An Aside: Wherein I discuss something that happened to me in class

I am a student at a community college. Lots of people attend this school from all age groups and backgrounds. The semester is over, but what prompted this post happened on the first day of my Public Speaking class. About halfway through the class session, we were given an assignment to interview one of our classmates. We were then responsible for introducing our partners to the class in a very brief (under two minute) speech during the next class session. My partner, Lisa, was extremely nice and I ended up sitting next to her each class and chatting. While she was interviewing me, she asked what my hobbies were, so I told her about my D&D game. Now, Lisa is  most definitely not from a nerdy background. All of my friends are nerds, the shop I hang out at every week is a game shop filled with nerds, I live and breathe nerd-dom. So it was very jarring when she asked me, "What is an RPG?" She had never encountered the concept. I can't fault her for that, she just has different interests than me. I don't exactly remember my response, but it was brief and felt unsatisfying to me. So, for my own benefit, here is a real answer.

"What is a Role Playing Game?"

At its most basic level, an RPG is a form of storytelling. Storytelling and stories in general have been around pretty much as far back as archeologists have been able to look. As humans, we love telling stories and we love hearing stories, but more than that we like to make up our own stories. In the past, we invented stories about how the Earth was created, how the stars got in the sky and all sorts of other things. Even though we eventually learned where those things came from, stories still endure. What makes RPGs unique as a storytelling device is twofold. First, RPGs are cooperative storytelling. This is a point of contention with some GMs who would prefer that players not “trample” their carefully crafted narratives. These people forget that the players have free will and want (as most people do) to change the world based on their own ideals. The second way RPGs are unique is that they are storytelling gamified. There are concrete rules in place that determine how to adjudicate the way in which the players interact with the world and vice-versa.  Because success is not always guaranteed in the real world, the same should be true of our stories. If there is no possibility of failure, there is no dramatic tension. So we use dice or playing cards or tokens or even skillful tasks to determine success in the game world. The actual method of determining success is mostly irrelevant, so long as it is not simply an arbitrary choice.

Now that we know what an RPG is, why are there so many of them? RPGs only really differ in a few ways: different allocation of responsibilities, different systems for determining success and different niche roles. Many RPGs follow a very standard allocation of responsibility, the GM is the architect and arbiter of the world he or she has designed, and the players’ control extends only to the actions of his or her own character. This is not a bad system, but it does tend to discourage new players from attempting to fill this role due to the amount of information that the GM must keep track of. It’s a daunting task to even some veteran players. However, some systems give the players more ability to affect the game world than this. On the minor end of the spectrum are games in which the players are given some ability to simply change the world around them in the current scene. At the other are games where there is no GM at all, and the game is entirely cooperative. As for different systems to determine success, the majority of RPGs tend to use dice. While all of these games use the same type of tool, the way in which it is employed is often vastly different. Some games use one die per player; others require each player to have dozens of dice. Some games only use on type of die; others use several. Most games use normal dice, in the shape of the platonic solids (and the ten-sided die as well); at least one uses dice with unusual numbers of sides, such as three and five. The room for variety is very large. However, dice are not the only system used. Some games use playing cards drawn from a deck, others use tokens. At least one game uses a Jenga tower. Finally, different RPGs are designed to fulfill different desires, or different niches. Many are based in Tolkien-style fantasy, some are sword and sorcery. Some take place in space, or at least the distant future. Some involve magic, some don’t. Some are based on the horror genre, some on superheroes, and there are even ones about entire alien civilizations. Each serves a slightly different purpose, and shuffling them around is often not a good idea. Superheroes don’t work well in a game designed for horror any better than a wizard does in space (usually).

I don't think that Lisa really understood my description RPGs when I explained it in class. This is likely the work of my half-assed response. I did tell her about this blog, so maybe she'll come here and read it. Maybe she'll gain a better understanding. Or not. Regardless, this is a much more fitting description, and maybe now I'll stop perseverating over it and get back to writing my damn game. More likely, I'll get back to my crippling addiction to Diablo III.

-Daniel