Role-Playing Games: An Explanation.

The Game Room
1

I’m typing out this long post more for myself than anyone else, just to get my thoughts down, and to justify my existence. But, there is also a hint of self-realization and self-justification, as well. I also hope to evangelize the benefit of role-playing games, and proselytize anyone who has ever wondered what the big draw to role-playing games is.

Also, too much coffee this morning, and my mind and fingers are vibrating. Please, this is not a Wikipedia article. This is just a folksy, and conjecture and opinion filled primer, based on personal experiences, for anyone interested in knowing someone’s point of view, who is a fan of role-playing games - and has been for a long time.

Short and truncated history of contemporary role-playing games told to me by many different people - some who have met both Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson - and based on what I’ve read:

Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson were from the greater area of Lake Geneva, WI. They were part of a group of war gamers who spent a lot of their free time building miniature table-top recreations of famous historical battles. They would pour thousands of hours into building the terrain on enormous tables, painting thousands of tiny miniature soldiers, and then thousands of more hours recreating historical battles.

Gary Gygax gets most of the mainstream credit for inventing the modern day role-playing game, but by sources close to both parties, there is a rumor that it was Dave Arneson who posited the idea to Gary to start assigning individual attributes to each soldier in the battle - instead of assigning overall stats to large groups of soldier miniatures.

They did that, and through a couple prototype sets of rules, started to incorporate a more fantasy-type of setting, a story-telling and goal-based angle, and included the common alternative races such as elf and dwarf - inspired by Tolkien.

Before 2000, “The Pre-3rd Edition” years:

Gary Gygax came up with the idea of using polyhedral dice to determine chance within the game after finding them in a school supply catalog and carving numbers into them. The editions of Dungeons & Dragons before the year 2000 relied heavily upon all of them. Your character could have, say, a 67 percent chance of understanding the elven script carved into a doorway, or your character could do a possible 1D4 points of damage to the minotaur that you encountered.

Dave Arneson heavily influenced the use of storytelling into the game, making it more of a “campaign” than just a “game”.

Betwixt the hard results of the dice, and the fluid and subjective storytelling, a neutral judge, or “Dungeon Master” - “DM” for short - was necessary to keep the campaign going. And that is how it was through the 70s, 80s, and 90s.

D&D gained popular success - and notoriety - even being featured in the movie “ET”. It’s the game the boys were playing in the beginning scenes around the kitchen table.

As the rule books were printed, rules were changed and modified - known as “errata” - and over the 20 years leading into the 90s, there were scores of different rule books in circulation with slightly different rules. Printing dates and editions needed to be compared to see which rule was the most current rule.

In the mid-90s, the Dungeons & Dragons Compendium was published. After 2nd Edition being the default edition for something like 20 years, the fan base was ready for the fabled 3rd Edition of Dungeons & Dragons.

As soon as we heard that a new book was published, my friend and I ran out and immediately bought it. We brought it home to play it. We opened the front cover, and the very first line in the foreword said, “First off, this is NOT 3rd Edition.” It was simply a compendium to standardize all the different rules errata that have been floating around for the past decades.

3rd Edition: The edition to unite all other editions, and gamers worldwide:

Think of 3rd Edition D&D as, say, the iMac, or Windows 98. Sure, primitive by today’s standards, but it was the matured result of everything that came before it, and ready for the mainstream. There is a definite division between what came before, and what came after.

It was social phenomenon within the gaming community, and it benefitted from the longevity of gamers. It was a standardized, and perfected, and polished ruleset, published uniformly across the globe. Gamers who played the earlier versions of D&D as teenagers were now parents, and they started playing with their own teenage children. And, their teenage children introduced their friends to it.

Within a year of the publishing of 3rd Edition, it was replaced with 3.5. Since the change happened so quickly and succinctly, from now on, 3.5 is the standard that all gamers refer to. It’s practically a brand name. Much like how there is the Mustang 5.0, when you say “3.5”, everyone around you knows exactly what you are talking about.

Why was it lauded as the perfect rules system? It was united under the “D20 System” and the “Open Gaming License”.

The D20 System standardized most of the randomness in the game to the D20 polyhedral - instead of having to switch between the D4, and then D8, and then percentile dice constantly. It kept the complexity in the game, but simplified it at the same time.

The Open Gaming License was revolutionary. When 3rd Edition was created and published, almost as a declaration of the game belonging to the masses, and not a corporation, inside the back cover of the main rulebook, the OGL was written. Much like the Magna Carta or Declaration of Independence, the game was given to the world without an expectation of any returns, much like the Polio vaccination.

This made the 2000s the Golden Age of Gaming. With this license, which freely gave the game to the world, scores and scores of independent developers used the license to create and market their own games under the same ruleset. Give something of value away for free, and it will come back tenfold. 3.5 dominated.

Fourth Edition: the Division:

3.5 was the default role-playing system through the 2000s. When it was announced that 4th Edition would be published in the late 2000s, the general consensus among 3.5 gamers was, “If 3rd Edition was good, and 3.5 is better, than 4th Edition will be perfection.”

4th Edition was published in the late 2000s, and after the initial hysteria, the massive fanfare subsided to gamers having to question and debate, both internally and externally, about their conflicted feelings about Fourth Edition. Some loved the shiny new system. Others, after much internal strife, had to solemnly admit that they…ahem…actually did not like it. Blasphemy. A role-playing gamer that doesn’t like an edition of D&D?

The agreed-upon elegance of the 3.5 ruleset was replaced with a very top-heavy and complicated ruleset of Fourth Edition.

After being involved with many debates on this topic, the main take-aways of the debate was:

[ul][li]Fourth Edition resembled more of a World of Warcraft or Magic: The Gathering type of game.[/li]
[li]3.5 had simple characters and complicated rules. Fourth Edition had simple rules and complicated characters.[/li]
[li]3.5 was tough, and your character always felt the threat of imminent death was possible. Fourth Edition characters were powerful, and success was almost always assured.[/li]
[li]3.5 was about the struggle. Fourth Edition was about the conquest.[/ul][/li]
I’ll get into the different reasons people even play role-playing games later, but this difference in the editions struck right at one of the core of the differences in the different personalities of gamers. The gaming community was divided, and still is to this day.

The rise of Paizo: Back to basics:

In the 2000s, Paizo Publishing was one of those independent gaming companies that benefitted from the D20 ruleset and OGL mentioned earlier. They designed, published, and sold gaming supplies to be used in the 3.5 system.

Based in Redmond, Washington, they saw the division in gamers between 3.5 and Fourth Edition, and took a huge gamble. They saw the desire of a large part of the gaming community, who threw away their 3.5 books in a Cortez-type of burning of their ships, and yearned for the days of 3.5 to continue.

They organized what some have said to be the largest worldwide beta-testing of a game ever, based on the 3.5 ruleset, to continue in the spirit of 3.5. The result was “Pathfinder” - or as some people refer to as “3.75”. They were allowed to do this because of the OGL and D20 system. As long as they did not reference any copywrited material directly from D&D 3.5, this was allowed.

Paizo has benefitted immensely from this gamble. A year ago, the various Pathfinder rule books were outselling the Fourth Edition rulebooks 4 to 1. Seven of the top ten best-selling rulebooks in this genre on Amazon belonged to Pathfinder.

Now, D&D 5th Edition has recently been published. It’s too early to tell how substantial this edition will be.

Today, I play Pathfinder with all ages, races, backgrounds, and genders of people. Never before have I seen a role-playing game unite everyone so well. I was at a party a couple years back, a normal cocktail mixer, and there was a table of gamers playing Pathfinder. I looked on with admiration and enjoyment.

People who know I play Pathfinder come up to me regularly and say, sometimes sheepishly, “So, we were thinking of trying out this Pathfinder thing. We heard you know a lot about it. Would you think of introducing it to us?”

But, what’s the draw to role-playing games?

People who enjoy role-playing games enjoy them for several different reasons.

Some people like the social aspect of sitting around a table with other like-minded individuals, and experiencing something together for the first time.

Others like the ability to do stuff, and take chances, that they normally wouldn’t otherwise be able to do in real life.

Some like the chance and gamble of randomness.

Others like starting off with a humble and weak character, and over time, through struggle and tribulations, building and sowing that character into something stronger - and seeing the character change and altered as it grows.

Some like the storytelling aspects, and the suspense not knowing what will happen next, and the delight of discovery.

Why are role-playing games important to me?

I don’t think I’m being overly hyperbolic in saying that if role-playing games didn’t save my life, it definitely made me a better person.

I had two speech impediments growing up. I slurred, and stuttered. Without going into my psyche, I also had social anxiety - the remnants still exist today - and a phobia of public speaking.

Of the above reasons gamers like role-playing games, I like role-playing games for the suspense, the chance, and the opportunity to grow a character through trials. Those are the aspects that drew me to role-playing games. But, if I wanted to participate, I had to be social. Participating in role-playing games helped me conquer my social awkwardness, correct my speech, and alleviated my phobia of public speaking.

Since my teenage years, role-playing games were just something that I always did in my free time, without even thinking about it. Sure, there is the mainstream stigma that I dealt with. Playing a role-playing game does require a lot of blocked-off hours of my attention, which I had to explain or defend to others. “I have this thing I have to do.” “Naw, I can’t make it. I have another obligation.”

It wasn’t until only a couple short years ago, when someone asked me about my hobbies, I said that I didn’t have any. They retorted with, “Well, what do you spend most of your free time doing or thinking about? That’s your hobby.”

In a moment of self-realization and self-awareness, I exclaimed, “Yes, I play Pathfinder. It’s a great game, and I would love the opportunity to show you why.”

If you made it this far, I want to thank you for your attention. As you can tell, role-playing games are important to me, and I appreciate you listening.

2

Nice post and all, but it somehow makes it seem like D&D and its relatives are the only RPGs ever, while in reality there’s a staggering amount of different systems out there. Sure it is the most famous of them but your text makes it seem there’s no others.

3

It’s not exactly how I remember the timeline. The Pathfinder public beta testing was done while 4e was still being worked on. Back then, people were excited about the preview they were seeing of the new system in the Saga edition of Star Wars. The most common complaint about 4e was that it felt more like a D&D-themed board game than D&D.

The gap between 3rd edition and 3.5 was actually 3 years, according to the chart at ENWorld. Years seemed longer to me back then, but even a year between editions would have shocked me.

Also, its misleading to characterize d20 as not requiring you to switch dice. You constantly had to switch when it came time to roll damage, for example. What you’re getting at is that actual resolution of most success-vs-failure checks was now done with the d20 with modifiers, whereas it was a hodgepodge of different mechanics under older systems – percentile for thieving skills, d20 for proficiencies, d6 for detecting secret doors, etc. Also, importantly, it established an important new universal rule that a higher defense rating or a higher die roll was always better than a lower one, instead of for example this business where you had to roll over your saving throw rating to make your save, but on an attack you had to roll high enough that when the number was subtracted from your THAC0 rating, it would be low enough score a hit on the enemies AC rating, which improved on a downward scale, or roll a d20 less than or equal to your proficiency rating on a proficiency check. That’s three different resolution systems just based on one die.

Sorry to be so picky. I’m thinking of this as a first draft of an attempt to attract people to the hobby, in which case you may want to note that the history of the game is of little interest to people who aren’t already playing it. On that you only need enough detail to make it clear that there is in fact a history, a hint of a larger back story. The detail with the scene from ET gives the aura of a larger cultural resonance, for example. That’s where you probably want to start when pitching the game to newbs, who almost certainly have heard of the game but know it mostly through jokes at its expense. Then you would probably want to parlay that into a discussion of the sorts of things the gamers themselves get out of it - the creative social interaction is at least as important as mechanics, and more likely to make the uninitiated care.

4

Yeah; This is pretty much what I was going to say - you haven’t written an “Explanation of Role Playing Games” (Especially since you haven’t, really, explained them at all - not even D&D) but rather a “History of Dungeon & Dragons.”

Which is fine, as far as it goes, but it’s not really even scratching the surface in terms of either History or…explanation.

Edit: I also feel it’s a little disingenuous to promote Paizo by how well their books are selling vs 4th ed a year ago when WotC had basically ceded the field and said “Forget 4th Edition! Just wait for 5th guys, it’ll be great!”

5

Yep - I’ve roleplayed for 25 years, and I think I’ve played maybe … 30 hours of any flavour of D&D in that time - 10 of those being modules at cons.

6

It was interesting for me, as an history of D&D, because despite playing it at the beginning when there were few alternatives, I then switched to other more creative RPGs, and never played D&D since…I’d guess the mid 80s. So, I’ve no clue what the version 3 or 4 can have been like.

But as others said, your post is only an history of dungeon and dragons (and the part of it you’re familiar with…lots of things about the switch from 3rd to 4th edition, but what about the switch from basic D&D to Advanced D&D around 1980, for instance? :smiley: ). Even though it’s the first and the most famous, I’d guess most players, like me, rarely ever played it, because they liked much better Runequest, or Vampire : the masquerade, or whatever.

Also, I don’t think it really explains what is a role-playing game, to begin with. Someone who don’t know RPG would need to know much more about that, and way less about the various editions of D&D, that are pretty much interchangeable, if you ask me, regardless how much debate it could have created amongst the fans.

7

My preferred explanation of role-playing games is simple: It’s like those games of Cops and Robbers, or Cowboys and Indians, or whatever, that you played when you were little. The dice and rules are just there to resolve the inevitable “I shot you! No you didn’t, I shot you first! You missed!” disputes.

8

One aspect that predates D&D is the idea of a judge controlling the game. That goes back to 19th century military exercises where there are officers assigned to watch the exercise, monitor how the participants are doing, make decisions about the outcome of events, and introduce new elements into the simulated battle. They are, for all practical purposes, the equivalent of dungeon masters.

9

So a little constructive criticism about the writing itself:

The voice you use seems to be an attempt at a kind of pseudo-academic “history of D&D” narrative, but most the actual content is your personal opinion. This is especially true when you talk about 4th edition. Without getting into the whole “edition wars” thing, I’ll merely say that I vehemently disagree with just about everything you wrote in that section.

You do mention, at the beginning of your post, that this is your opinion. I’m just saying that the tone and the content don’t quite line up.

I do agree with you about the potential transformative power of roleplaying games. They’ve always been an important part of my life.

10

4th Edition is a classic example of giving people exactly what they were asking for and then discovering that they suck at explaining what they actually want.

It’s a very good game that does an excellent job of doing what it set out to do; The problem is that what it set out to do was not what a lot of people wanted even though they claimed it was. It’s also without question the most noticeably different version of D&D - people like clairobscur should be very careful with statements declaring that all editions are interchangeable, since even from a non-edition warrior standpoint, this games have some pretty significant differences.

I tend to ignore what Pathfinder players say about 4E because a lot of them tend to be… ill informed. Unfortunately, Chicago Faucet seems to fall into this category as almost everything stated about 4E appears to be demonstrably false. (Seriously? 3E was ‘tough’? One of the DESIGN GOALS of 3E was to make it easy.)

11

If Dave Arneson posited the idea to start assigning individual attributes to each soldier in the battle, that idea has very little in itself to do with role-playing as a type of game. The most important thing with role-playing is the players’ role-playing in a story that develops as the player characters take part in an adventure without a board; that is what is unique, not individual attributes in a war game.

The period between the idea and the 3rd edition (0-2), which certainly must be the most important in the history of RPG, is pretty much skipped. It’s almost like skipping Apollo 11 in the history of moon landings, is it not?

12

It’s an interesting point, or at least it probably would be if I were sure what you’re getting at. Can you say more about this? What did people say they wanted that resulted in 4e, for example?

13

I forget many of the details; The most obvious example, though, is the ‘linear fighters, quadratic wizards’ issue where fighters start off generally better than, or at least on par with, wizards and other spellcasters, but that as levels are gained, fighters become essentially useless while wizards increase in power to cosmic levels. There’s also the fact that 3X many classes are essentially worthless (even compared to other classes that are supposed to do more or less the same thing), and wizards, in particular, often able to do everything better than the classes who are supposed to be ‘good’ at those things. So, ‘balance’, I guess is the big one. I suspect that things like ‘chargen traps’ (choices that you are technically allowed to make during character creation, but which contain options that you should basically NEVER EVER CHOOSE) and general overcomplexity were in there too.

WotC didn’t create 4E in a vacuum. They created it by LISTENING THEIR FANBASE. Maybe too literally.

14

But what they did in 4e was to give up on balance. Instead of making fighters as good as wizards, they made everyone wizards. Good balance requires diversity.

15

As I would often comment when I had a group playing 4e, suddenly every class was as complicated to play as the wizard. On the other hand, the wizard was suddenly a lot less complicated to play. I’ve recently been reading some of the backlog of D&D novels, though, and it occurs to me that the game mechanics that the stories involved doing what they were able to do by the old school rules. In 4e, wizards mostly seemed to get the same abilities that fighters got, with different flavor text.

16

This seems like a good place to mention Playing at the World, Jon Peterson’s encyclopedic history of the invention of D&D. It’s a fascinating read.

As others have pointed out, if you’re trying to write a brief history of D&D, it’s odd to focus so much on 3rd edition. 3.5 was the “core” system for only 5 years. 4th edition has already been around longer than that. 1st edition was around for 12 years before 2nd edition came along.

17

I think you’re underestimating what I consider interchangeable. All editions are RPGs, the games aren’t narrative-driven, there’s an extensive set of rules governing actions, they’re in a high fantasy setting, they aren’t tied to a specific world or setting, character types are strictly divided in classes, progression is discrete by leveling, experienced characters are totally outclassing new characters, and so on…

So, yes, pretty much interchangeable. I played many RPGs in my younger years, and frankly you pick whatever rule system works the best for you, and concepts like “class” or “level” or “generic fantasy world” weren’t things that worked well for me, which makes all editions of D&D mostly the same thing from my point of view.

18

This doesn’t really make any sense. You can’t have “most classes suddenly become as complex as the wizard” AND “the wizard suddenly becomes much less complex”. Unless you mean “Everyone is now as complicated as the new wizard” which is a completely meaningless assertion because it would have been equally true if they’d just dumbed wizards down to 3X fighter levels of blandness, and doesn’t really say anything about how ‘complex’ anyone actually is.

Yes, they evened out the level of complexity - that was another design goal: Make sure everyone has interesting things to do in combat instead of “I power attack for 3 again.” Mission accomplished.

Asserting that everyone has “the same abilities with different flavor text” is a baseless assertion. Do fighters have any abilities that create zones they can move around and sustain? No they do not. Do wizards have attacks that cause them to do weapon damage to all adjacent targets? No they do not. Do fighters have powers that allow them to hit an area at range 10? No they do not. Do wizards have the ability to encourage enemies to focus on them by giving them penalties to hit others? No they do not. These are clear mechanical differences. The fact that some of them are ‘daily’ and some of them are ‘at will’ does not in any way mean that these classes’ abilities ‘differ only in flavor text’ or that the classes play at all similarly. There are legitimate complaints about the Daily/Encounter/At Will power structure, but “everyone plays the same” is not one of them.

Also, sorry, clairobscur, but you’ve just basically said “All games I don’t like are interchangeable” and I think we can all tell that that is not correct.

19

Sounds like you took my meaning quite well, so I’m not sure why you’re objecting. It used to be that Wizard was a class whose intricacies were best handled by players willing to do a lot of reading and strategizing. In 4e, the Wizard was just much simpler to handle and the complications of playing that class did not exceed the complications of playing other classes.

I’d characterize it as more of a overly breezy exaggeration, but your point that there were non-overlapping mechanisms of battle defining the niches of each class must be acknowledged. Should I assume from your passionate apologism that you would also deny that it all just kind of seemed samey? This is also baseless, of course, but I’m not the only one to feel that way. Actually arguing the point would require me actually digging out books to reference fighter abilities that except for the mention of weapons had effects more reminiscent of magic spells than combat maneuvers. Much of what every class did seemed more like spells whose action principles couldn’t be described in normal physical terms than something you could describe in terms of mundane objects interacting according to transparent principles of causation. Everybody was a Wizard.

20

Again - this was a design goal. Now everyone can do lots of strategizing and reading instead of most classes getting the ‘you suck’ stick if they weren’t spellcasters. Are there other ways they could have done this? Maybe. But I haven’t heard any good suggestions yet. And yes, this was something people asked for when they said “We want non-casting classes to be less boring.” which, yes, they did. Look closely at 3X. A handful of spellcasters absolutely dominate the game to the point where certain other classes are almost literally not worth playing. Heck, I was reading an article today about the problems with the Monk. This does not exist in 4E. Not all classes are equally good, but there’s nowhere near the degree of dominance/failure that exists in 3.5.

There are whole articles devoted to cataloguing these problems. Observe the absence of any martial classes above tier 4.

How very sporting of you?

I think I would like you refrain from vaguely insulting insinuations. “Apologism”? Really? Is that what we’re down to here? Is it really that hard to have an objective discussion about these games without casting aspersions on someone’s character and intent? I don’t play 4E anymore. I haven’t for years. I don’t play 3E/Pathfinder either. I have no horse in this race. It just irritates me that people seem unwilling to believe that it has any merits while they sing the praises of <insert game system that for some reason is usually Pathfinder here>.

To answer your question, no, it does not feel samey to me at all. And there’s nothing ‘apologetic’ about this. The very act of playing a character whose ‘goal’ is to attract as much attention to himself as possible (and has tools designed to do so) is radically different from, say, a characters whose strategy focuses on finding a lone, vulnerable opponent and hammering them to death, or a character whose strategy is to lurk at the edges of a fight and find places to put down strategically placed AoEs. The fact that everyone has X powers per fight makes no difference to me at all.

I’m sure you’re not, but holding up the “Hey man, it’s not just MY opinion” card in this sort of discussion, when you admit the point is baseless, is not really super useful, don’t you think? How much 4E did you actually play? And when? And how many of these opinions are based on things people told you?

Please do go ahead and try to find a fighter power that “seems more like a magic spell” because I just spent ten minutes leafing through them and I didn’t find any. To be fair, the fighter is a terrible class for you to try to use as an example here, because their powers are really not spell like at all. You could make a better argument with, say, some rogue stuff (AoE blind?) but even so, this undercuts your assertion that “everyone plays/feels” the same pretty severely.

On the other hand, it’s correct that everyone feels a little bit “magical” - though I would use the term “heroic” instead. Martial classes are now capable of exceptional, impressive, almost ‘supernatural’ feats of arms rather than “Swinging a little harder and having a higher chance to miss” the way they were in previous editions.

I think that you are overstating just how often this happens. Yes, there are some powers that are hard to justify, though it is often the result of the situation rather than the power (“How did you manage to knock that ooze prone?”); It’s also worth pointing out that this is only even a valid argument for a relatively small subset of classes (“Martial” classes) because the idea that, say, a Paladin can’t do something “spell like” is of course rather silly. Really, the -better- argument is “I don’t understand why my fighter can only do that once per encounter/day” rather than “That effect seems too much like a spell.”

The fact remains that the game plays out extremely well from a strategic combat angle. Everyone has something interesting to do, and everyone has a good array of options, and every class feels different. The fact that some effects map imperfectly to the fiction is a legitimate complaint, but no one seems interested in recognizing the fact that the system does what it does very well.

Anyway, I’m done with my little bit of “Maybe you should look at what the game actually does and what it was designed to do before casting aspersions” rant. If people want to discuss D&D editions further, politely, we should stop derailing this thread and open a new one.