D&D:
In one the players are really getting into their characters, the cleric crying for vengeance from the heavens, the paladin refusing to help the rogue flank because stabbing someone in the back is dishonourable, and the warlock having imaginary conversations with the demon who gave her her power.
In the other group they don't do any of that. They get through the fights by treating them as tactical wargames. "My guy is the defender and he's starting to get low on hp so he could use a bit of healing, but I guess he can survive another turn." In non-combat situations they just send up the guy with the highest skill modifier for whatever they think they need.
In the third group they treat combat much as the second group: for the most part they make the tactically best moves, occasionally saying something in-character and mostly just describing their actions from a mechanical viewpoint but sometimes adding "and then I stomp him on the foot and say 'Take that, filthy orc!'".
Which of these groups are roleplaying according to the definition you use in relation to roleplaying games? Why? Why not?
Decivre wrote:
It'd be like if I found a videogame called "open-heart surgery" and declared that anyone who plays the game is performing open-heart surgery and is therefore a surgeon.
No, it's more like if you declare someone playing a game about open-heart surgery who spends all his time stabbing the patients in the kidneys with a scalpel to be playing a game about open-heart surgery. In one way it's true, in another it's not - it depends on what you mean by "playing the game".
Er... that's exactly how defining words works. You say "I take this word to have this meaning in this context". That's what defining a word is.
You may not agree with that definition, and if a lot of others also disagree and using the word that way doesn't convey the meaning the person defining it intends it's not a very useful definition, but that doesn't make it "not a definition".
whenever we talk about out-of-combat events, we call that role-playing. For instance, if the DM says that in order to do something, we have to convince so-and-so that it is the right thing to do, and it will take some role-playing, we all understand he means we are going to be talking to somebody.
This is what I alluded to above when I said the term is used in several different ways in the context of roleplaying games. It can be used as in this example, or similar to this:
Player: Okay, we need to convince the guard to let us through. I roll Bluff and get... 17. DM: I want to hear what you tell him. Roleplay it. Player: Er... I tell him we're... mercenaries. Yes, that's good, isn't it? Other Player: Yeah, we're mercenaries, hired by the Duke himself! Player: For a special mission. Third Player: Special secret mission, so we can't tell the guard any details.
Or this:
Player: Okay, we need to convince the guard to let us through. I roll Bluff and get... 17. DM: I want to hear what you tell him. Roleplay it. Player: Okay, lemme think... Right. "Greetings, stout guardsman! Kindly let us pass, for we are on a secret mission for the Duke and would not have him wait."
In the sense Hated describes, all of these are roleplaying: as soon as you're in a non-combat situation you're roleplaying.
In another sense, that's not enough, but you start roleplaying when you have your character do something not covered by the rules, like describe what he says.
In yet another sense that isn't enough either: you're only roleplaying when you're speaking in-character.
In yet yet another sense you're roleplaying when you're doing something "stupid" (bad for the group, bad for the character, something that makes the current situation more difficult) that you think fits with your character, even if it's done completely within the mechanics of the game.
"Why did you charge the troll? You're a Wizard, not a Fighter." "I was roleplaying. My character hates trolls."
No, it's more like if you declare someone playing a game about open-heart surgery who spends all his time stabbing the patients in the kidneys with a scalpel to be playing a game about open-heart surgery. In one way it's true, in another it's not - it depends on what you mean by "playing the game".
There is a profound difference between singing incredibly badly and not singing.
"The world does not work the way you have been taught it does. We are not real as such; we exist within The Story. Unfortunately for you, you have inherited a condition from your mother known as Primary Protagonist Syndrome, which means The Story is interested in you. It will find you, and if you are not ready for the narrative strands it will throw at you..." - from Footloose
There is a profound difference between singing incredibly badly and not singing.
Very true, but as long as nobody here claims that a person sitting still in a corner and not doing it as part of a roleplaying game is roleplaying it's also fairly irrelevant.
To continue your analogy, there are different opinions on what counts as singing. Some would require you to carry some semblance of a tune. Some would count tuneless humming. Some would count if you spoke the words with a certain rhythm as long as you did it to music. Some would count song from a voice-synthesizer. Some would count making the pauses in a song.
All of these are clearly related to singing in some way, but whether they constitute singing depends on how you define the term. And that's why we're having this discussion.
Or, to bring it back to the video game analogy: if you're using the game controls to perform actions the creatores of the game didn't intend you to do and which are at cross-purposes of the pre-defined goals of the game, are you playing the game? Yes, because you're confining your activites to those allowed by the game - you're not "breaking the rules" by reprogramming the game to function differently; everything you do was put in there as possible actions by the game designers. No, because you're not following the intentions of the game designers, not performing the allowed actions with the intent of "winning" the game.
I would agree to that definition, except it leaves some core concepts of acting out. Narrators and voice actors do not necessarily do an action beyond speaking. In many instances, actors do not have to play a different person or character (Neil Patrick Harris in Harold & Kumar, for instance). Hell, even in roleplaying games you don't have to play as a different person or character... it's still roleplay if you, for instance, portray yourself being caught up in a fantasy world. But that portrayal of yourself is still a role, and you are still playing it. The same is true for a narrator, whether himself or not.
Emphasis mine.
Here you neatly capture the fine line some of us are drawing between roleplaying an acting. I think we would say that roleplaying is about choosing actions as if you were someone else, while acting is portraying actions as if you were someone else. An actor can work from a script. I'm not an actor, but I would guess that an actor who was also roleplaying would expand on that script to choose actions for herself that the script leaves out. A D&D roleplayer might not care about the portrayal, but she can still care about getting into the mindset of her character. Below, I think you link this back quite nicely to D&D, but first...
Decivre wrote:
That is very true. In most cases, people think of rules as being "written rules", but one must also remember that many games do not necessarily come with written instruction...
The definition of rules is a bit vague, admittedly... but the definite core concept is that it segregates the game from reality. To use a previously stated concept, rules define where reality ends, and the magic circle begins.
Where I was earlier saying that not all games had rules, I see now that I was really in agreement with you. Not all games have 'written rules', and rules can behave in very unexpected ways. (You give examples, omitted for brevity.) I agree with you that all games have rules in the wider sense you provide. (As an aside, I like to draw a further distinction between laws and rules.)
Decivre wrote:
I agree that without the roleplay, you are missing out on fundamental parts of D&D... but that is exactly Kaldric's statement. To him, the tactical skirmish game alone constitutes roleplay, solely by merit of the fact that D&D is a roleplaying game.
Here we can advance the argument by acknowledging diversity. Although I would call myself a roleplayer, I sometimes play D&D as a tactical skirmish game. At those times I temporarily suspend roleplay and get on with tactical combat. I don't at those times think I am roleplaying, just because the word 'roleplay' is on the box. I would guess that this is scalable. If a group are right at the tactical combat end of the spectrum, they probably use the non-combat rules as sparingly as possible; just to link together their battle campaign. That can have great value for them, because the over-arching context can make the outcome of each battle feel more meaningful. They may not need written rules for anything outside of combat, because as you said
Decivre wrote:
rules are largely there to challenge: do your players wish to be challenged by negotiation, how do they wish to be challenged by negotiation, and what outcome do they wish to see from succeeding in negotiation? The same goes with drink and dance (which I think would be far harder to fill out).
If all we want is a daisy-chain of battles, we might not want any chance to fail to proceed along that chain. That would interfere with our main purpose. We might want to pick the place and time of our next fight, but we don't need anything between our fights to be challenging.
So addressing the OP, if we read 'rules' to mean written rules and 'roleplay' to mean non-combat actions, and if we are that group that only wants a daisy-chain of fights, then we might feel it was 'completely true' that D&D only needs rules for combat. I feel that is how the OP's quoted statement must be read, and now that we look at it, it uses poor definitions that evidently don't hold true all of the time for all D&D groups. I feel we thus thoroughly demonstrate that the OP fails to supply examples in support of his thesis.
Decivre wrote:
The original game of D&D was, in effect, a skirmish wargame... and yet it was also a roleplaying game...
...it was the natural evolution that chainmail took. Arneson and Gygax's wargame group concentrated on fantasy play, and Arneson's new novel style of play allowed players to focus on individual heroes.
That's a nice summary. My notion of what happened is that what started out as originally tactical skirmish battles changed once they went to individual soldiers. Players started to put themself into the mindset of that one guy they controlled, and began roleplaying in the sense that I and others are using, and in your sense too I believe.
I thought it was clear that I meant "a specifically defined meaning in the context of playing roleplaying games", but apparently I should have made that explicit.
Even then, there are plenty of approaches to roleplay (in a way, the list in the DMG about different types of players is kind of a list on the approaches to roleplay), but all of those approaches are unified with the concept of "playing a role". Without that fundamental concept, it stops being roleplay.
Discordian wrote:
But "portray a role" is so loosely defined as to fit in any activity where someone is pretending (using the loosest possible defnition of the term) to be someone else, or in a different situation. In fact, it seems to include any activity except boardgaming - and why that is excluded, I don't know.
Take the following situation: A company wants to test some potential manager candidates by putting them through a roleplaying session. They are split into three groups in separate conference rooms, each of them is assigned a role (sales manager, HR manager etc), and on the whiteboard are representations of the assets they have available: employees, funds and so on. They get told to do their best to make the company run well.
One group really gets into their roles: the sales manager tries to be as smarmy as possible, the CEO is demanding and arbitrary, the HR manager complains about his training budget and blurts "I cannae give ye any more men, captain! She'll blow!" to much hilarity, and the CTO tries to build his own little empire by conspiring with the CFO to get more funds than anyone else.
The other group doesn't do any of that. They discuss the various options and come to a conclusion they can all agree on, dividing the assets in the way they think will be best for the company. The most they get into their roles is "Well, as sales manager I could use a bit more money for an aggressive ad campaign, but I guess I can do without it too." They approach it as a puzzle to be solved with their roles being entirely secondary.
The third group contains most of the "young and hungry" candidates who have figured out what is going on and want to impress the presumably watching managers. They make bold moves: slashing budgets, outsourcing everything, making plays for each others' departments, some sticking to their assigned roles and some ignoring them completely - "I may be the HR manager but surely that doesn't mean I can't make marketing suggestions to the CEO!"
Compare this to three groups playing D&D:
In one the players are really getting into their characters, the cleric crying for vengeance from the heavens, the paladin refusing to help the rogue flank because stabbing someone in the back is dishonourable, and the warlock having imaginary conversations with the demon who gave her her power.
In the other group they don't do any of that. They get through the fights by treating them as tactical wargames. "My guy is the defender and he's starting to get low on hp so he could use a bit of healing, but I guess he can survive another turn." In non-combat situations they just send up the guy with the highest skill modifier for whatever they think they need.
In the third group they treat combat much as the second group: for the most part they make the tactically best moves, occasionally saying something in-character and mostly just describing their actions from a mechanical viewpoint but sometimes adding "and then I stomp him on the foot and say 'Take that, filthy orc!'".
Which of these groups are roleplaying according to the definition you use in relation to roleplaying games? Why? Why not?
Actually, all three of your initial examples include roleplay. The first one has people fully immersing themselves into the concept. This is roleplay as people generally see it when playing RPGs. They were barely doing it to the original intentions of the company (I doubt anybody in the upper tiers wanted one of them to show off their best Scotty impersonation), but they had visualized themselves within a role.
The second one has people using roleplay as a visualizing medium... the one person who said "if I were..." was using a fundamental concept of roleplay to fit himself mentally within the role. They may not be roleplaying externally (showing it outwardly as the first group did), but the fact that they are using their imaginations to put themselves in a role means they are roleplaying.
The third group is an interesting group (they would probably be the business equivalent of power gamers). Despite that, however, they are definitely still roleplaying. While many of them are completely ignoring their own personal role and sometimes visualizing concepts that are dramatically unlikely... but the fact that they are visualizing is core to the idea that they are, in fact, roleplaying.
The latter three are largely also roleplaying to various degrees. Of those, the second group is the closest perhaps to not roleplaying, but even then, there is the possibility that they are....
In the end, roleplay effectively sums to the same concept children use when they play pretend. They mentally visualize themselves within a scenario, whether as themselves or as someone else completely. The kids who find a boat on the beach and pretend they are pirates are roleplaying. The kids who play a game of Risk and start claiming to be emperors trying to conquer the world are roleplaying. Even the kids playing with action figures and dolls who are imagining them in various situations are roleplaying.
RPGs are a lot like that. The kids who are playing on the boat at the beach? They're the kids who get dressed up and go LARPing. The kids who play risk and pretend to be generals? They're the kids who play your classical RPGs and immerse themselves into the game as people within a fantasy world ("I attack the troll."). The kids who play with action figures and dolls? They're the kids who play RPGs and narrate their character's actions in the third person ("My character, Teles, attacks the troll.").
However, the key to roleplay is the visualization, and without it you simply aren't roleplaying. If those kids at the beach just sit in the boat and hang out, they aren't roleplaying. If those kids are just playing a standard game of Risk, they aren't roleplaying. If those kids are just using their action figure's karate chop action to slap the cat in the face, they aren't roleplaying. They are playing for sure, but it isn't roleplay.
The same is, once again, true with roleplaying games. If you approach D&D in the same way that most people approach Yahtzee or Chess, then you are definitely playing a game... but it's not roleplaying, as you aren't "playing a role".
Discordian wrote:
No, it's more like if you declare someone playing a game about open-heart surgery who spends all his time stabbing the patients in the kidneys with a scalpel to be playing a game about open-heart surgery. In one way it's true, in another it's not - it depends on what you mean by "playing the game".
Not really. If a toddler gets into a monopoly set and starts eating the pieces, he isn't actually playing anything at all. Games have the concept of rules to segregate them from reality (which includes the goal of the game), and only by following those rules (and pursuing said goal) are you actually playing the game. Of course, there is the possibility of creating a new game out of the mechanics present (such as team-based monopoly, which I have played before despite the standard goal of monopoly is to be the last man standing... or you could even pick out one of the many variants of Poker, which all have different rules yet the same game pieces). Of course, the age old question of "how much do can you houserule D&D before you are playing a completely different game?" is probably beyond the scope of this discussion.
Of course, this isn't really a question of whether or not someone is playing a game or not... it's a question of how we define roleplay. If roleplay does not require us to play a role, then why is the word "role" even in the phrase?
Discordian wrote:
Er... that's exactly how defining words works. You say "I take this word to have this meaning in this context". That's what defining a word is.
You may not agree with that definition, and if a lot of others also disagree and using the word that way doesn't convey the meaning the person defining it intends it's not a very useful definition, but that doesn't make it "not a definition".
Once we acknowledge that people can use whatever definition they desire for whatever word they wish, the concept of language has no value. It is one thing to define a word which has yet no meaning, or to create a word for something that has not yet been labeled... but to redefine an already-defined word in such a way that it is effectively synonymous with a word that is a component thereof (roleplay being defined as synonymous with play) seems a bit bizarre to me.
Here you neatly capture the fine line some of us are drawing between roleplaying an acting. I think we would say that roleplaying is about choosing actions as if you were someone else, while acting is portraying actions as if you were someone else. An actor can work from a script. I'm not an actor, but I would guess that an actor who was also roleplaying would expand on that script to choose actions for herself that the script leaves out. A D&D roleplayer might not care about the portrayal, but she can still care about getting into the mindset of her character. Below, I think you link this back quite nicely to D&D, but first...
One thing I would like to note is that acting or roleplaying both are defined by a portrayal existing within a different scenario. Not all acting or roleplaying necessarily needs to portray someone else, because it is still roleplay or acting if you pretend to be yourself somewhere else (one of my players made a character who was, effectively, himself being transported to a fantasy world... complete with panic at the sight of an orc and everything). A key example of that is Neil Patrick Harris in Harold & Kumar, or John Malkovich in Being John Malkovich... both actors portraying themselves in a scenario external to the one they were in.
That said, your definitions leave out the concept of improvisational acting, wherein actors choose actions as if they were in a different scenario. Moreover, stating that roleplay omits portrayal excludes players who like to portray their characters, and completely excludes the hobby of Live Action Roleplay, a form of roleplay where portrayal is effectively the medium for roleplay.
At best, the only way we could possibly segregate the two in any real way were if we were to define actors as "professional roleplayers", or perhaps if we were to define acting as "roleplaying primarily for the entertainment of an external audience".
vonklaude wrote:
Where I was earlier saying that not all games had rules, I see now that I was really in agreement with you. Not all games have 'written rules', and rules can behave in very unexpected ways. (You give examples, omitted for brevity.) I agree with you that all games have rules in the wider sense you provide. (As an aside, I like to draw a further distinction between laws and rules.)
Fr the most part, I suppose the best way to segregate laws and rules would be to define laws as "rules within the context of real life" and rules as "laws within the context of a game". :D
vonklaude wrote:
Here we can advance the argument by acknowledging diversity. Although I would call myself a roleplayer, I sometimes play D&D as a tactical skirmish game. At those times I temporarily suspend roleplay and get on with tactical combat. I don't at those times think I am roleplaying, just because the word 'roleplay' is on the box. I would guess that this is scalable. If a group are right at the tactical combat end of the spectrum, they probably use the non-combat rules as sparingly as possible; just to link together their battle campaign. That can have great value for them, because the over-arching context can make the outcome of each battle feel more meaningful. They may not need written rules for anything outside of combat, because as you said
If all we want is a daisy-chain of battles, we might not want any chance to fail to proceed along that chain. That would interfere with our main purpose. We might want to pick the place and time of our next fight, but we don't need anything between our fights to be challenging.
So addressing the OP, if we read 'rules' to mean written rules and 'roleplay' to mean non-combat actions, and if we are that group that only wants a daisy-chain of fights, then we might feel it was 'completely true' that D&D only needs rules for combat. I feel that is how the OP's quoted statement must be read, and now that we look at it, it uses poor definitions that evidently don't hold true all of the time for all D&D groups. I feel we thus thoroughly demonstrate that the OP fails to supply examples in support of his thesis.
That may very well be true. As The_HATED pointed out, many people use roleplay synonymously with non-combat actions when they talk in the context of D&D. In this sense, I suppose the term roleplay may have become a form of jargon. That said, most people who only play D&D as a series of skirmishes, with each skirmish amounting to a tactical game with no in-character visualization whatsoever, would still be "not roleplaying" within the context of both this and the original meaning of the term.
vonklaude wrote:
That's a nice summary. My notion of what happened is that what started out as originally tactical skirmish battles changed once they went to individual soldiers. Players started to put themself into the mindset of that one guy they controlled, and began roleplaying in the sense that I and others are using, and in your sense too I believe.
-vk
Possibly. I actually believe that the game of D&D probably took root long before they ever played a skirmish-based game at all. Judging from the interviews I have read from founders such as Arneson, it actually seems that they were roleplaying as generals of fantasy militaries well before Arneson ever got the idea to scale the game down and let everyone play as a character on the table. In reality, we may never know when the first true "roleplaying game" ever actually occurred. RPGs may have secretly been invented in the 1950s, when a group of kids decided to imagine themselves as emperors conquering the world during a game of Risk.
Very true, but as long as nobody here claims that a person sitting still in a corner and not doing it as part of a roleplaying game is roleplaying it's also fairly irrelevant.
To continue your analogy, there are different opinions on what counts as singing. Some would require you to carry some semblance of a tune. Some would count tuneless humming. Some would count if you spoke the words with a certain rhythm as long as you did it to music. Some would count song from a voice-synthesizer. Some would count making the pauses in a song.
All of these are clearly related to singing in some way, but whether they constitute singing depends on how you define the term. And that's why we're having this discussion.
Or, to bring it back to the video game analogy: if you're using the game controls to perform actions the creatores of the game didn't intend you to do and which are at cross-purposes of the pre-defined goals of the game, are you playing the game? Yes, because you're confining your activites to those allowed by the game - you're not "breaking the rules" by reprogramming the game to function differently; everything you do was put in there as possible actions by the game designers. No, because you're not following the intentions of the game designers, not performing the allowed actions with the intent of "winning" the game.
Actually, singing is the act of "producing musical notes with ones voice". One can sing without making a song... and while the act of singing is pretty explicitly defined (producing any note with the voice is singing), the concept of a song is less so (as I can attest to a number of hit singles that I would hardly call "songs").
As for humming, it does have a number of definitions. Humming can be "the production of vocal sounds while ones mouth is closed", but it has also been defined colloquially with anything that sounds like humming... the rapid movement of small machine parts, as well as the sound of an insect or hummingbird flapping its wings (it is this hum-like sound where the hummingbird gets its name from).
That said, these definitions are linked in a sense. A hum is always tied to the sound of humming, and all things labeled as "hums" supposedly sound similar. In that sense, there are a number of ways to roleplay, but all of them involve "playing a role". If we were to decide that the intersection of roleplay and games allows us to swap the definition of roleplay to include the playing of games, then that logic makes it equally plausible to use the intersection of humming and bird to now claim that all bird are "hums".
