Are You Playing D&D or Roleplaying?

[Neil Gow]

- Potentially controversial subject, read charitably
- Remember, I love D&D

I have been ignoring the D&DNext stuff, relying on Baz to filter anything of importance through to us. However the entire process has made me think about something and that is why my reaction to Old School D&D has been so ... snarly.

I think it rotates around one simple concept, one truism that has stuck in my craw from Day One.

"Unlike other versions of the game, 4th Ed stops you from roleplaying."

Now I have said before, tongue-in-cheek, that most people played D&D wrong. Ranges are there for a reason and if you aren't using them correctly, with at least a range-friendly map then you are just proto-narrativists saying you are playing D&D. The battlemat and figures side of 4e is often cited as doing away with 'roleplaying' for some reason. I've never bought this. At all.

I've also looked at what old books I have and I have yet to find any references in them as to how to roleplay. Its just not there. 4th ed offers you no more or less instruction in how to 'roleplay' than any other version of the game. In fact, I would argue that the DMGs offer more material of that nature than any other version.

And yet, in the face of this evidence, I'm still told this.

So I thought some more and it hit me - maybe we are mixing Apples and Chainsaws here?

What if what one person calls 'roleplaying' is different from what another person calls 'roleplaying'?

Now this might seem to be bleeding obvious, but bear with me because I am not talking about how the inner psyche exploration of 'A Penny for my Thoughts' differs from the two-fisted pulpy-ness of 'Spirit of the Century' or the throw-the-horns gonzo of 'Umlaut'. No, I'm talking about the probability that there are people who see ten foot poles, perfectly square rooms always in multiples of ten, secret doors for no reason, inevitably animated statues, random treasures, wandering monsters, ridiculously placed pit-traps and patrons in taverns as 'roleplaying'

That is what they see in D&D. That is what roleplaying is and thus when something doesn't do that, it isn't 'roleplaying'

I have to say, it hit me like a bolt from the blue. I can be a slow bear sometimes.

It explained OSR to me. It explained the dislike/distrust/open hostility to indie games. It explained how 4e somehow did away with 'roleplaying' whilst having no more or less roleplaying instruction in it than previous editions.

Apples and indeed chainsaws, as I said.

So am I right? Is it possible that 'the D&D hobby' and 'Roleplaying' might exist in two different definitions in many people's heads and the same in others? Is that the fundamental schism at the heart of our community? Am I just late to the realisation that someone else has made a decade ago?

Neil

ps. This is what happens when I have two weeks holiday. I have seven weeks off in the summer, Lord only knows what crap I will come up with then.

[Orpheo]

D&D is a roleplaying game. Take away the word game and you're left with something different.

[thenovalord]

the minis et al didnt take away some of the roleplaying bits from D&D, but they way skill challenges are laid out, in my only played for 6 months mostly LFR experience, did

And to answer the OP, yes roleplaying means many things to many people
the way some people roleplay may not be how others roleplay
the way some people roleplay may really annoy, and cause major frothing, to others
the way some people roleplay may influence, in a happy way, how you roleplay

it is a game, its all about your experience terrible pun intended, what you do with it, playing with like minded individuals if you wish to, and if you can find them

there an insane amount of different games, and different amendments to those games, and so different ways to play those games. Even the same game is played different by different people

No idea where I am going with this

enjoy your two weeks off, and look to play in your 7 weeks and not over-analyse....I have 12 weeks off this summer....i really need to find something to do with my time!!

[Neil Gow]

D&D is a roleplaying game. Take away the word game and you're left with something different.

If I recap my final statement as

So am I right? Is it possible that 'the D&D game hobby' and 'Roleplaying games' might exist in two different definitions in many people's heads and the same in others? Is that the fundamental schism at the heart of our community? Am I just late to the realisation that someone else has made a decade ago?

Does it still hold?

@Novalord - how the hell have you managed to wangle 12 weeks off in the summer? I thought you were one of the downtrodden underclass of teaching that is a FE lecturer and not one of the toffee-nosed elites in their Ivory Towers, at university?

[thenovalord]

@Novalord - how the hell have you managed to wangle 12 weeks off in the summer? I thought you were one of the downtrodden underclass of teaching that is a FE lecturer and not one of the toffee-nosed elites in their Ivory Towers, at university?

total threadknap....its 75 days, so only 10.5 weeks, my bad!! i dont get paid for it! so i may have to find bits and bobs of work to keep Mrs Thenovalord happy....OR i could spend the whole summer gaming with JonnyG who gets even more time off than me!

on the FE front I wrote up a pile of reports for tutors. In them all I had written 'target number' not 'target grade'..and only found out when a few tutors contacted me asking to correct....sometimes I think I game too much

...and now back to our normal service....

[old timer]

How i see this, which may or may not answer your questions, is that when i play traveller, legend, savage worlds and all the other role playing games i own/played/etc, the game part is the rules of that particular game that allows me to determine what my characters do or fail to do. When playing these games, i role play that characters interactions with other characters, but roll when i need to do something that i, the player, cannot do.
Remove the rules, or most of them, then i am left with role play, which something i only did on training sessions when i was a support worker. To me, that is the difference.

[DigitalMage]

For me playing D&D is roleplaying. D&D is just one of many rpgs out there. Some RPGs have more mechanical crunch than others, but all require you to play a role.

If anything, I tend not to think of some "story telling" games as RPGs - ones where players don't own a specific character but make up several characters and play them as much as NPCs (e.g. Universalis) - for me that isn't what I term roleplaying.

[Evilgaz]

Well, Ja, natürlich, everyone has different definitions which can cause the troubles to begin (see threads on roleplaying theory for details).

My view is that when people talk about roleplaying, they mean the talky bits, the interactions, cool descriptions etc. The game bit is the mechanics and rules. Of course the two can meld together at various points. If other people don’t mean that when I chat to them about 4e inhibiting roleplaying (or whatever) then we’re getting nowhere fast.

Everyone bases their idea of roleplaying on how they were introduced to the game and the experiences they’ve had since.

4e for example probably doesn’t give you any less roleplaying advice than Savage Worlds (probably more), but the game limits my roleplaying because there’s tons of time dedicated to bigass fights in the former and absolutely require a board and miniatures to do it properly. In the latter I can have lots of equally big fights a lot quicker and get to do more of the touchy feely stuff in between to pad it out. No one at Pinnacle or Wizards is telling me how to game, but the tools they’ve given me influence what I do with the session.

I’ve been using Interactions in TOR, which aren’t a million miles away from skill challenges in 4e. Using either of these systems as written, it could easily devolve into just making a bunch of rolls until you succeed or fail. Its up to me and the players to come up with the cool shizzle between the dice rolls (i.e. roleplaying) to make it my version of Roleplaying and not just a dice rolling exercise.

Other people may well be happy with the dice rolling exercise and hoping to “win” as that’s roleplaying to them, but its not really playing a role much.

Each to their own.

This is the hard bit about convention GMing… you get a bunch of people at the table and they can all have a different idea about what constitutes a good session!

[ian_orourke]

So I thought some more and it hit me - maybe we are mixing Apples and Chainsaws here?

Is it possible that 'the D&D hobby' and 'Roleplaying' might exist in two different definitions in many people's heads and the same in others? Is that the fundamental schism at the heart of our community?

Am I just late to the realisation that someone else has made a decade ago?

Yes

Yes...to a degree in certain communities.

Yes

No time for a longer explanation at the moment.

[zackspacks]

the way some people roleplay may not be how others roleplay
the way some people roleplay may really annoy, and cause major frothing, to others
the way some people roleplay may influence, in a happy way, how you roleplay

That needs setting to music matey, gangsta rap for sho'.

WRT Neil's OP though, I don't think there is a definitive answer. As long as the crew are enjoying themselves, that's what counts in my book..

cheers
Paul

[apn]

It would take something special to get me back into D&D. I GM'd mostly BECMI and some 1e AD&D back in the day and whilst I own every edition (3.5 is as new as the day I bought it, sat in a box somewhere, 4e was bought used, and remains mostly unused by me) I'd feel happier with making my own lashed up version combining T&T/BECMI rather than playing as written, though the rose tinted specs come out for Red Box basic and before that, the Moldvay version where I started.

Back in the day I suppose our sessions were 50/50 Role/Roll playing dependent on time. My players got itchy if we went too long without killing something and taking its stuff, despite my best efforts to get them into character. Sometimes a lot of the fun was simply sitting back and letting the players hack through mountains of enemies and keeping score, kind of like watching any of the Transformer films, or any other 'leave your brain at the door' exercise.

I think what put me off from 4e was the amping up of 1st level characters. Part of the thrill/danger/sense of achievement came from getting to 2nd level. By third you were breathing a sigh of relief and relaxing a little. By 4-5th, you could enjoy yourself a bit more and concentrate less on whether you were about to lose the character and more on building the character up. 6-10th held few dangers if you were careful and worked together, and after that it was mostly about working out how to spend your mountains of gold on castles and the like, then having to go look for Dragons to pay for the kitchen extension on your castles east wing etc. I don't get that feel from 4e. I've yet to see anyone play it successfully for any length of time in play by post either whereas earlier editions (2e and before) would just need a tweak on how fast you earn experience and you're good to go.

[GuyMilner]

I think we might be trying to divide into two camps what's really a multi-dimensional continuum of tastes and play practices. I think there's certainly a diversity of opinions of what RP should support, where the system should start and end, and where GM/player authority is split; and I think that this can lead in some cases to very strong feelings that different opinions are badwrongfun and/or 'not roleplaying'.

Witness the way of every thread on the internet about mechanics for social conflict, where two immovable forces collide with the "it's not roleplaying if you roll dice for it!" and "it supports roleplaying by giving mechanical heft to outcomes!" camps refusing to give ground.

Or consider Fiasco: no pre-game prep, no GM, all players largely in 'director stance' (although they've got their own PC, to some extent), heavily structured scene economy, and virtually no resolution mechanic whatsoever - task OR conflict based. I've had some of my very best RPing experiences with Fiasco, but I can totally see how folks can see it as 'not roleplaying' if they're used to D&D.

Now, I'd encourage anyone who hasn't given Fiasco a go to try it, but I guess the OSR guys would say the same to me about, say, exploration-focussed white-box D&D, which I really can't see the appeal of. Maybe we should all try and get along like happy bunnies and push our RP experiences out of our comfort zones. But only if we want to, mind.

And, hey, this thread doesn't seem to have devolved into a back-and-forth argument about semantics/definitions yet. Well done everybody!

[andrewmorton1968]

Are you playing D&D or Roleplaying?

Interesting question. No simple answers to this one, are there?

I guess my answer would be both a yes and a no depending on the circumstance -players, scenario, games system, games master etc.

Personally, I like lots of stuff about D&D (obviously only versions before 4th ed - just get that out of the way at the start) and I like some of it less. Published scenarios do have a tendency towards death and destruction without a lot of character role-playing, don't they. I think that any system with a heavy set of mechanics can reduce the game to just rolling dice - it's not just D&D that suffers from this. But that doesn't mean it can't be as rewarding to play as something like Fiasco and nor does it mean less scope for roleplay, either. It depends on a lot more than just the system mechanics.

I come from a trad gaming background - probably like a lot of gamers who are over 40 and have played since whenever - but I like a lot of what I see in the newer breed of indy games. I think D&D (and a lot of other games) just needs more narrative introduced to it and more scope for 'talking out' situations before going for the dice. Focus on the character more than on what the character can do.

[Evilgaz]

Or consider Fiasco

I conclusively proved at IndieCon that Fiasco isn't a roleplaying game. So at least we've got some certainties in life...

[Baz King]

Neil,

I'm honestly still trying to unpick your op, and I'm struggling. Here's what I think you're getting at, and what I have to say about it. If I've got you wrong, please pipe up.

Is D&D a different hobby to the rest of the roleplaying games hobby? Yes, broadly I think it is. It's got it's own idiosyncrasies that shouldn't work, but do, and are insanely popular by the standards of the RPG hobby. It's simply on another scale from all the other games, and of course it's the originator. Note, I'm including a lot of versions of D&D in this, and not all of them have that on the cover (hi Pathfinder)

Is D&D a single game? Absolutely not. There's dozens of different systems you could be using and still legitimately say you're playing D&D. So, 4e has about as much in common with Basic/Expert as SLA Industries has with Cyberpunk 2020. Lots of similarities sure, but crucially different in tone and play style as well as in core rules.

Who hates 4e? Lots of different folk, all of which have another game that is their favourite. The loudest and most vociferous haters being the players of other versions of D&D. Some folk have never liked D&D of any stripe, and 4e just confirmed their view, or in some cases brought them back into the hobby. I'd say that hating D&D is a pretty broad church.

Does 4e prevent roleplaying? Yes, I think it does, if you're not very good at it.

Are people using the term roleplaying in different ways and so perhaps arguing at cross purposes? I don't think so, not really. I get annoyed when folk say that combat isn't roleplaying, because I see and hear rping in combat all the time. But I know what they mean, they just mean talking with NPCs and speaking in character. I get that. The term rollplaying gets an instant red card from me, just because it's so **** elitist and dismissive.

I think so much of this devisiveness comes from leaning so heavily on a system as the arbiter of good gaming. Surely everyone knows its only one of the variables in the good time formula, and important though it is, it's often trumped by GM skill, player engagement, props and handouts, or strength of beverage and lateness of hour. But to speak of any of those as blocks to roleplaying would be getting personal and no-one wants to go there (or often isn't allowed due to sensible forum rules). So instead it's all about the system, and D&D is a target rich environment from that perspective. Half the criticism is blatant nonsense, the other half is personal preference dressed up as attack. The third half is reasonable doubts expressed reasonably. That's the smallest half by far.

Neil, is this helping or am I just rambling at this point?