This article is by fellow RTR member and guest writer, Joseph Carr.
What is a role-playing game? What sets it apart from other kinds of games? How is different than those role-playing exercises in that mandatory integrity training your company forced you into? Who shot JR?
I’ll let you Google that last one, if you really want to know. This is a spoiler free article.
The thing that separates a role-playing game from a role-playing exercise is the thing which is lacking from your participation in that integrity training – namely, any element of choice whatsoever.
Choice is the core element of any game. Choosing which pawn to advance at the beginning of chess is a tense and exciting moment with ramifications that will play out over the rest of the game. Choice can be downright dizzying, such as in some of those new Euro-style board games with 15 different ways to earn points. (I’m looking at you, Great Western Trail). You can have games that don’t have choice which typically function as tests of skill, like darts or Mario Brothers, but that tends to translate poorly to board games – just think about the last time you played Candyland.
You see choices all the time in role-playing games – do you expend willpower to get a few extra dice on the attack against this ghoul minion, or save it to resist the mental influence of the ghoul’s vampire overlord? Spend a spell-slot now on smite, or save it to cast Cure Wounds after the battle? And when exactly do you use that healing potion you bought back in the first town? In many ways these choices are similar to the choices you make in chess or Great Western Trail. Indeed, you can take those elements of choice and port them pretty directly into a board game like Descent or a video game like Final Fantasy.
However, I’m sure any of you reading this have the feeling that a role-playing game isn’t quite the same experience as Descent or one of the Final Fantasy video games. If you probe that thought, you might note that a role-playing game has a much wider range of choices than Descent or Final Fantasy – you can do literally anything your GM will let you get away with. Swing from a chandelier! Seduce the dragon! Murder the princess!
Boy, that went an odd place, didn’t it? But, what if you had a good reason to murder the princess? What if there was a dread prophecy that the kingdom would be drowned in fire and blood if the princess lived to her 16th birthday? Or what if the princess was a self-absorbed villain who’d ordered your village cleared away to make room for her favored courtier to put up a hunting cabin?
It turns out that the reason you make the decisions in a role-playing game is as much or more important than the decisions themselves. In a board game, you make decisions to maximize your chances of winning the game. Everyone knows what the objective is and, broadly speaking, how to go about achieving it. You may make a mistake and pursue a sub-optimal strategy, but you aren’t going to suddenly start pursuing a completely different strategy because it better fits the true desires of your in-game avatar. In a role-playing game, those desires are the entire point.
If you have played role-playing games long enough, you have probably heard stories about the time the group went off the rails and the GM just put down the dice and improvised out an entire session.Usually, these are spoken of as some of the best sessions in the person’s experience. Someone might even say that they stopped playing the game and just focused on role-playing. However, if you think about it, you might view those sessions as the most pure role-play gaming of all. The players continue to make meaningful choices, those choices have consequences, and then they respond to the consequences with more choices. It’s just all done without dice or engaging in the meta-structure of rules – it’s all done from their character’s perspective.
Making a choice from your character’s perspective – that is the soul of a role-playing game. It really takes off when you stop thinking about how to use this ability to achieve victory in this scenario, and start thinking about what your character would do and why they would do it. This sort of play is most obvious in a role-playing scenario like the one described above, but it need not be limited to that part of the game.
Consider a fight against some goblins and their hobgoblin masters. In a game like Descent, this comes down to resource management – making choices about which abilities to use at what times, and what enemies to engage, and how to block the enemies from using their abilities to their full extent. In those cases it might make sense to focus fire on one enemy at a time, and try to send the rogue after the hobgoblin mage to take them out as soon as possible.
In a role-playing game, by contrast, it is possible to layer on different motivations that transform that simple combat into a set of choices that engage the characters on a personal level. The goblins may have taken some prisoners, and efficiently focusing on one enemy at a time means that the other enemies are free to push the prisoners into a boat, never to be seen again. And perhaps one of the hardened hobgoblin warriors critically injured the rogue in a past battle, and the rogue is looking for revenge. Deciding on the best course of action in this scenario is not about deciding which ability to use to most efficiently kill your foes – it’s about deciding what is most important to your character. A party focused on saving prisoners has a very different optimal use of their actions than a party focused on killing goblins. The party might get pretty miffed if the rogue lets the mage get off a fireball so that they can gank that hated foe, but the rogue might consider it a fair trade-off for the personal satisfaction of killing that guy.
As a GM, you can use the principle of choice from the character’s perspective by shifting from challenging the player character’s resources to challenging the player character’s priorities. You can give multiple objectives in combat, as described above, or make entire scenes which are about nothing more than revealing what is important to your characters. The stakes don’t have to be life or death – you can reveal a lot about a character by simply starting them in a tavern and asking them “what do you want to do?” Of course, like any good tavern, it helps when you provide a menu of options to get them started – an old friend who just walked in the door, the bartender with a range of tasty brews, and a mysterious stranger in the corner who gives you the chills.
Players can utilize the principle of choice to expand their experience by thinking about what is important to their character. This does not have to involve an elaborate backstory – just think about the scenarios where your character would act in a “suboptimal” manner. When would you ignore a more powerful foe to attack a weaker one? Is it more important to defeat your enemies or to protect your friends? Is there something that your character would die to accomplish? When would you willingly cede an advantage to an enemy, and how far would you go to uncover useful information?
I find that the element of choice from a character’s perspective is fundamental to thinking about RPGs, and I hope to continue that conversation in the weeks to come. In the meantime, what are some of the most difficult choices you have had to make for your character? What are some of the times when you’ve made choices that seemed trivial, but revealed something important about your character? GMs, what are some of your tips to make choices in your games more interesting and engaging?
Post-Script:
If I have seen far, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants. Much of what I’ve learned about role-playing games comes from others who have shared their own insights. I owe a particular debt of gratitude to Matt Colville, who has an excellent series of YouTube videos on the art of dungeon mastering. I have also learned a lot from TheAlexandrian and The Angry DM. Also, Keith Baker, the fellow who came up with Eberron, has a bunch of interesting articles on the website that shares his name.
