Sword World: What If D&D Didn't Matter?

This post is me suddenly realizing that I could Simply Write About something I've repeatedly alluded to in replies on social media: 

"If you've ever been curious what a fantasy adventure TTRPG might look like if it hadn't developed under the massive shadow of D&D, then you should check out Sword World."

I probably don't need to explain the shadow of D&D and how it warps the TTRPG landscape. It's the game everyone has played, it's many people's only game, and it's the game everything else is compared to. But the interesting thing is, that's not true across the whole world. In Japan, for example, D&D never got that initial foothold (something about dice availability, if memory serves) so the TTRPG scene developed in its own ways. Even now, D&D is simply Another Game That Exists. It's not the most popular one (that's Call of Cthulhu, interestingly enough), and it's not even the most popular one in the fantasy adventure genre: that honor goes to the subject of this post, Sword World 2.5.

I want to be clear, because the internet has (rightly) learned to be wary when an American wants to talk about something Japanese. This is not a post about how perfectly awesome Sword World is, or how it's better than "western" RPGs, or anything like that. This is about the fact that we have a genuine example of a fantasy adventure TTRPG that was under no pressure to compare itself to D&D, which feels a little like peeking into an alternate timeline. I, for one, find it fascinating to compare and contrast. Maybe you will too.

So let's talk about One Real Example Of What Fantasy Adventure Looks Like When D&D Ain't Shit.

Sword World 2.5

Just as a quick introduction, Sword World is the top fantasy adventure TTRPG in Japan. It's currently in edition 2.5, which is what I'll be talking about here. There's no official English version, so I'll be using a fan translation, which you can get for free HERE. There are three core books; I've looked at Core Rulebook I, which covers the general gameplay rules and the basic races and classes, along with a few monsters. My understanding is that Core Rulebook II and Core Rulebook III include some special additional rules and advanced classes, but I haven't looked at them yet. Trust me, there's plenty of interesting comparisons to observe just in the first book.

Classes & "Skills"

I'm starting here because it's one of the first and biggest differences someone like me would notice about SW2.5. It has classes and skills, but they don't work the way we're used to. Your classes are your skills. You don't put points into skills, or have your class grant you skill proficiencies that scale up automatically. No, when you make a skill check (or spellcasting check, or attack roll), you roll 2d6 and add your level in the relevant class. Most (but not all) checks have more than one class you could use, so you use whichever one you have the higher level in. If you don't have a relevant class at all, then you just roll a blank 2d6 (you don't even get your ability modifier).

As you may have inferred from the preceding paragraph, multiclassing is normal. I don't mean it's "allowed" or it's "not a variant rule" or it's "common." I mean it's the expected default. Every character is a mix of a handful of different classes, likely each at a different level. If that sounds overwhelming, that's because you're imagining "classes" that are much bulkier than the ones in SW. You don't have a five-page spread of abilities for each class. Your class is like... a paragraph or two. For example, the Fencer class explains that as long as you're using light weapons/armor you get an improved crit chance, and... that's it. Add your Fencer level to your combat rolls, just like anything else, and you're ready to rock and roll.

XP, Advancement, and Adventurer Level

While SW2.5 does have "experience points" and "levels," it doesn't work like how you're used to. Instead of reaching the next XP threshold and gaining a level, you spend XP to purchase levels of individual classes. The XP cost of purchasing a level depends on whether it's from a "major" or "minor" class, and how high your level already is in that class specifically. Have a look at this chart:

Brand new characters start with 3,000 XP worth of levels, so you might start the game as, for example, Sorcerer 2, Fencer 1, Scout 1, giving you magic as your primary focus but with a bit of melee ability for flexibility and a wide array of utility skills. Someone used to D&D would call this a 4th-level character, but in SW it's actually a 2nd-level character. This is because your "adventurer level" is equal to your highest class level, not your total number of class levels. Which makes sense, because we're on tight 2d6 math for everything, so we want to be measuring power by what's getting added to the roll, not by how many different things you can do.

How you gain XP in the first place is also a bit different than the D&D model. You automatically gain XP at the end of each session: 1,000 XP if you achieved your objective, or 500 XP otherwise. That's basically it. There's some bonus XP if you defeated monsters, but it's pretty small: 10 XP per level of the monsters defeated. The example in the book is if you win a fight against a 3rd-level monster and their four 1st-level minions, that's 7 levels total, or 70 XP. You also get 50 XP if you manage to roll snake eyes on 2d6 (a 1-in-36 chance). Both of these are a drop in the bucket compared to the base session XP.

But in addition to XP and classes, your advancement also includes "Growth" of ability scores. At the end of each session, you— wait a second, I haven't told you about ability scores yet, I'd better do that!

Ability Scores

Characters in Sword World have six stats. Which is funny, because if an American designer said that, many people would assume they had never seen a game other than D&D. But that's objectively not the case for SW2.5, and in fact there's a very specific reason to have exactly six ability scores: Growth. Your six stats are numbered 1-6 on your sheet, and at the end of each session, you roll a d6 twice, pick one result, and increase the corresponding ability score by 1. But wait, it gets even more interesting.

You don't add your ability score to rolls, you add your Ability Modifier, which is exactly what you think it is. This is even funnier than having six stats—people would call you a liar right to your face if you claimed that you had a score/mod duality for any other reason than D&D-brain. And yet, here we are. Anyway, you get +1 mod per 6 points of score. Most starting mods will be +2, some will be +1, and very very few will be +3. But this connects back to growth: if you have a score that's close to the next multiple of six, you can try to steer your growth toward it and get that next +1 (eventually, dice willing).

But growth isn't the only way that SW2.5 makes ability scores more relevant than in D&D. Weapons and armor, for example, have minimum Strength requirements. (Proficiency by class isn't really a thing, for the most part.) You use your Vitality score for calculating HP, and your Spirit score for calculating MP. I haven't found anything similar for Dexterity, Agility, or Intelligence, but still, the scores are getting more use than in D&D at least.

Side note because I know you're wondering: yes, you roll your ability scores. In order. That said, there's some amount of control: your choice of background gives you a set of flat numbers that your rolls are added to, and you also roll three full sets of scores and choose from among them. This model, alongside the growth mechanic, point to an interesting middle ground of guided chance in between the extremes of raw luck from old-school D&D and full control of modern point-buy.

I Am In Love With "Fellows"

In video games, sometimes an NPC will temporarily join your party, following you around and helping in combat but staying in the background the rest of the time. In some tabletop D&D-alikes, you can get hirelings that work similarly. In Sword World, you can do this with other people's player characters.

Want to share your character with the world? Make a Fellow Sheet, which summarizes their stats and includes a random roll chart for a few combat actions, and—get this—you even have to write down lines of dialogue your character would say when doing these combat actions. You can then post your Fellow Sheet online, such as in a fan forum, where people you've never met might pick them up to take along on their adventures.

Fellows stay in the background, contribute according to your custom random table during combat, and cannot take damage or die (in the event of a TPK, they're assumed to miraculously escape). Here's the adorable part: after using a Fellow, the book explicitly encourages the player(s) to contact the Fellow's creator (probably just a post online) both to thank them for their help and to give a recap of their character's little side adventure.

Power Tables

Remember I mentioned the issue of dice availability as part of the reason D&D didn't catch on right away in Japan? Well, SW2.5 is fully d6-based, and that includes rolling for damage (or healing). But apparently they didn't want everything to deal Xd6 damage, so instead they created Power Tables. Your weapon or spell will specify a "Power" rating. Find the row for that Power on the table, and roll 2d6. There will be a box corresponding to your result which tells you how much damage you deal. (You also add bonuses from things like your STR mod, but that's after you're done with the Power Table roll.)

At first I was surprised. Requiring a reference to a table on every single instance of damage is a bold move, though maybe you get used to it if you're referencing the same Power rating every time. Also, it does present an interesting solution to the need for variable damage output using only d6s and without too much range from the bottom to the top. I don't know if I would have the guts to do this in a design of my own, but I see what it's offering.

Relatedly, this method of damage calculation means everybody's always rolling 2d6 for damage, and SW2.5 takes advantage of this. Your chance of a critical hit is based on the dice result of your damage roll rather than your attack roll, scoring a crit when you roll your weapon's crit threshold or higher. Lots of weapons put this threshold around 10-11, but the Fencer can reduce this by 1 (at the cost of halving your STR score for the purpose of weapon and armor requirements, which means less power in the first place and also less defense). Also: crits can explode. When you crit, you record your rolled damage, and roll again. If that's a crit too, just keep going.

Three Combat Systems

So, you know how in D&D (and similar games), there's differing opinions on tactical combat versus abstracted combat? There's grid-based model, battlefield zone models, here-there-elsewhere models, all kinds of stuff. They all have advantages and disadvantages, and often it's a major decision point for which game(s) someone is willing to play.

Well, Sword World just sidesteps the issue by having three different combat systems with different levels of complexity and depth. The idea is that you bounce around between them, depending on which one serves the needs of a given fight. You can use the "advanced" mode (full tactical grid) when you have a big, complicated fight with interesting terrain and want to have a really robust experience. But if you want a quicker fight, you can use the "simplified" mode, where you just abstract the battlefield into three zones (the melee "frontline" and two ranged "rearguards") and leave it at that. The stats on weapons and spells (range, area, etc) are designed to accommodate both modes.

There's also a third mode that splits the difference between simple/advanced, but I honestly don't see the point of it. Maybe I'm missing something and I would get it if I actually played it? Who knows. But hey, it exists!

Okay Okay I'll Wrap It Up

There's plenty more interesting points of comparison to talk about (like how dwarves are fireproof and elves are perfect swimmers, or how there seems to be an assumption that adventures are short and serialized instead of campaign-length megaplots), but this is getting pretty long already. Anyway, the point is, Sword World is solidly in the adventure fantasy genre without being a "D&D clone," and this makes examination of its design choices absolutely fascinating for fantasy fans who live and breathe the inescapable dominance of D&D. If design comparisons are at all interesting to you (and if you got this far into my blog post, I assume they are) then I highly recommend that you go have a look at SW2.5 for yourself. And by all means, hit me up with your observations! I'd love to hear about them!

The GoldenEye Effect

I've been telling myself I would write this for ages, and now that I have enough other things I want to procrastinate on, it's finally time. It's about a type of media literacy failure that might have a formal name somewhere but I've been calling it "The GoldenEye Effect."

So if you were alive 20-30 years ago (and even maybe if you weren't), you're probably aware of the GoldenEye 007 video game for the Nintendo 64. It was a first-person shooter made as a tie-in game for a then-recent James Bond movie. And unlike most movie tie-in games (yes, that was common in the Old Times), GoldenEye was incredibly popular. Tons of people have fond memories of weekends with pizza and friends, playing 4-player split-screen free-for-alls, and yelling at the one kid who kept picking Oddjob and saying it's only because they like the character and not because his hitbox is half the size of everyone else's.

Yes, I too played this in my youth (my older brother was Oddjob Guy). Another thing that was part of my youth was a subscription to Nintendo Power magazine. Part of that magazine was a set of awards for games in various categories based solely on reader votes. You would send a physical letter to the magazine's office listing your picks for each category—things like best graphics, best music, best controls, and so on—as well as the best game overall. The magazine would then publish the results in a future issue.

Like I said, GoldenEye was incredibly popular. Nobody was surprised when Nintendo Power readers voted it the best game for that round. However, it also dominated most of the individual categories, often defeating games that were unequivocally superior in those specific categories. It was so egregious that the magazine even went as far as to directly chastise its own readers for so blatantly just picking their favorite game over and over instead of being honest about individual categories.

The best graphics in video games at the time, according to Nintendo Power readers.

I was a kid at the time, not exactly a paragon of media literacy. Maybe that's why having this distinction spelled out to me stuck in my memory so much. This was my first conscious exposure to this fact of human behavior: many people will not differentiate between their evaluation of a thing as a whole and their evaluation of its individual facets.

Now, I'm calling this "The GoldenEye Effect" because it was both an egregious example and also my personal first awareness, but it goes far beyond just video games. It's an issue with media literacy more broadly. (Probably also in other things, but that's beyond what I feel like getting into right now.) You read a book or see a movie, you fall in love with it, and then you start listing individual traits and over-selling them as each being as good as your overall appraisal.

A more recent example is the series Arcane. When it came out, I couldn't go 2 minutes without hearing people raving about how incredible it was. I watched it, and came away simultaneously impressed and disappointed. On the one hand, that show was fucking gorgeous. The visuals were stunning, not just in art style but in cinematography. The music was great, and was also put to fantastic use in how it was integrated into the action. Furthermore, several individual scenes were wonderful—the fight between Ekko and Jinx, for example, could have been a stand-alone short film on the strength of its visual storytelling.

But.

The plot was disjointed and jerky. The show would signal a focus or direction, then do something else instead (and not in a "dramatic reveal plot twist" kind of way). Several key characters had unclear personalities, shifting around to serve the plot like Captain Janeway cranked up to 11. The show had some real warts mixed in with its accomplishments.

Which is fine! Most things have strengths and weaknesses, and if something's strengths outweigh its weaknesses for you, then you'll probably like it, and that's okay! Nothing needs to be perfect to be loved. But that's not the same as being great in every category. I've seen people say everything from "it's basically perfect" (normal hyperbole, I can overlook that) to "it has no flaws" (that's a bit more specific and debatable) to "in addition to its beauty, it's a masterclass in storytelling and characterization" (hold the fuck up).

In Conclusion

Nothing is perfect. If you love a piece of media so much that you've read/watched/played it multiple times, but you still can't point out any real flaws, you're probably deluding yourself. 

Plain-Label Roleplay-Gaming

This post is me explaining my extremely straightforward approach to tabletop roleplaying games. It is not literature, it is not theater, it is roleplay-gaming. It is Exactly What It Says On The Tin. Various folks' unwillingness to accept that I'm using "roleplaying game" to mean exactly what it says, not as a codename for either "collaborative storytelling" or "wargaming," has necessitated this post.

Welcome to my primer for what I guess I'll call "Plain-Label Roleplay-Gaming."

Exactly What It Says On The Tin

If you get nothing else, get this: the core of Plain-Label Roleplay-Gaming is that the phrase "roleplaying game" is not just a name but also accurate descriptive language for the thing we're talking about. With PLRG, roleplaying games are roleplaying games. Do you know what a game is? Do you know what roleplay is? Can you imagine how one might integrate the two? If you can clear your head of prior assumptions well enough to answer "yes" to all three questions, then you can grasp the basics of Plain-Label Roleplay-Gaming, and with enough time and thought you can more or less extrapolate the rest of this post.

But to make it a bit more explicit, PLRG basically uses the definition of roleplaying games detailed in this post. The short version is this:

1. A "game" is more specific than just "any recreational activity," involving a set of rules that place you in a state of tension and allow you to use your agency to resolve that tension.
2. "Roleplay" means putting on a fictional self in a fictional scenario and treating it as real, basically "playing the role" of that person in that scenario.
3. A "roleplaying game" doesn't just put "roleplay" and "game" alongside each other, it fully integrates them. It's a game, and is categorized among types of games by the fact that roleplay is its most-central mechanic. 

Okay, so Plain-Label Roleplay-Gaming means that we're playing a game and that game's central mechanic is to take seriously a made-up persona in made-up scenarios. What does that mean in practical terms?

It Is Literally a Game

Because we're playing a game, all the normal social boundaries of games apply. For example, the rules are to be applied consistently. The concept of cheating is a thing. You can have houserules, of course, but they require informed consent from the whole group. The type of "fudging" that was popularized in D&D, where one person temporarily ignores the rules without telling anyone, is obviously cheating unless a houserule permitting it was established in advance.

Everyone shares a responsibility to maintain the game state. That means reminding each other of active mechanics and correcting each other's errors. Verify rules when in doubt. It also means everyone shares responsibility for learning the game. Learn at your own pace, but if that pace is zero then you're being a dick.

The Imaginary Space Matters

Plain-Label Roleplay-Gaming cares what's going on inside the imaginary world. One thing this means is that we hate "flavor text"—descriptions of in-universe truths that are not allowed to affect anything. That doesn't mean we need a bespoke subsystem of rules for absolutely every eventuality. But any truth about the game world, no matter how trivial, could make a difference in the right circumstances. You might never find those circumstances for a sufficiently trivial detail (and the nature of "trivial" will depend on the focus of the specific game you're playing), but we play with the knowledge that if it comes up, that detail is, in fact, true.

Here's an uncomfortable but illustrative example. A lifetime ago, when I used to play Pathfinder 1E organized play, some people had mounted characters, and there was a limited list of allowed mounts. Someone wanted their small character to ride a dog, but that wasn't allowed. Their usual GM told them they could pick the stats for an allowed mount (they picked a boar) and just say "flavor-wise, it's a dog." Fast-forward to Gen Con. That player brings their dog-rider to a PF org play table, and they encounter goblins. As it happens, PF goblins hate dogs—like, kill-on-sight hate. They were literally wielding swords called "dogslicers." All of a sudden, it became very important to know whether that player's mount was a dog or a boar. It became an infamous ordeal, and I don't remember how it all ended. But to loop back to our topic: in our model of Plain-Label Roleplay-Gaming, whatever it is in-universe is the truth, and the world responds accordingly. RIP, Doggo.

Our respect for the imagined space doesn't mean that we ignore the rules in favor of "realism." The rules and the world work together. If an in-universe action or circumstance doesn't have specific rules, either because it's a rules-light game or we're outside the scope of the game's focus, we just default to the general umbrella rules (which for trivial things can just be "the obvious thing happens"). If something does have specific rules, then we assume that the universe functions in such a way that those rules are a reasonable approximation of it. If that assumption feels unsatisfying, then either (A) we're failing to engage the game on its own terms and need to reevaluate our understanding, or (B) it's a flawed game and/or is not suited to roleplay-gaming.

INTER-active, Not Just Acted Upon

When you consider that the imaginary space matters, and also that the world and the rules work together, we find that the rules are pulling double duty: they're not just the gamification of our roleplay, they're also the voice of the imaginary world. The imaginary world is not just a canvas upon which we enact our creative expression, it is something we can interact with. It's not just there to be acted upon by us, it's also capable of acting on us, thus making it truly INTER-active.

Consider the difference between dolls and cats. Dolls have no agency. We do with them what we will. This isn't a bad thing: it makes them a great vehicle for our own creativity. But while we can act upon them, they can't act upon us. They're not truly interactive. But living with a cat is a whole other thing. Cats have agency. You're not in control of how they react to your ideas, or what they get up to on their own. You can act upon them, but they can also act upon you. You won't always like some of what they do. But we love them anyway, and it wouldn't be the same otherwise.

In the same way, a major element of Plain-Label Roleplay Gaming is that we allow the imaginary world, often through the voice of the rules, to act upon us. We don't veto it because something else would make a better story, we only choose how to respond to what happened. The dice fall where they may, and sometimes it's inconvenient or temporarily unpleasant, but that authenticity of interaction is part of the recipe for the experience we're after. Many popular forms of... let's call it "curation"... undermine the point of the PLRG experience.

Very Specific Avenues of Agency

Given the above, it should come as no surprise that Plain-Label Roleplay-Gaming prefers for player agency to be channeled through in-universe activity. This tends to mean that meta-mechanics are frowned upon. For example, if you want players to be able to spend a point to do something special, we roleplay-gamers would rather spend a point of our character's stamina to fuel a stunt, than to spend a player-owned point of meta-currency to introduce a new element to a scene. We would rather discover a chandelier and spend 1 Stamina to swing on it, than to desire to swing and spent 1 Plot Point to declare that a chandelier is available.

The distinction can be harder to see for the GM, but it's still there. The GM is (usually) the one who populates the world with people, places, and things. There's plenty of freedom there, but the important point is that those decisions are not made (or modified) dynamically, responding to current events in an effort to alter the trajectory. To use a classic example: the villain does not have "however much HP it takes for the battle to be a satisfying length," they have what they have. You don't fudge hits into misses or misses into hits, not even to "help" a player who's struggling. Sometimes the road has bumps, but if that makes the journey not worth taking, you shouldn't have left home in the first place.

I Think That Basically Covers It?

I don't have a fancy conclusion. Just... try to remember that if someone is explaining to you why your literary advice doesn't apply to their roleplay-gaming, they might actually know what they're talking about. 

Ending With a Meme Because It's My Blog and I Do What I Want

What is a TTRPG?

Ask a dozen people what a TTRPG is and you'll get two dozen answers. Many of them will be incoherent, most will contradict each other, and at least half will clearly have no relationship to the words those letters represent in that abbreviation.

But who cares what gets called a "roleplaying game" and what doesn't? Honestly, for a lot of people, it really doesn't matter. If you're home with your own group of friends just doing your own thing, call it whatever you want as long as you all know what you mean and you're having fun. That's fine. You don't need this.

But there's also those of us who are connected to other people in the TTRPG space: players or GMs seeking new groups, creators looking to exchange design ideas, even just people who like to chatter about their interests online. As soon as "people who aren't your static home group" are involved, the language matters a lot more, because you need to be able to communicate.

Or to put it another way: to obstruct the clarification of terms is to actively undermine the full engagement of the field by the people who love it. In the interest of TTRPG enthusiasts and creators being able to engage their craft, let's establish at least a basic, working definition of this artform.

What is a "game"?

This should be obvious, but roleplaying game exists at the intersection of "roleplaying" and "game." We'll circle back to that intersection later; for now let's define the parts, starting with "game."

One's first thought might be "anything you do for fun," but even a little reflection reveals that this is too broad to be useful. You could eat a yummy meal, go for a walk, have sex, then watch a beautiful sunset, and still end your day having played zero games. For a definition to be useful, it must be specific enough for its constituents to have more than a singular shared trait of "fun."

Some people turn to the inclusion of challenge to get us from "recreational activity" to "game." Once again, this might sound good at first but is ultimately a mistake. For one thing, not every challenging recreational activity is a game (rock climbing comes to mind). Furthermore, not every game uses challenge (Animal Crossing, for example). We can refine our definition to account for both of these.

First, replace "challenge" with "tension." A game like Animal Crossing may not challenge your skills in any real way, but it does place you in a state of tension. For example, you don't immediately have access to a huge house and the full inventory; you have to do stuff to get there. Even though it's a self-directed game where you set your own objectives, the game still puts something between you and your goals and you'll have to deal with that.

Second, this tension must come from the rules you accept when you choose to play the game, not simply from the physical properties of the objects involved. This solves our rock climbing example. In rock climbing, which nobody calls a game, there is certainly tension—but it comes from the physical difficulty of the endeavor, not from your voluntary agreement to stay within a set of rules. Rules which, almost tautologically, exist for the purpose of making the activity into a game.

In fact, astute readers will recognize that you could take any of our examples of non-game activities (eating, walking, sex, sightseeing, climbing) and "make a game of it." Many of us have often done exactly this. And how is it accomplished? By taking the base activity and layering some voluntary rules on top of it to introduce tension.

Putting it all together, I think we can use the following as a reasonable definition:

A game is a recreational activity structured by voluntary adherence to a set of rules that are designed to place the participant in a state of tension, and which allow the participant to take action to resolve that tension.

I have not yet thought of any counterexamples for this definition of "game." When I try to think of things that are obviously games, they all fit this model. When I try to think of things that don't fit this model, they are always something I'm comfortable saying isn't a game. It might not be a Philosophically Perfect definition, but it's useful and concrete, which is what we need if we're going to engage TTRPGs as more than consumers.

What is "roleplaying"?

Weirdly, I find that TTRPG folks (1) are no more likely than the general population to have a conscious definition of "roleplay," and (2) the unconscious definitions that TTRPG folks are working from are somehow worse than common understandings from outside the TTRPG space.

The dumbest, of course, is that "roleplay" means dialogue, cutscenes, and disengagement from game mechanics. I assume this originated from people who played a "roleplaying game" while having a mental framework for "game" but not "roleplaying." They played something like D&D where all the rules—all the stuff that's obviously a game—was focused on action or combat. Then they assumed that since there was also other stuff—talking to people with little to no game mechanics—that this stuff alongside the "game" must be the "roleplaying."

But roleplaying games can put rules to any part of the experience, so defining roleplay as "that which a certain subtype of TTRPG does not support" is ridiculous. Remember, roleplay exists in other contexts than TTRPGs as well. We can do better than this.

What might we use to guide our interpretation of "roleplay"? The word itself suggests the playing of a role, but there are any number of things that could mean. The banker is a role you can play in Monopoly, but nobody calls that roleplaying. Likewise, actors on stage are playing a role, but again, we don't usually call them roleplayers. Even the different positions on a football team could be called "roles" that they play, but that's clearly not roleplaying.

What's something we actually call "roleplaying"? One example is sexual roleplay: the partners imagine alternate personas for themselves, imagine an alternate scenario, and then do their sex in the way they think makes sense under those imaginary parameters. Another example is therapeutic roleplay: a therapist might ask you to imagine that the therapist is some other person in your life, and have a make-believe conversation together.

(Aside: I know some of you are yelling at your screens that I breezed past "acting" and then immediately talked about pretending to be a different person. Calm down and let me explain. The actors in a movie are not free to behave as though they're in those scenarios; they have a script to follow. Getting into the heads of their characters might help them with their portrayals, but if anything that's more "you can use roleplay to assist with acting," rather than "roleplaying is acting." There's more nuance to unpack with respect to improv, but there are still differences, and a deep dive is outside today's scope. "Acting is different because it's fundamentally more performative than experiential" is good enough for today, even if it's not good enough for forever.)

I would note that neither of these examples is "pure" roleplay. That is, they are both repurposing roleplay as a tool for a specific goal (much like we will be doing later for "roleplaying games"). But by putting aside their respective goals (sex and therapy) and comparing their similarities, a picture begins to form: imagining an alternate scenario, imagining alternate personas, and choosing your actions (and interpreting others' actions) as though these imagined parameters were real. It is fundamentally alike to simply "playing pretend."

Based on this, I use the following definition of "roleplay," both within and outside of TTRPGs:

Roleplay is the act of adopting an imaginary persona, inhabiting an imaginary scenario, and then filtering both your perceptions and your actions through the lens of that persona for the purpose of experiencing that scenario.

I think this definition is very workable. It's not perfect, but it's specific enough that we can actually do something with it. That alone puts it leaps and bounds ahead of lots of casual use of the term.

The Intersection: What is a "Roleplaying Game"

Now that we have at least a working definition for both "roleplay" and "game," we can start to define "roleplaying game." I think it's reasonable to treat it as the specification of a subtype of games: there are video games, there are board games, there are card games, and there are roleplaying games. Just like these other types of games, a roleplaying game is categorized apart from other game types by its qualifier (roleplaying). Seems obvious, right?

But remember, these qualifiers—board, card, roleplaying—aren't simply what's included in the game, they're what's central to the game. For example, Monopoly has both a board and cards, but there's no dispute that it's a board game and not a card game. That's because the cards are a peripheral subsystem while the board is central to everything. Conversely, Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer likewise has both a board and cards, but is obviously a card game. That's because the cards are the central mechanic, while the board is mostly just an organizational tool for the cards.

In other words, we title these subtypes of games by their most-central mechanic. This leads us to our deceptively simple definition for roleplaying games:

A roleplaying game is a type of game whose most-central mechanic is roleplay.

That might seem short and broad, but we can actually get quite a lot out of it (especially now that we know what games and roleplay are).

Remember: the name comes from the most-central mechanic, not the only mechanic. So you can have a roleplaying game that has board game elements, or a roleplaying game with storytelling elements, or a roleplaying game with interpretive dance elements. If roleplay remains the central mechanic, it's a roleplaying game. But conversely, if those other elements are more central than the roleplay, then it becomes a board game, or a storytelling game, or an interpretive dance game (with roleplaying elements).

And of course, being a roleplaying game requires that it's a game. If all you're doing is playing out scenarios without "making a game of it," that's literally just roleplay. Or if you're using the roleplay to do something else (tell a story, do a sex, whatever), but haven't met the criteria of "game," then it's likewise not a "roleplaying game."

But that still leaves lots of room to go wild! You don't have to use XP or classes or long-form campaign play or any of the other things traditionally associated with roleplaying games. The possibilities for how we can gamify roleplay are endless, and frankly, we've only scratched the surface. And we've also discovered (or sometimes rediscovered) tons of related artforms along the way, which is super exciting!

Thanks for reading.

Pokémon's Game Design Problem

Over on BlueSky, I did one of those silly engagement posts that asks what topics you could discuss at length with no preparation, and one of mine was Pokemon's Game Design Problem. To my surprise, multiple people wanted to hear more, so here's that topic in stream-of-consciousness form.

So the short version of the problem is this: Pokémon doesn't know what kind of game it wants to be anymore. It used to be a very specific type of game, and has changed gradually over time, without any concrete intent to become any other type of game instead. It just... drifted. Now it's less of a game and more of a pile of game components—some new, some legacy, and all divorced from any coherent design intent.

Okay, so what type of game was it originally? Don't say "monster-collecting game," that's a term invented later for games that couldn't legally say "Pokémon clone." Hell, collecting wasn't even a big thing originally. More like a subsystem that you'll be rewarded for dabbling in a little but mostly has no impact unless you're trying to 100% the game. Like Korok seeds.

No, originally Pokémon was a cookie-cutter JRPG. It came out at the height of the SNES RPG era, at about the same time as iconic titles like Chrono Trigger, EarthBound, and Final Fantasy VI (the one marketed as III in the US). It was almost a decade since the original Final Fantasy, and the genre had hit its stride, established its conventions, and was at the height of its popularity. It was right at the cusp of being "formulaic," and Pokémon used its formula.

To be clear: I don't just mean having levels and turn-based combat makes it an RPG. The copy-paste goes deep. Core loop of refreshing at the inn and then attrition-ing through a dungeon or between towns? Stock. Elemental rock-paper-scissors? Stock. Changing your party due to new arrivals or to match a specific challenge? Stock. A dungeon full of rocky or ghostly enemies who resist your Normal attacks? Stock. Hell, even having your party members evolve into stronger versions later in the game had already been a thing for years. It's just the RPG tropes of the era all the way down. The only real innovation was the symmetry of having your party drawn from the same roster as the monsters.

That's where Pokémon started. Any amount of examination shows that it's somewhere else now. For example, battles (aside from a handful of story checkpoints) are now entirely optional and the ground is littered with more supplies than you could ever need, which removes the entire core play paradigm of old-school RPGs: get from A to B before you run out of gas. That's just literally not a thing anymore (as of Scarlet/Violet).

Which is fine! Pokémon doesn't have to forever remain a genre of RPG that was popular in the 90s. Completely fine for it to change. But what is it trying to be instead? That's where the problem is. The makers don't seem to know. It still includes the combat and level systems that it needed when it was an old-school JRPG, but they've been removed from the structures they were built for (dungeons and routes) so they're just weird and in the way. And in place of what's been removed we have... what? A few half-baked minigames, presented by NPCs who, even in-universe, would rather be doing something else? A "world of adventure" that you can't interact with except by walking around? Lovable creatures who mostly just stand around, and your only way to interact with them is through a combat system designed in a different era for a different game?

If you don't want to be an RPG anymore, then fucking do something else. But they won't, because it's not a game series anymore, it's a multimedia franchise with a focus on merchandise. The point of a Pokémon game isn't to be a game, it's to introduce the next region and expand the roster of collectibles. As far as actual gameplay goes, the only proactive intent that can be inferred from the evolving design of the games is that apparently they think we all hate battling, so they keep creating workarounds to reduce how much of it you have to do.

An interesting point of contrast is Legends Arceus. Whatever its overall strengths and weaknesses, it does have intent. Since combat was going to be de-emphasized, they streamlined it down into a dynamic subsystem that's kinda fun each time instead of being an attrition mechanism that's designed to function across a long string of battles. Since prowling in the wild was the focus, they made it matter: you can catch directly in the wild, there are resources to harvest in the wild, the majority of your research tasks are in the wild, and the pokémon can interact with you in the wild. Though it has plenty of flaws, PLA at least is a game that has chosen something to be about, and at least tries to focus on actually being about that.

But the main series? It's just roster expansions with some legacy mechanics stapled on, seemingly designed by people who are certain you don't still want the old Pokémon experience but have no idea what you'd rather be doing instead.