Roll Play, THEN Role Play!

Before we dive in to this, beware: I'm a harsh kind of DM. I'm a hardcore Dwarf Fortress fanatic who takes the saying "Losing Is Fun" to heart. I believe in PVP, deadly campaigns, evil PCs, split parties, dungeon crawls, hex crawls, and wargaming. To begin with, I am very much outside of the mainstream when it comes to gaming philosophy. So take my words with a grain of salt, but please take the time to consider what I have to say.

There exists in the gaming hobby a philosophical saying which states, "Roleplay, not roll play!". It is a rebellion against the old-school, "Gygaxian" competitive format of play. It is championed by narrativists who believe story integrity should come first. It is sang by softies who can't have fun the hard way, who get deeply hurt any time they "lose", who think no character should die unless the group agrees on it. The saying is closely related to the sentiment in the Gamer's Manifesto of Whitewolf fame. ("Rules written on paper not stone tablets [...] when dice conflict with the story the story always wins [etc.]")

And yet, as far as I can tell, it is nothing more than an eloquent expression of the Stormwind Fallacy.

This is perfect, except that Superman is a piss-poor character.

Why, pray tell, do these things need to be mutually exclusive at all? Just as it is entirely possible to minmax a PC and still have a great time roleplaying them as a character, I posit it is entirely possible to follow the rules of the game to the letter and still have excellent roleplay- and even a coherent narrative! There is nothing about any game's system which is inherently anathema to roleplay.

An RPG system is (generally speaking) designed to facilitate roleplay. If it wasn't, it wouldn't be an RPG! Now, some admittedly do a better job of that than others, but that's beside the point: they all got into this for the roleplay.

Here's something that might surprise you: between the system and the roleplay, it's the system that is the most fragile. An RPG system cannot really exist in a functional sense without some degree of roleplay, it just becomes a boring process. Without fair play, the game system becomes a meaningless waste of time. Roleplay, on the other hand, can exist without any system at all. It is independent, and inherently as sturdy as the social bond between the role players at the table.

As an example, let's talk about some other games: Life, Magic the Gathering, and Checkers.

Did you know that the game of Life is a type of RPG? I didn't, at least not until I played it with a bunch of kids.

When you play Life with adults, it's a lot like silent D&D: you roll dice and move pieces and eventually the game is over. It's random, arbitrary, and pointless. A process with no purpose.

When you play Life with kids though, it's a completely different game. The kids make choices with details. They'll say things like, "I get the red car because it goes faster!!" and "my person has blond hair!" They make jokes about players who accidentally grab the same gender as their person for a spouse, then run with it anyways. They talk about the hows and whys of the things that happen to each other. They make decisions based on the kind of person they're playing, rather than based on what they think will win. They tell a story.

It's a ridiculous story, with some questionable commentary on modern values, but it is a story nonetheless. At the end of the game, it doesn't matter that the winner was mostly random, it doesn't even really matter who won. What they'll talk about later on, what they'll remember, is all the silly stuff they made up on the way. That's the game of Life. And they do it all without houserules, or homebrew cards, or fudging spinner results.

(Although the homebrew cards sounds like a fun project to try... Keep an eye out for that article. Give me a few years. It'll be a slow day item.)

MTG was originally designed as a convention game, and initially attracted primarily players of Dungeons & Dragons. While most people assume it was because D&D was also a fantasy themed convention game, but I think there's something a little more fundamental to it than that. Here's a question:

Would MTG be as popular today if the cards were nothing more than abstract game pieces with no thematic element, narrative, or artwork?

I highly doubt it.

If people didn't play MTG for the narrative component, there wouldn't be one. There wouldn't be books, or comics, or card art, or flavor text, or the Plane Shift supplements for 5e D&D. To a certain extent, the theme that you are roleplaying as a powerful planehopping sorcerer locked in mortal combat with other powerful magi, is the point of the game. Without it, it's just ink on cardboard and whiny man-children squabbling over petty minutiae.

The structure of the game inherently builds it's own narrative every time the game is played, even when the players don't notice or keep track of it. The composition of the decks involved describe the nature of the characters who are engaged in the wizard's duel.

Most players just leave it all as-is, but the narrative element is there automatically. Anyone could take advantage of it if they wished.

I don't know about you, but I roll with the kinds of people who DO take advantage of that narrative element. All it takes is for both players to attach the how and why descriptive element to game events. That's it. A little bit of first-person in-character banter never hurts either! Magic the Gathering can be as much of a roleplaying game as D&D- players can even roleplay the personalities of the creatures they summon if they wished!

And again, all of this works fine without having to sacrifice any of the integrity of the game's system or its components. (Although I have found that ignoring all the official card restriction rules makes for a better game as long as you aren't playing with jerks.)

I bet you see where I'm going with this now. I bet most of you probably even see how! But yes, even Checkers can function as an RPG system.

For anyone who hasn't noticed, Checkers is nothing more than an extremely simple, very abstract wargame. War is one of the most fundamental narrative devices in history.

The board represents a borderline. A large region over which there is conflict. The pieces represent military strength by mass. The players are the military leaders. Taking pieces also takes territory, pushing into enemy land.

Roleplaying this game takes a bit more effort. You need more than just how and why, you also need to fill in what. What lands are these? What types of soldiers make up the units? What is the conflict over? These kinds of questions are minor though, it only takes a second or two to make it all up.

Really, pretty much any kind of game, (with the possible exception of most sports, which tell the narrative of their reality) can be a roleplaying game.

The truth is that you don't even need a game system at all in order to roleplay.

Collaborative fiction can be created through a character based roleplaying process. It's commonplace on roleplaying forums, and individuals can do the same in person as well. I've run plenty of pure roleplays online, and I was a roleplayer long before I was a game designer.

Improvisational theater is another format in which roleplay can take center stage- this is basically what a kid's game of "Let's pretend" really is!

So I ask, if you aren't even going to actually use the game system in your roleplay, why have a game system at all? If you're just going to ignore it and create whatever story you want, why bother with the hassle of dice and character sheets and books? What's the point? What value is gained by including encumbrance rules that are ignored and lose conditions that never come into play? If all you care about is roleplay, and the game is an unnecessary thing tacked on to the side to be ignored whenever inconvenient, why bother with the game?

But there might be some out there, especially younger role players, who don't see how to roleplay without a system to guide them, or who don't understand how to tell a story when the dice seem to call the shots. So let's take a look at how things fun at my table. This is what actual roll play looks like when you don't sacrifice roleplay to do it.

1. The DM describes the SIS. Setting and situation explained.
2. Players ask for clarifying details to inform their decisions.
3. After the SIS is sufficiently understood, players describe the actions their characters attempt, with their desired results.
4. The DM determines the success/failure, then calls for rolls on anything uncertain.
5. The DM narrates the actual consequences of the attempted actions, possibly working with the players to construct the consequences.

For example:

1. DM: "You are all standing in a stone room. Exits to the North, East, and South. The room is empty aside from a stone table at the center of the room."
2. Player: "Are there doors on the exits? Do I remember how I got here?" DM: "Yes, theya re made of wood, no you do not."
3. Player: I go to the North door and check to see if it's locked."
4. *DM looks at the PC's passive perception score, compares it to the trap detection DC for the trapped door.*
5. DM: "Your character has found a spring-loaded trap mechanism. Describe to me how that looks." Player: "Guys! There's a bunch of clockwork stuff on the door hinges here! This door is trapped. Be careful, this place is dangerous!"

In the above method, there is an important distinction: The players consult the system FIRST, then use that system to inform the roleplay. Instead of giving your roleplay monologue and rolling the dice to see if you convinced the king to give support, you state your intention, roll the dice, and then deliver a monologue that matches the result you were given. In this philosophy, the game is a prompt. It is the foundation for a narrative that does not yet exist. It is schrodinger's story.

This method validates the game as a game. The system is understood, utilized, and followed- and the players still get to roleplay. It isn't a matter of one conflicting with the other, it's simply a matter of priorities.

To a certain extent, this is part of appropriate check calling. The DM should never call for a check to see the effect of roleplay. The DM should call a check and then ask the players to play out the consequences. Think of it as Matt Mercer's "how do you want to do this?" extended to every single check result.