In a recent post, I touched on the notion of describing tabletop RPGs in positive rather than negative terms - that is, describing them in terms of what they actually add to your RP experience, as opposed to merely describing them in terms of their ability to not interfere with telling your story.
I’ve received a number of follow-up questions to the effect of: okay, so what do tabletop RPGs do that freeform RP doesn’t? So here’s my list. This is just one game designer’s opinion; it’s not exhaustive, not all tabletop RPGs do all of these things equally well, and certainly tabletop RPGs aren’t the only way to achieve them - but I’d argue that if you tried to put together a tool that checks off at least most of them, whatever you end up with is going to substantially resemble a tabletop RPG in the end.
This one might seem so obvious it’s hardly worth mentioning, but: tabletop roleplaying games are games. We could get into a whole quagmire of defining “what is a game?” here, and obviously not all games need explicit rules of any sort, much less rules that involve dice and numbers, but let’s cut right to the chase: games, even cooperative ones, offer a different set of incentives and rewards than pure collaborative storytelling does.
This can manifest in a whole variety of ways from game to game; it might be the difference between describing an activity and actually engaging in it - for example, it’s easy to describe having made a tactical decision, but much harder to actually make one! - or it might just the thrill of scoring points, but typically there’s something you want to get out of the experience apart from/in addition to telling a story.
(Failure to correctly identify that added priority is the root of a great deal of interfandom strife in the tabletop roleplaying community. You end up with folks assuming that all tabletop RPGs have basically the same gameplay objectives, and trying to understand each other’s games as broken or incomplete versions of their own favoured game - which is about as sensible as trying to understand soccer as a broken or incomplete version of golf!)
There’s a tendency in some circles to frame “storytelling” as the act of creating a fictional world, but that’s not how all storytelling works. Heck, arguably it’s not even how most storytelling works. Another type of storytelling is this: a bunch of stuff happens, and then we look back on it and construct an explanatory narrative to account for it. This type of storytelling is as much an act of organising as it is an act of creating.
In this sense, a tabletop RPG is a stuff-that-happened generator - an engine for producing a series of bizarre happenstances that demand an explanation. And for that to work - i.e., to prevent things from falling back into authorial mode - the outcomes need to be outside of the control of any one participant; hence, dice and rules.
The great paradox of creativity is that it often needs restrictions to shine. Absolute freedom to create whatever you want can be suffocating, while having a specific set of rules you need to stick to fuels the fires. The rules and setting of a tabletop RPG function as a very elaborate creative prompt: what sorts of characters can you build by plugging together this specific set of archetypes and attributes? What kinds of stories can you tell subject to this specific set of assumptions about how it ought to go?
(This a big part of why many folks find self-labelled “universal” tabletop RPGs unapproachable, incidentally. A game that can do anything is well and fine in theory - though I’d argue that no such animal really exists - but in practice it cuts against the reason that a lot of people play tabletop RPGs in the first place. They don’t want a game that can do anything; they want a game that provides a robust framework for doing one particular thing.)
It’s sometimes asserted that the primary function of rules in a tabletop RPG is to prevent things from descending into the “yuh huh!/nuh uh!” loop that childhood games of let’s-pretend are prey to. While it’s absolutely true that RP with immature or inexperienced participants can fall apart in this way, RP with mature or experienced participants tends to have the opposite problem: excessive consensus-seeking.
Basically, experienced roleplayers may find themselves falling back into trying to negotiate the outcome that would “make the most sense” in terms of the established fiction. Most of the time that’s okay, even desirable - but sometimes you need to shake things up. Sometimes it’s desirable to break that consensus and inject a little chaos.
(Somewhat counterintuitively, it’s more the rules than the dice that are responsible for creating that chaos. It’s easy to define the outcomes of a dice-rolling exercise so that every possible outcome feeds back into consensus-building, but the rules can be a right bastard. Even games with no dice or other randomisers whatsoever can thus benefit from this function.)
It’s rare in freeform RP for one player to have the ability to make awful stuff happen to another player’s character without that player’s explicit consent; it’s considered a very “hard” sort of RP, and is likely to lead to crossed lines and hurt feelings, so most freeform RP venues don’t allow it - but in tabletop RPGs, this sort of play is very common, and generally doesn’t cause any problems.
How do tabletop RPGs get away with it?
Simple: by blaming the dice.
To be sure, there are other aspects of the implicit social contract of tabletop roleplaying that contribute, but the biggest one is that the dice and rules provide a layer of psychological “insulation” when awful stuff happens to your character. It’s not the other player of the GM’s fault: it’s the dice that screwed you over. Any potential hard feelings are displaced onto inanimate chunks of plastic. Some groups even develop rituals for “punishing” dice that consistently roll poorly.
I’m 100% sure that half the people reading this are going “okay, hold up” right now. How could dice and rules possibly enhance immersion? Doesn’t having to think about the mechanics and tot up the dice rolls pull you out of the story? In some senses, absolutely it does. In other senses, picking up the dice can actually avoid a potential immersion break.
Let’s skip back to the preceding point about consensus-building for a moment. Even if your character is the only party who’s affected by whatever they’re about to do, it’s easy to fall back on trying to achieve consensus with the established fiction. What’s the most likely outcome of this action? What would make the most sense? What would move the story forward most effectively? What does it feel like the outcome should be?
The trouble is, when you’re thinking like that you’re not acting as your character: you’re acting as the author of your character’s story. Some players don’t see any important difference between author-stance and actor-stance, and that’s okay, but for others the distinction is huge - and that’s where the dice get to shine: when you pick up those dice, in that moment you’re just as ignorant of the outcome as your character is. You’ve bridged the gulf between merely describing uncertainty and actually experiencing it!
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