On Dead Tree Based Games, Part 1

So, I figured today I would pull out the metaphorical dice bag and dive into a realm that most view as perhaps the pinnacle of geekery – RPGs.  No, not console or computer RPGs which, frankly, barely qualify for the name.  I’m talking about good old fashioned dice rolling, dew drinking, THAC0 calculating tabletop RPGs.  And perhaps even more geeky, LARPs (Live Action RPGs).  To begin, I figured I’d take a brief gander into the history of RPGs and a discussion of some of their various characteristics.

For those of you who never really ventured past computer-based RPGs, here’s a quick rundown.  Children have been roleplaying since time immemorial.  Cops & robbers, cowboys & indians, and in even less refined forms than those simple games.  Did you ever draw wings on a cardboard box and pretend it was an airplane?  Congratulations, you were roleplaying.  But for a long time, there was no adult equivalent (except maybe Civil War reenactments and those murder mystery dinner parties – for the life of me I can’t find out when they appeared on the scene).

Then back in the dark era of the late 1960s and early 1970s, a strange confluence was born.  Wargaming was becoming popular – miniature based combat simulation.  Essentially, it was the top-down real time strategy game of the day, you just had to do all the random number generating and moving of pieces instead of a computer.  Fantasy wargaming was a particular subset of the genre, where you had wizards, knights, archers, elves, and all the familiar Tolkeinesque trappings.  For the most part though, there was no roleplaying involved.  It was numbers crunching, troop squishing fun, but ultimately just a sophisticated wargame.

Then one fateful day, a conversation happened that probably went something like this:

Steve: “Okay Evan, my phalanx takes the north side of that hill there, and that’s the last of its movement allotment.  Your go.”

Evan (drunk): “Yeah man, okay, my uh, barbarians are going to charge your phalanx.”

Steve: “Dude, my phalanx has a huge defensive value, and that’s not even accounting for the high ground you’d be charging up or the fact that because of the ravine on one side you can’t do your little ‘the barbarian horde surrounds you’ trick you always do.”

Evan (still drunk): “Yeah, but don’t you get it, man?  They’re, like, barbarians.  I know I’m gonna lose, but that’s what they’d do.

And in that fateful moment, the core of modern gaming was born.  Dungeons and Dragons was the first major player on the scene in 1974, but a host of others hit the scene in the 70s and early 80s.  Tunnels and Trolls, Star Frontiers, Gamma World, etc.  The core of an RPG is the fact that you are not playing some nameless piece on a game board, but a character who has certain skills, motivations, and is in essence an individual, much like an actor playing a role (hence, ROLE playing).

I’ll be getting into this a bit more in an upcoming post, but there are generally two broad component categories to a roleplaying game.  For all you cooks/bakers out there, think dry ingredients vs wet ingredients.  These are commonly referred to as “Crunch” and “Fluff.”

Crunch consists of the mechanics of the system, the intricacies of its rules, and the depth, ease and accuracy with which they model the intended subject.  It is the skeleton of the game on which the world, the characters, and everything else is hung.  It is what stops the age-old Cowboys and Indians argument of “I shot you!”  “Did not!”  Fluff is the trappings that give the game its own unique character.  The environment, the history behind the world and the characters, the story that hopefully keeps people coming back.

People tend to like a varying degree of each in their games, but they are not necessarily inversely proportional.  True, there comes a point where too many or too detailed rules slows things down.  Similarly, there is a point at which a lack of structure makes resolving conflicts difficult and stalls the game just as surely.

So, what you end up with as an “RPG” is essentially a game where you take on a role the same way an actor does, and interact in a world (usually) directed by another person.  Depending on the game and the group you play with it can be anything from a hack and slash game where the deepest character motivation is to get more treasure, to a deep philosophical exploration of the nature of reality and human consciousness.  Most fall somewhere in between.

LARP (Live Action Roleplaying) just adds another dimension to the game – instead of sitting around a table saying ‘My character does X,’ you actually get up and do it to some extent.  Obviously, a lot depends on the nature of the game and how accurately you can enact it.  A LARP about dogfighting space pilots is probably going to be a flop unless you happen to have a few custom flight simulators sitting around.  And similar to tabletop games, you can go from primarily hack and slash types of larps (boffer larps for those who are familiar with them) where people actually fight with padded/foam weapons, to more esoteric larps devoted to a certain concept or situation (Intercon-style LARPing, again for those familiar with it).

Anyway, that’s it for now, I’ll resume soon.