What is Roleplaying ? - Thoughts, featuring an translation of an article from me.
There are many, many discussions on what „proper roleplaying“ is, even what’s roleplaying at all !
To me, there are several
fractions of role-players out there.
For example, I think that Blizzard has invented a new sub-genre to the RPG : The “Action-RPG” , like Core Design had invented the “Action-Adventure” with the ascending of Lara Croft.
Several other fractions say that Blizzards products are not RPGs at all; I instead say that they are a very cut down form of RPG : The “Action-RPG”. Very straight, very few interactuion at all, but lots of fighting and collecting.
The ideal of role-playing - as I believe it - is the development of an character. Including interaction.
To me, role-playing in its literal sense has *very much* to do with actual acting - what actors do in movies or in theatres. You incorporate a character and try to play its role.
Someone even said that he could imagine even an First-Person-Shooter as an RPG, because you are playing the role of someone. I don’t agree, because that point of view lacks some
traditional , essential parts of real role-playing.
There / they are :
- Characters (which you play), sometimes including the need to build them up on your own;
- Experience-Points (however they may called);
- Skills
- a Rule-Set or Rule-System.
- This normally includes somekind of “up-leveling” of a character - the more experience a char gets, the higher levels he or she is able to climb up.
This is the core of what a traditional view of role-playing is made of.
About the fighting part there is an interesting article I recommend somewhere at
www.RPGDot.com : “Is there a game after combat ?”
Apart from that I’ve got an article on my harddisk which might eventually appear at RPGDot. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/biggrin.gif" alt="" />
As an extract from that, I show you what real roleplaying is to me :
Al-Kalkül robbed forwards. He was lying on the floor of the low, tiled duct. He feared that some of these tiles were indeed traps, but he had no chance to find out, because the others behind him were pressing forward, pushing him on to reach the secret chamber.
As he was about to touch a certain tile, it gleamed in a low bluish light before him. He didn’t know what to do. Was this a trap or a lever to disable one ? He wasn’t sure.
Then he heard the roaring. Some sort of monster was somewhere before him, maybe in the chamber or even beneath him, if indeed some tiles were hiding a trap in which the monster resided. Some shouting came from behind him.
„What’s wrong with you ? Is there a good reason you can’t just creep on ?“ These were impolite and impatient warriors. They had taken him with them only as some sort of „weird magic maniac“, as they called him. He hated them. But still he *needed* that artifact from that secret chamber only legends knew about ...
So he had quickly to decide.
[...]
That’s why I’ve included the small adventure in the very beginning of this article : You can very well do proper and interesting role-playing without fighting at all ! Have you seen there any sign of combat ? Well, there is a monster, roaring. It must be *somewhere*, and at one point the party might run into it. But does this mean the whole role-playing game can only be played while including some sort of combat ? The monster can be calmed down, or even turned into a friend. Some character who is able to use telepathic on it might even get some sort of information out of this creature (by asking, of course, not by torture) the party otherwise wouldn’t have ever got a chance to see.
