One of the best voices for historical/modern gaming discussion, Black Vulmea, weighed in on my previous post. When people you respect consider your post and find much of it very good - that's a great feeling. The main question my post left him with was the same question that comes up most commonly in response to CAG, which is a variation of: "You reject the word 'roleplaying'? What exactly does that mean?"
BV framed his thoughts on roleplaying as I most commonly hear it from people who by and large are receptive to CAG:
"My personal conception or ideation - I'm loathe to call it a definition - of roleplaying is, "Making decisions as your character." If your character is a game-world avatar of you sitting at the table, as in CAG, then that still fits my concept of roleplaying. So does the "playacting style" EOTB describes as it's practiced and advocated for by many in the hobby. From where I stand, roleplaying isn't strictly deep-character-immersion or "talking in funny voices." "My guy" is a perfectly valid approach to roleplaying for me."
This is how a lot of people having the most years in the larger hobby think about roleplaying. It's understood, at least implicitly, that most people use the term in a narrower fashion - thus inevitably there's some variation of "what roleplaying means to me...". The "to me" is reflexive because we've all been through enough online discussions to know that we can't say "roleplaying" and expect others to understand we simply mean playing to an archetype, or a functional role in a group of varied specialists, or what have you. In the larger discussion this will result in the opposite of functional communication. Thus some form of negotiation occurs where we establish alternate meanings the hearer will consider idiosyncratic to ourselves but may be willing to accept, and from there conversation can take place.
This is however a personal negotiation that must occur each time the subject comes up in a public setting, whether on social media, or in large tent groups with changing membership. It must always be established that we will use a word in a fashion most people do not use it.
I wouldn't begrudge anyone choosing to do this, but I don't really want to have this negotiation periodically. Words change meaning, and it feels like fighting a rear-guard action to insist upon using it in a lapsed meaning. The word "meat" used to mean all the food on the table - whether animal, plant, or otherwise. If I write on an invitation that everyone is welcome to come to my house on Saturday night for an evening of fine meat and drink, none of the vegetarians are going to think to double-check my usage. I'd have to explain my archaic use of the term individually when giving the invitation.
And this gets to the reason for starting up the podcast - we want to reach people who aren't playing any form of "D&D" but love the idea of hanging out with their friends to explore lost tombs, find fabulous treasure, and cross swords with personal nemeses. But because D&D has been around for a long time now, with significant social media reach outside the membership of the hobby, when many of those people hear the word "role-playing" they think "an adult version of tea party".
Because that is what they read, see, and hear.
And often, they're just not interested in that. You can get all of the adventure I listed above in other media, with zero tea party. There's no reason at all to play D&D if you don't like tea party. You can play video games as a group, remotely. You can meet up somewhere and run a 40K scenario. You can get your fill and never have to risk sitting across from someone telling you that unless you are willing to repeat that in character, it never happened at all and they won't consider it valid for play. Or your funny quip that made everyone laugh, yeah...the DM insists your character said it too.
I'm not just white-rooming this or shooting at unicorn games. If "No roleplaying?!?" is the first question many curious RPGers raise, it's also the first reason many new CAGers give for checking us out and settling in. One of the podcast crew blew D&D off for years because his early exposure to tabletop was in the late 90s, after gamers had enthusiastically slurped up editorials in Dragon magazine telling them in no uncertain terms that if they didn't include a hefty dose of tea party in their games then they weren't really roleplaying.
And what he observed did not interest him in the least.
'Really roleplaying' shrinks the gaming hobby by making it unpalatable to a lot of the people Dungeons and Dragons presumed were its core audience. Which is dumb because this is a demographic that will buy things - D&D now desperately wishes it had the revenues of game forms in which play-acting isn't required, and is frantically hallucinating ways to get people to tea party online and buy shiny new character skins every time they roll up characters.
Look, I've been there too - negotiating an alternate definition of roleplaying. The most common responses when I'd describe how I ran games to a general audience (excepting the that's not really roleplaying already mentioned) were:
- you're just playing a board/video game at the table
- well, I roleplay, I don't roll-play
- It's a roleplaying game - it's right in the name!
- the game to me is all about being someone else, if you're not roleplaying (play-acting) interesting characters why play the game at all?
All of this sums up to: there could be nothing more self-defeating than insisting upon describing yourself using terminology your target audience is hardwired to dismiss; its predominate usage being reinforced by almost everyone who isn't you.
But now after explaining further why we arrived at the stance of rejecting the term roleplaying completely, let's get to the meat of BV's question:
"This is the essence of Develop-In-Play rather than Develop-At-Start gaming. Old-school and roots gamers tend to be speak in terms of "story" as an emergent property arising from actual play rather than one planned by the referee - story is something seen in hindsight - and from my own experience, so is characterisation. The more decisions I make for my character, the more subsequent decisions are likely to reflect a consistency and a coherence with what came before. My characters develop interests, habits, and quirks that build on those experiences and ambitions and "my guy" becomes someone else altogether, very different from where the campaign started.
I don't know if EOTB's concept of CAG necessarily excludes or proscribes this."
The short answer is: there's nothing about this that is outside the bounds of CAG, at all.
Every time I create a character it is essentially myself as that class type. But as BV says, the character, by virtue of interacting with the game world, often becomes a variation of myself that is different than all the other variations of myself I've played before. I might never bother giving the guy a name (I do name some of my characters) but he's still different than EOTB-6106 and EOTB-5114. He's made different enemies, developed different habits and often would handle the same situation differently than another character of mine would.
But he also might not. He might handle it exactly the same. And that's the point: I don't care if he winds up different or the same as some other character. He's not why I'm playing, what happens with him as a character per se is some sort of happy accident, and it might be nothing worth remembering. Because I'm not here to develop a character, I'm here - me, EOTB-0001 - to explore tombs, find treasure, cross swords, and kick ass. He's the tool I use to do it, just like a good hammer. Nothing about the hammer is my hobby, however. It's rather incidental to the point even if I truly appreciate a great hammer.
The last characters I ran were a ranger in Zherb's AD&D game, and a thief in Melan's 7VoZ campaign. The ranger wasn't ever named, although the thief was. At creation of the ranger, discord's dice roller (by some powerball-like alignment of odds) spit out a stat string allowing for a class combo I'd never played before: a ranger who could dual-class into illusionist. I've played for a long, long time, but that has never happened. I was intrigued. I've not dual-classed yet, but that ranger character feels different simply because he's already on the lookout for Illusion-y stuff. My decision-making is different and thus experiences are different, priorities are different. I probably won't name him until he completes the switch and can use both sets of powers. I won't really know him until then.
Zero roleplaying (as in the common parlance) has occurred with that character.
The thief has made his way up through the underworld in Melan's campaign, eschewing converting all of his currency into XP and buying assets instead, forming a wide-spanning caravansarai with a talented smuggler ship captain useful for moving...lots of things...lots of places. He's bought gifts for nomad tribes simply to gain goodwill in case negotiations might be necessary in the future to move...things...to places...across their territory. And this has all been done in downtime between fantastic swords and sorcery adventures that have seen him gain immense physical strength from plunking himself down on a mysterious throne, gain some divinatory boons he keeps in his back pocket from respecting altars to bat-gods, and some other stuff that, well, we'll just have to see how it plays out if I can get that day/time slot free again soon. But I make decisions with that character in a way unlike any other thiefly character I've played.
There has been some minor real roleplaying by myself, in that campaign. Not much, incidental really, undertaken when it was helpful rather than performative. But never once was it necessary.
The acceptable roleplaying floor for an individual participant must be zero so that people who aren't into that can relax and have fun. The ceiling can be whatever each group determines. But if everyone agrees they're really there to maximize adventure gaming - to explore, loot, fight, conquer, and gain glory - then is there really enough table time left over for roleplaying to be more than incidental? An activity having a floor of zero of a possible action can't be defined by that action. To attempt that would be nonsensical - but conversely, switching monikers from "fantasy adventure game" to "RPG" is also the reason play-acting-cum-roleplaying grew from this odd thing some people did into a rhetorical bludgeon held by TSR editorialists who didn't really enjoy high-stakes gaming.
The hobby needs a recognized playstyle where people know a table running it isn't going to spend dice-rolling time talking with merchants to buy arrows, they don't have to worry about playing Bob the 53rd (who is the same in every respect as the 52 Bobs before him) and getting a roll-eye, and they never have to be "in-character" if they don't want to be. CAG is that playstyle (among other things) and it is long overdue.
Pretty good stuff.
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Danke, JB!
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