Role-playing Game Systems
It seems everyone is getting into D&D 5E lately. Even Jeff Goldblum is into it.
I have had a number of friends, acquaintances, and strangers asking lately for my input about picking up the system as a player or DM and generally asking questions about RPGs. Maybe because I have been doing a ton of playtesting and exploring other systems lately, or because I’ve been running RPGs on and off for 30 years now, I guess I have an “informed opinion.” Still, it is only that.
Much of the draw to a particular system, particularly when it comes to the most popular, comes down to sunk cost rather than the types of experience that the system is liable to produce. Familiarity and shared assumptions can be incredibly appealing elements. It takes a lot of time — reading, running, and playing — to learn a system well enough that it becomes a more intuitive process, which is where collective storytelling begins.
Many character and story-focused RPGs try to get by this by simplifying the “game” elements — Fate is in this direction, Hillfolk is another. However, the demand on the individual group becomes very high, and the handholds the system may give to structure your options or capabilities as a character can be hard to find.
So, although it may be helpful to critique a given system for its ubiquity, it might be misleading to assume that the draw to a system results from what it does.
The “system” in a role-playing game is functionally the glue between “role-playing” and “game.” There’s a gradient between games that strictly dictate your range of actions and the mechanics of the space/world it occurs in (chess, say), and partially or fully unrestricted (and potentially unruly and directionless) free play.
RPGs all fall somewhere on this spectrum, and where it falls always entails some trade-offs. Some systems strictly delineate the range of possible actions; others attempt to be more abstract, all of them try to blend “story” with “game.” I’m going to pick on D&D a little, although this isn’t a “D&D sucks play my indie game” post (although would it kill ya?). I enjoy D&D with the right group. I think it’s a little duplicitous about the experience that its systems are liable to create, and that’s what I’d like to dig into a little bit.
What’s the issue? I’ll use an example: look at how much “flavor” dictates the differences between character classes, races, and so on in 5e, and really how little the system seems interested in incentivizing the type of play the books claim to be for. (While they lend themselves to other things, as I’ll get into).
As an experiment, I took the same character concept and developed that character with different races, class options, and so on in several other campaigns. I played the character as both PCs and NPCs. I’ve done this before for various reasons but hadn’t considered changing their class, race, and overall “build” before.
It worked perfectly well, almost too well. Part of the reason for this seems to be that in the process of opening up the range of possibilities for what kind of person a goblin, orc, elf, or tiefling might be, they also reduced in advance the sort of assumptions that we can make about them. Stereotypes are generally corrosive in the real world. Still, they function as a part of the generalization we do in the process of creating a narrative that is simple enough for us to understand, remember, and repeat to one another. While stories that challenge our predefined notions of simple right and wrong are by and large my preference, there is a tension between that and providing enough pre-loaded assumptions that it means something that a character is a goblin and not an elf, aside from their combat bonuses or superficial appearance. The alternative, of course, is to create a rich and diverse inner life and system of social relations, but that goes far beyond what D&D is prepared to support as a gaming system or which most groups can bring to life.
In playing these different iterations, something else seemed increasingly obvious. It’s not that the system is so flexible that the same character can be “skinned” and spec-ed out differently and role-playing them was essentially the same; it’s that the two things — “role-play” and “game” — have no clear relationship with one another so far as the system of D&D is concerned.
The point is that the system, by and large, mostly cares about how abilities manifest in combat — and where there are variations, those are intentionally smoothed over for the sake of “balance”. There’s plenty of lore about the races and classes. Still, when you get down to what comes out in sessions and drives/limits player actions, it’s… again… mostly left in the hands of players how to connect their character and the story their in with the system that are meant to represent them, or else it’s a couple little stat perks that are even more incidental now that they can(optionally) be swapped for one another to represent “cultural” differences. I found a reskinned character concept played very differently as a goblin than an elf, but that was only because I leaned into it without any guidance or incentive from the system.
The last thing I want anyone to take from this is an argument about “Political Correctness.”
I’m 100% behind “make every Goblin gay” if that’s what you want to do. This is about something more fundamental in what the rules do and don’t do. In other words, the optional rules in Tasha’s are well and good in themselves. They don’t fix the disconnect between the system and how you role-play that character. I wonder if the “woke debate” (I feel gross even typing those words) is a smokescreen, with the cynical intent of garnering more impressions online.
At most, a major respect of a character between races or classes tweaks the specific methods they use to slice and dice or blast their opponents. How I play them, and if I “play” them at all, that’s up to me. What are his goals, motivations, and fears, and what does it have to do with their development? If this is a role-playing game for all seasons rather than a hack ’n’ slash monster hunting game, why is the primary incentive in the standard rules to kill for experience?
How does your character’s arc connect with an adventure module, any of the systems that take up the bulk of the rulebooks? Doesn’t matter. You’re only role-playing if you want to be. Either way, it’s a “skin” atop the same Swiss army knife. If you can manage to shoehorn the development of your character into a pre-fab adventure, it certainly wasn’t included in that module’s design. All you need is a couple of stock phrases and a desire to vanquish your foes.
I think this indicates an internal conflict within D&D, both in the books and in how it’s played, about what it actually is. Character and story are intended to be a core part of the “role-playing,” or so we are told, yet most of the books are filled with rules that have very little to do with meeting that end. Roleplaying is something extra, something you do, supported vaguely by skill checks (at times), but mostly handled as an adjunct that’s handwaved a bit with “creativity”. Give a Warlock an Eldritch Blast, and they’re gonna use it.
Before anyone gets out pitchforks, I should reiterate that I play and run D&D and have since the late 80s, so obviously, I’m not simply attacking it or suggesting that no one play. For those of you who play with me or in 5E campaigns I run, none of this is too much of a hindrance in situations where you’ve already accepted the “game” for what it is or are mutually beneficial willing to make adaptations. Either they know how to role-play a character and track their basic motives and character arc without re-enforcement and incentive from the system, OR they’re interested in the more regressive, almost board-gamey elements in D&D — if you’re having fun playing hack ‘n’ slash with friends, who cares?
As I’ve said before and will likely say again —D&D is a monster hunting and looting game with some role-playing “flavor” characteristics, often posing as a high fantasy character-driven role-playing game. If you let it do what it’s good at, it can be a lot of fun. You can also push it to be more than that, though at that point, I would suggest maybe looking at other systems.
This has been a significant problem for me when I’ve tried to play at Cons, with strangers at events, or online. (Especially using a modular approach like Adventure League or tables that take the system as a literal tablet of dictates to be followed, to the detriment of the story, of fun. “The dice are Gods here. We are merely their puppets.”) If your character is a cardboard cut-out anyway, the game makes its own covert demands. “We are doing a role-play. Roll 1d6.”
This also becomes an issue beyond my personal bugbears (no pun?) when it comes to thinking about public assumptions about what role-playing games are since D&D has insisted and, to some extent, won the consensus view that D&D and role-playing are synonymous.
All of this raises the question of what a game system is meant to do? The short answer I would give is that system is for subtly incentivizing certain behaviors and deprioritizing others, helping to realize a story-like dynamic by directing/restricting your character’s actions and agency within the world as much as keeping them open. That balance, and the balance of agency, is part of what defines one system from another. The objective is to help replicate an experience.
Of course, no matter how effective the system is at doing this, it always comes down to the specific group playing and running it, but when it comes to game design, that is the variable you don’t really have control over.
Given the popularity of D&D, I find this disconnect both fascinating and a little troubling, because instead of being a problem, this lack seems to be a strange sort of benefit where Wizards can reassert itself as the Ur-RPG, and leverage that disconnect between character, story, and system as a feature rather than a benefit. The issue isn’t whether dark elves or orcs are or aren’t inherently evil. It never was — it is the absurdity of taking a game premised on killing foes and taking their shit and pretending it’s something else entirely.
Of course, given Wizard’s sales numbers, they’re doing something right. And, you know, I enjoy the monster-hunting game just fine when that’s what we’ve chosen to play. But if you are still trying to use D&D to drive character-driven collective stories, there is a long list of systems you might want to look into.