Words by Vincent Baker, co-signed by me:
In Apocalypse World I say that roleplaying is a conversation.
What I mean is, let’s take talking together out loud to be the medium of play. Instead of taking place on a board and pieces, or in cards arranged in decks and hands, or in pixels on a screen, the game takes place in the words that you and your friends say to each other.
In a board game, you need rules for how to place, move, handle the pieces on the board. In a card game, you need rules for dealing, holding, playing, reading the cards.
In a roleplaying game, let’s say that you need rules for talking: what should we talk about? How should we talk about it? How should we respond to what others say?
In Candyland, you have just a single simple rule for moving your piece. In Chess, though, you have different rules depending on the situation. The different pieces move differently, there are rules for pieces blocking and capturing each other, there are special case rules like castling, check, and en passant.
Same thing in rpgs. The game’s rules for talking can change depending on the situation.
For example, you can think of Apocalypse World’s basic moves as being like the different ways that Chess pieces move.
A pawn steps forward one space; when you have your character attack someone, ask the other player whether their character’s going to stand up to you or back down.
A bishop slides along a diagonal; when you have your character act under fire, the MC offers you a bad deal or tells you how your character falls short.
So that’s my basic proposal: in games where talking together is the medium of play, you can and should have different rules for talking about different subjects.
Thanks for listening!
I think that’s a bit limiting for roleplaying games. Although descriptively I’m not aware of any that don’t include the conversion component (although so do boardgames like Chess).
That’s how I always understood the adage.
I’d like to extend this: all person to person games distort the conversation. Catan is a means of distorting the conversation, as is Fiasco, as is Cards Against Humanity. And each of these distorts the conversation in a different way.
The resources and challenges in RPGs are not words; they’re the characters and their attributes, and the in-game materials that act as bits of economical value, and the in-world obstacles placed before characters that present challenges to overcome to acquire the materials (gold, experience, reknown, etc). Conversations have conventions, not rules (which I see as the difference between situationally “ought not” and “must not”). While it might be possible to make games that do have prescriptions about language use where words themselves become game pieces (20 questions, charades, PbtA games to some extent), it is certainly not a requirement — the majority of RPGs and the most widely played RPGs do not behave the way you suggest.
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Viktor Haag, the fundamental framework of D&D is literally “The DM says what the situation is, the players say what their characters do.”
If it’s good enough for D&D, it’s good enough for all its spawn.
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There are some important roles in the conversation, many of which have sheets or props —
The Anchor lets you know what things can’t be ignored. Character sheets help with this.
The Edge tells you when to stop digging at something and move on. Going to dice is a way of using the Edge.
The Wheel produces more possible fodder for discussion. Character sheets can help with this too — playbooks do a great job of this, as do Fate aspects, and OSR “Spark” tables.
The Listening Heart makes sure everyone is ok, and is usually a GM job, but things like the X-card and Brie Sheldon’s script editing thing are direct aids to this.
Gregor Vuga saying all roleplaying games are the “spawn” of D&D is not something I agree with, especially if you include LARPing.
Ultimately, in mathy terms roleplaying games don’t (imo) form an equivalence class. You can’t come in with a (finite) definition that captures all roleplaying games, and nothing else. However, since I don’t think it would be useful to do so I’m fine with that.
I might suggest that the “natural” shape of conversation is distorted by circumstance. Which is to say that I do not disagree that play is a distortion on conversation, but I am not sure that meaningfully distinguishes from me visiting my in laws (or, well, almost every conversation with other humans).
And that’s cool! We have REAMS of culture and thought and historical tradition focused on that distortion, and its application to games is awesome!
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Addendum: All else being equal, a conversation is also a much more appealing model for me than a writing exercise. 🙂
The back and forth of a good conversation has a snowballing effect that mimics how I run rpgs. Without that conversation, the rpg ceases to exist.
While I love boardgames, they do not require conversations in the way an rpg does. I have played many board games with adept opponents in near silence. That’s clearly not an rpg’s structure.
In board games, the board and bits are the medium and they are constrained by their physical properties and potential spatial states.
In rpgs, conversation is the medium and it is constrained by the language and the social contracts accepted by the community in which it takes place.
Gregor Vuga I don’t disagree that this is a basic convention; what I question is that (a) this is prescriptive, and (b) this is equivalent to saying that the things being said at the table are the same as the pieces in a boardgame. You could just as well say, “either the players or the GM can ask questions about the setting, or declarations about what the characters they control are doing, and the group can use the rules and common sense to suggest answers to the questions and outcomes to the actions”. The shape of talk at the table during nearly all the RPGs I play and have played is by convention, not by rule.
Joshua Hillerup Victor said that the most popular roleplating games don’t behave according to the definition. Since D&D-play is both the progenitor genre and the standard for the majority of mainstream games, I used it as an example.
I’m fine with categorizing larp as its own thing. But I think that rpgs de facto use conversation as their medium. If a game doesn’t, that’s fine, too. Video art or sculpture isn’t less valid because it uses a different medium to painting nor do I think it’s controversial to say that different arts use different media and we can define and categorize them by the media they use (mixed media is a thing, too!). How useful you find that categorisation is up to you but I don’t think it’s problematic. To me it’s so common sense it’s almost a non-statement.
Jeremy Stephens some board games clearly do, or clearly can. Most of the ways you play Diplomacy, for example, require discussion; it’s possible to play it silently, but in the community this is clearly seen as a variant and not the principal mode of play.
D&D has two different modes of play (I have no idea if there are others, but they’re certainly not common at least). One is based on tactical maps, the other “is the theatre of the mind”. The theatre of the mind mode is like Apocalypse World in this regard, where the intersection (usually) passes through speech. But the map based mode is very much like a board game such as Pandemic.
Jeremy Stephens says something that has me thinking a bit. I converse a lot in many games I play, but he is correct that the conversation is not essential to the game as designed (though the game as played may be another matter).
Imagine, if you would, a boardgame where you are not allowed to touch the pieces. Instead, you need to tell someone else what you do, and they move the pieces (or play the cards, or whatever) for you. In such a game, there would be no shortage of words spoken, and there would probably even be a bit of distortion of the language to tune with the activity being done, but would we categorize it as a “conversation”?
I ask because it is not impossible to imagine a game of D&D (or many other games) where the only words spoken are of a similar nature. Imagining such a game, would we categorize that as a conversation?
I’m genuinely not sure. In the most technical of senses, the answer would seem to be yes, but for all that, it seems to be missing a certain something special that would differentiate what I think of as play from that manner of exercise. And that, in turn, makes me look at Apocalypse World and ask “Ok, is this meaningfully different?” And while I feel like the answer should be yes, it does not peel apart as cleanly as I might like.
> So that’s my basic proposal: in games where talking together is the medium of play, you can and should have different rules for talking about different subjects
True. Although that suggestion is circular. Because for any two things you can argue that they are very similar or very different. Like, while there are pawns and bishops in chess, everything is a token in go.
So what a game considers “different” is up to the game.
Being circular, the point is very useful though. Because games that treat everything the same, will incur bias to saying certain things: There are things that people will rarely use The Pool for.
So what this means is: Think about what subjects you want in your game and make them different enough from one another to be seen as such.
There’s some evidence that social space is represented similarly to physical space by the brain. Conversation may be closer to pieces on a board than we think…
sciencedirect.com – The Hippocampus as a Cognitive Map … of Social Space – ScienceDirect
Rob Donoghue in fact Diplomacy has a fair amount of similarity to this. Control over your own pieces gets confounded in several ways — your movement of pieces gets controlled by secret “orders” you write, and which get processed simultaneously with everyone else’s; often your orders also depend on “support actions” that other players promise to order and which they may or may not in fact give you; thus, what you want to do with your pieces may not actually come to pass. In many games of Dip, the pieces are never actually moved by the players — they’re moved by a moderator (human or automated).
Viktor Haag I don’t think it’s prescriptive (I’m fairly sure that Meg and Vincent don’t think it is either), it’s taxonomical.
And if you agree that the basic medium of RPGs is “we talk to each other about fictional goings-on”, then you can see how the rules guide and shape that conversation. The rules don’t need to specifically address your language. Hit Points in D&D are about saying who’s dead and when. Attack rolls are about the permission of saying whether you hit your enemy or not. Having “elf” or “30 ft. of rope” written on your sheet shapes our conversation when your character meets another elf or when you find yourself in front of a 25 ft deep pit in a way that’s clearly different than if you didn’t have those things written on your sheet.
The OP said “in role playing games you need rules about talking”, and it seemed pretty clear to me this was not meant to indicate that your “conversation was shaped by” the rules that govern the the resources and obstacles in the game, but rather the proposal was that the game should have rules that govern the structure and manner of the conversation. And that seems prescriptive to me. If I misinterpreted, that’s fine and perhaps we agree — I don’t dispute that when playing RPGs it results on a structured conversation — I just don’t think we need rules to govern those conventions and enshrine them.
Viktor Haag Right, but exceptions don’t prove the rule. And those conversations are not about a fiction, they are about winning. Not really comparable to an rpg. Not to say you cannot MAKE it into a roleplay, certainly, but the conversations in such games like Diplomacy are not about assuming a role and creating fiction with that role’s agency, but about gaining leverage on your opponent(s).
I was not asserting diplomacy was an rpg or even comparative with one. I was responding to your assertion that “board games do not require conversations in the way an rpg does”. The rest of your statement seemed to make it clear you were asserting that any conversation was not necessary for board games and that’s patently not true (for some board games). If you meant that there weren’t board games that used the same modes of conversation as RPGs I don’t think you made that clear, and I also don’t think it’s exactly true — there are board games that deal, in a structured way with spinning narratives (Arabian Nights) and those where players often assume roles, even in competition (diplomacy). If anything it seems to me that the thing that distinguishes these games from RPGs is that the latter that I’m most familiar with dont have similar restrictions on the kind or structure of the conversations you have at the table.
Viktor Haag The rules to enshrine those conventions are literally the rule books to rpgs. They are each their own religious scripture for their own religious practice. Each defines a way of having that conversation. Sometimes there is overlap in those methods, and sometimes there is not.
Which rpgs have you played that do not have rules for discussing the situations you’ll be exploring in fiction? I am literally racking my brain trying to think of something that is an rpg but doesn’t have rules to discuss different subjects?
Any examples? I’d love to see what that looks like.
I don’t agree that the basic medium of RPGs is “we talk to each other about fictional goings-on”. It’s something that shows up in a lot of RPGs, but that’s like saying that the basic medium of RPGs is paper and dice. But I don’t think there’s a medium inherent to RPGs. I don’t think you even need interaction with another person for RPGs though.
If I had to pick a core activity it would be more inhabiting a character.
As to the rules found in a gaming book defining conversations happening at the gaming table? Also very much not true. I mean, they can if you’re playing a handful of RPGs with constrained speech, but certainly not most RPGs.
Joshua Hillerup I think I read the OP’s use of ‘discussion’ as a much broader term than using actually speech, but also the rules that govern resolution of fiction that the players and GM speak.
In that way, every RPG book is literally a set of rules for how to discuss (and thereby how to resolve) the in-game actions taken.
I still want to see an RPG that doesn’t delineate the rules for how to discuss (and resolve) the fictional actions in the world.
Name one – I really want to read that RPG book.
I just realized that people might be speaking metaphorically. “Standard tabletop RPGs” work best when you work cooperatively, give space, listen, and try to communally work together, just like conversations. Is that what’s meant?
I really don’t understand this metaphor of “discussion” here. Do you mean creating a shared imagined space?
Joshua Hillerup I was reading the “conversation” that the OP referred to as the game fiction, and how to resolve the different actions that the players are “discussing” within that fiction. I think the term isn’t really about actually having the characters speak, but how the players discuss/converse around actions taken in the fictional space that is held aloft by the conversation.
In my head, that “conversation” is how to model combat, how to determine how far you can jump, how convincing a character’s deception is, or whether or not you see the assassin before he’s on you with a knife in your back. Each of those is a conversation. Some times, its just a conversation between the players, sometimes, there’s some dice and specific rules, sometimes there’s an in-fiction conversation between characters. Either way, there’s a clear set of guidelines for how to describe this aloud within the conversation space, and how to determine consequences based on the context.
Maybe then this is about semantics?
OK, I think I understand now. “Conversation” is being defined as that shared space. The rules are what defines it. If you define the rules to mean that sure, then I agree that’s the definition being used, but the vast majority of rules are never written down in something as complicated as a roleplaying game, because that is literally impossible.
I’m still confused by the talk about board games though. Those also are a conversation, defined by rules, using this same definition as for roleplaying game. The rules are different of course, and so different sorts of conversations happen, but this is required for all social activities, and quite a lot of solitary ones as well.
Joshua Hillerup When you say the majority of rules are never written down in an RPG, can you give examples? I am looking at my bookshelf of rpgs, and struggling with that statement as it is completely opposite of my lived reality (and in direct opposition to the thickness of many of those books).
Maybe you mean its impossible to write down all the possible ‘rulings’ for every rule/context combination that may come up within the conversation?
K, maybe I’m wrong, but every time a constraint is introduced on the conversation, including adding something that limits what could be added further, that’s a rule.
If it’s not then I’m still very confused.
Joshua Hillerup Can you explain this with an example?
K, so you’re playing D&D, and you say “I hit the orc with my sword”. You introduce a rule that you swing your sword, and the other rules that are written down (along with other rules that say the DM introduced, like the location of the orc, and it’s AC) determine if you succeed in hitting the orc, and how much damage you do. The DM interprets those results to add a rule about the orc bleeding.
However, if you say X Card something that the DM tried to introduce? That rule stops the DM from introducing a new rule.
Joshua Hillerup How is a player describing their character swinging their sword and striking an orc with it, a new rule in D&D? That rule is literally the attack roll, and the in-fiction description is the conversation that is developed between the players and GM, constrained by the rules governing attack rolls.
Rule: one of a set of explicit or understood regulations or principles governing conduct within a particular activity or sphere.
The RULE is how to model the sword swing (dice, fictional distance, fictional properties of the weapon), and the RULING is how you decided then talk about what happens (the orc takes the hit, and a deep gash opens on his belly where you sliced him, seeping blood).
In this example, the DM could make a house rule for ‘bleeding’ and that would be a RULE. And the RULING would be what is currently happening to the orc as a consequence. But that RULE isn’t required, either. It could just be flavor.
But everything else in this example makes me think “RULING” and not “RULE”.
Maybe I am misinterpreting what you’re describing?
Yeah, I’m lost then. If that’s what rules mean in this context this analogy by Vincent is flat out wrong. I’ve never encountered a gaming book that says that what’s introduced in the conversation has to be consistent with what was already introduced (although I can think of one game that explicitly does not have that rule). There’s other rules like that as well.
Also, there’s no where in the D&D books that say that your character did attack. It just states what happens if they do.
Joshua Hillerup I am not speaking for any one but myself, and how I read this post and how it resonated with me and my experiences.
” I’ve never encountered a gaming book that says that what’s introduced in the conversation has to be consistent with what was already introduced”
Neither have I. Is that what you read into my words? That’s not a fair interpretation at least of mine.
“Also, there’s no where in the D&D books that say that your character did attack. It just states what happens if they do.”
What does this mean? What’s the goal of this statement? We agree, the books don’t say your character did attack, should attack, or whatever. They give you tools to model that behavior if you choose to do it. Then based on the ruling of the DM, a consequence is described.
Rob Donoghue I love that example of a board game where you have to tell your opponent how to move your pieces. That just seems like a fun idea to work on and integrate with something else.
I don’t think that kind of game is a conversation about a fiction, though. It’s clearly verbal communication about how to move the pieces, but its not a narrative (unless we are really pushing the definition of narrative). There might be table talk, but that’s outside the demands of the game rules (i.e., table talk is not required to move any objective within the game environment forward towards victory/resolution).
I think the answer doesn’t pull apart as cleanly because there’s not a clean answer. I have played D&D games that might as well have been a board game (cut-scenes-between-fights styled play, if you will), while I’ve played Descent with folks really into creating a character persona (even without any tools to support that). I think its a matter of what you bring to the table is what you get out of a game experience. I had friends that “RP’d” in World of Warcraft. That was clearly a conversation oriented game space those WoW players were operating, and while they had very little tools, they enjoyed it any way (I couldn’t get into it without tools to support agency I wanted to exhibit).
But there is clearly major differences from a game that gives you a tool box to play with designed to move fiction forward, and a board game that has a narrative structure that is used to explain the in-game agency (or why you are doing that in this way). But for the individual person, I still feel like its entirely what you bring to the table.
I think this conversation needs more rules.
Joshua Hillerup I might be able to clear a thing or two up, but only one or two, and no promises.
When you’re playing D&D and you say “I hit the orc with my sword,” who’s allowed to answer you, by the rules of D&D? What range of answers are they allowed to give?
If you say “I shove the orc back with my hands,” would you expect a different person to answer? Would you expect the same person to answer, but their answer to be different?
In D&D, at least when I’m the DM, you’re allowed to say both “I try to distract the orc while my friend sneaks around to his flank,” and “do I think I could distract the orc while my friend sneaks around to his flank?” As your DM, I’ll take you to mean different things. In the former case, you’re trying to do it; in the latter, you’re weighing the possibility and you haven’t committed, right?
When are you allowed to say “I hit the orc with my sword,” when should you definitely say something different, and when should you listen and not interrupt?
Under what circumstances can your friend who’s playing the elf, not the DM at all, answer you with, “oh I already killed that orc”?
This is the conversation I’m talking about.
Is this conversation the REAL medium of play? Who knows, who cares. Instead, let’s take it to be the medium of play, consider roleplaying in that light, and see if we can gain some insight into roleplaying as a practice and the art of rpg design.
With me now?
OK. And I’m all for the rules being written down with that in mind.