When Is an RPG Not an RPG?
The following two statements are both true.
My first actual session of D&D was my first exposure to roleplaying. No game I had ever played before had any element of pretending to be someone other than myself—except maybe the make-believe “games” we played as kids, but strictly speaking, those play sessions didn’t have any sort of rules, other than what we agreed upon as we went along.
But despite the fact that 1978 was the year I discovered roleplaying, it’s hard to look back at the roleplaying that I actually did and see it as anything other than a variation on me pretending to be a cowboy, or Batman, or whatever took my fancy at the time.
I say this because in every D&D session I’ve ever played in, going back over four decades, the only thing stopping me from changing my character’s backstory and motivations at any point during the game was, like my childhood play, governed only by whatever the rest of the players thought was reasonable.
If they were cool with it, I could switch mid-game from being Memnor the Fighter/Mage to Mem-Tron the Combat Robot without any consequence whatsoever…because there were no rules in the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Handbook governing roleplaying.
Before you go digging out your copy, let me save you a little research. The term “role play” appears twelve times in the PHB. The closest the book comes to detailing rules for roleplaying is this section, in the introduction:
There’s a lot of room for interpretation in there—and in 1978, we had to piece together what it meant by word of mouth from other players, with a smidgen of insight from the use of role playing in clinical psychology (or, at least, what we knew of that, being teenagers just starting high school).
In fact, to the best of my knowledge, no edition of D&D since then has laid out any rules for roleplaying, either.
So, is Dungeons & Dragons actually a roleplaying game?
I know it says so in all the advertising, but we all know that advertising can be completely meaningless. You can buy “organic apples” from your grocery, but unless they have the “Certified Organic” sticker on them, there’s no guarantee that they meet the USDA standards for what growing methods are considered “organic.”
And, in case you haven’t noticed, there’s no “United States Department of Roleplaying.” There are no industry standards for what can and can’t be labeled as a “roleplaying game.”
I had a gaming buddy once who frequently mused that “any game can be a roleplaying game”—meaning that you could inject roleplaying elements into, say, Risk or Clue or even Checkers—and we sometimes put that to the test. Unsurprisingly, it never failed. Pretending to be “Michael McGlen the gangster” while playing Arkham Horror was ultimately no different from pretending to be “Tanlo Weatherbloom the halfling cleric” in Dungeons & Dragons.
The point is that neither game actually requires you to pretend to act and think like those characters.
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My fellow players, if you were to ask them, could confirm that I roleplayed Tanlo Weatherbloom to the hilt. I came up with a “halfling voice,” and I did frivolous things and made bad decisions because that’s how I conceived Tanlo when I rolled him up.
But if I stopped doing that at any point—started talking in my normal voice, or started taking situations more seriously—then the other players might’ve mocked me for not committing to the bit, but it would have had absolutely zero effect on gameplay.
In fact, Tanlo is the only character I ever made for D&D that actually had a roleplaying requirement: He was scrupulously, painfully honest…but that was only because I had taken a character disadvantage (and my DM had approved it), using a rule from the Player’s Option: Skills & Powers sourcebook.
That is to say: The rules for roleplaying Tanlo as “honest” were literally in a book of optional rules.
So, again: If the rules that require you to roleplay are not only optional, but not even in one of the core rulebooks…is D&D actually a roleplaying game?
Mind you, I don’t mean to pick on Dungeons & Dragons. In my experience, most games that call themselves “roleplaying games” don’t actually require the players to roleplay. I can only think of a handful where the rules either reward you for roleplaying, or punish you if you don't.
(Of course, Dungeon Masters and Game Masters and Storytellers and so on can, at their discretion, choose not to enforce those rules…but that’s a whole different ball of wax.)
With all of this in mind, the answer to the question “When is an RPG not an RPG?” is this:
“If the core mechanics of the game require players to act and react within a defined persona, it’s a roleplaying game. If the core mechanics of the game only suggest roleplaying, it’s not technically a roleplaying game.”
The real question, though, is: Is that really important?
And the answer is, of course, no. It doesn’t really matter if the game you’re playing expects you to act and react in-character…and make suboptimal decisions. because the persona you’ve created doesn’t always act in his or her best interests. (Or as Andrew Finch, a former Wizards of Coast game designer, once put it: "The truest test of roleplaying is giving up mechanical advantages for character or story advancement.") That’s your choice, and as long as your GM is okay with you foregoing roleplaying sometimes (or all the time, for that matter), no one really cares. Nondescript men in black suits with guns and badges aren’t going to show up at your door and whisk you away to a USDRP “black site.” Hell, the game’s designer probably doesn’t even care whether you roleplay or not.
But.
When the rules of the game do actually require you to roleplay—when it’s not just about making the optimal decision in any given situation—and your scrupulously honest halfling cleric has to explain to the town watch that yes, you and your friends did indeed start the brawl that ended up with two people dead…it’s times like that when you’re actually getting the most out of your roleplaying game.
The difference in the two experiences is like thinking you enjoy eating Oreo cookies…and then one day discovering that you can dunk them in milk first.