If you are into role playing games, you are highly likely to own piles of books:

  • Almanacs that dragons could be slain with – aka core rules
  • Colour coded big format books to expand the game world, lore, and playable classes
  • an arsenal of dice and paraphernalia

I love diving into those worlds, expanding the puzzle of character creation with an ever growing set of combinations and rules, weave the lore into the campaigns, dive into the endless possibilities of equipment and tactics.

Most players I know start and stick with these kind of games. Be it Dungeons & Dragons, Arcane Codex, Das schwarze Auge, Shadowrun, Splittermond and the such. If we think of role-playing games, these games seem synonymous with it.

But are they? Or even more critically: Should they?

Discovering chimera

Disillusion

A short while back I was playing Splittermond. My party was in a fight and a party member that my character felt protective about got attacked. As was standing right beside my protégé, and it was allowed to take defensive actions out of turn, I declared: “I inject myself between the attacker and my friend and block the attack for her.”

Narratively it made sense. But, “That requires a special ability”, declared my Game Master.

I was confused. I was playing a roleplaying game. My friends and I value roleplaying above all. My is my portrayal of my character artificially restricted? It felt to me that this was wrong. That this violated the priorities my friends and I appeared to have.

Something like that happend in every game I played.

New Words

It was months later, when Matt of the Tomb of Lime introduced me to a pile of new words, that allowed me to see and articulate what was going on:

Roleplaying games as we know them have their roots in board/tabletop games (which is obvious in Dungeons&Dragons), which in turn have their roots in war games (tactical games play out and analyze combat scenarios). All the games I did play for several decades had not just been roleplaying games, but war games (or at least tactical games) as well. The piles of rules, especially surrounding combat resolution betray it for what it is: A chimera. A hybrid of roleplaying game and war game.

The grant potential of roleplay

It is roleplay, the authenitc portrayal of a character in an alien setting, which I am after. I love to display personalities that are different to mine. I love to discover hidden sides of myself. I love to observe my characters evolve. I love to discover otherworldly places through the eyes of my characters.

It is roleplay that I am after.

While tactical games can be interesting, I do not involve them in all my roleplay. The tactical puzzle can be fun. But it never stays interesting for me. What sustains me in campaigns is roleplay.

Even worth: I am frustrated with the tactical games, as they inevitably break immersion and get in the way of roleplay.

The many knots that bind roleplay

There are several paradigms that need to be changed in order to get a free roleplay. War games provide a great many of them. But Game Mastering and Story Telling bring their own detriments to the table.

War game paradigms:

  • Granular resolution mechanics with unambiguous results
  • Combat focus
  • Quantification of abilities and equipment
  • Strict resolution processes
  • Distinct classes (archer, paladin, wizard, barbarian, …)
  • Prioritization of success
  • Every challenge that is put forth is intended to be overcome

Game Mastering paradigms

  • Plot focus
  • Curation of scenes for effect
  • World building monopoly
  • Guided by story telling principles
  • Responsible for reasonable challenges for the party

RPG without story and tactics

For a free roleplay, what we seek, then, is a game with

  • focus on roleplay for the players as well as the game master
  • a simple resolution mechanic that can handle combat none combat equally
  • little to no restrictions on characters, their choices, and their actions
  • collaborative world building
  • a simple process to spice up the world and it’s response to the characters

Surely I am not the first to think about this. Might there even be game that provides all this? Maybe even a Star Wars game? Maybe we need to look no further than Scum and Villainy…