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.
