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:
- 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.
- "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.
- 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
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