Role Playing as it is done in Historical Miniatures Games

[MatrixGamer]

Any more I'm thinking that using terrain that could be made by anyone (hey new player this means you) could put together. I won't win any terrain making prizes but should market the idea - play with toys. The hero clicks, star wars, prepainted figs would be best for this since they are open and play toys.

Chris Engle
Hamster Press

[Mike Holmes]

IMO, RPG largely lacks awareness of mechanical structures.  Thats too sweeping a statement, but it does not have anything like the set of terminologies for structures that exist in the wargame field.  Frex, I can go to baordgamegeek and search for games that share a common mechanical type, like area movement by contrast to movement points.  In many ways, IMO, board games are structurally more sophisticated than RPG's.

That's ironic. I was talking to an avid Boardgame Geek poster this weekend over a game of 1830, and he said that he really enjoyed The Forge, because of the actual shared vocabulary. He says that any term you find used on Boardgame Geek actually has far less in the way of agreement as to the meaning then they do here.

Anyhow, noting that I'm sorta biased, my opinion of the "role-playing" that goes on in miniature gaming (being an avid minis gamer myself), is largely "tacked on." That is, the activity is all game, with some role-playing slapped on just for fun by the participants. I remember one really memorable moment where a room mate of mine at a GenCon in the early '90s playing a German commander in the Europa demo that we helped run, decided to print up about fifty little propaganda pamphlets and rained them down on the Russian staff meeting. Hilarious.

And had nothing to do with the overall agenda of play. Just a value add by an inspired participant. Not much different than telling jokes while playing golf, really.

Let's look at the examples given individually:
#1 is about taking pride in the individuality of one's pieces. Yes, I think this is evolutionary towards RPGs, and how Gygax and gang moved from Chainmail to D&D. But it's still pre-roleplaying. No matter how much history there is behind the piece, it's still not played outside of battles, and, I'll bet, nobody would complain if it were used in the same battle twice. There's no attempt at creating character continuity with the unit.
#2 is about making the unit a single individual. This is part of the evolution, too, but interestingly doesn't have anything to do with what makes RPGs unique. That is, you can play a unit of men in an RPG just as easily as a single character. It's just that at the scale of an individual does it first dawn on people that they can have a continuity of their own outside of that of the scenarios proffered. That is, the scenarios can be given to the character, instead of the character being placed in a decided scenario. Again, can you play the same scenario twice? If so, then the character isn't being considered a discrete object in the continuing SIS.

Note that not even D&D and other RPGs got to this point until a few years had passed (about 1976). Up until this point it can quite literally be said that D&D is just a complex wargame. Yes, that quite intentionally does abuse to the naming of the original D&D as a RPG.

#3 - what's missing here is that in those games, the goals of play become a source of gamism (I've played a lot of NSDM). And then the characters become pawns. There's no intent to play the character "as the character should be played." It's all about the player winning the game through the tool of the character. No matter how much color is dolloped on top. This is the difference between NSDM and some LARPS. Though I think that may really gamism based LARPS often devolve into this sort of play. Sometimes you get a very incoherent mix.

#4 sounds like you drifted the game to a RPG for your own entertainment. Otherwise it's like 3. Did you note anyone looking at you strangely, or have anyone ask you why you weren't trying to help win the scenario?

Or, if everyone was participating, then this wasn't a wargame anymore. It was a LARP about a wargame situation. I'm running a PBEM a lot like this right now.

#5 Matrix Games seem interesting in that, as the "balance" is pretty arbitrary (given that it's set by the GM), I think that strongly informs the people playing that it's about exploration. The only place it's not an RPG is that people do not do much First Person interaction.

I'm also, as it happens, currently involved in a PBEM somewhat Matrixy game of a space empire game (reminds me slightly of Starfire). We're all roleplayers primarily (it's being run by Kirt Dankmeyer, and played by folks like Josh Kashinsky and Ben Lehman), so it's not surprising that we discovered a way to inject a little RP - we formed an interstellar body and we play the delegates. But it was totally unneccessary to do so. The game is exploratory enough, however, that I feel that the RP is allowed to affect the outcome, so it's an RPG for all intents and purposes.

I think that's where the line has to be drawn. It's the point at which the players go from their in-game decision being soley determined by the mechanical rules, to where their decisions are being informed by what interests them in terms of the characters. Gamism is when the character goals become a source of player goals, for instance, other than imposed by the game framework. In a wargame you have no choice but to fight the other army. And yes, that's why early "Here's the Dungeon for tonight" D&D was a wargame.

Outside of this definition, we can talk till we're blue in the face about the time cousin Chuck played Monopoly acting as a smarmy real estate agent. That happens in any game, but it's not really making the game a role-playing game at all. It's just taking on a fun portrayal on top of the otherwise unchanged original game.

Mike

[MatrixGamer]

#4 sounds like you drifted the game to a RPG for your own entertainment. Otherwise it's like 3. Did you note anyone looking at you strangely, or have anyone ask you why you weren't trying to help win the scenario?

Science versus Pluck is a wargame, the role playing frequently is a tack on just like the other games. It has more potential than other wargames for role playing to effect play when the game is being run by a fun loving game master who is swayable.

I played in a SvP game in Oklahoma City in 95 in which el Hiba lead the Jihad to expell the French from Southern Moracco. He told me before we got to the convention that cowry shells would be used to modify the game (exactly how was not specified but I assumed it meant dice modifiers.) I brought a bag full of cowries and took on the role of el Hiba. I used my illegal cowries to give a gift/bribe to all the arab/berber players in the game on the first turn. They thought I was out. Of course I wasn't but did not use any other illegal cowries for the rest of the game. I lead my men on a pilgrimage to the tomb of a famous saint. All the while my army and fame grew. I role played with the Islamic players throughout the game urging them to follow the green banner. Howard was swayed by my moves so my army grew in strength and my contacts with the religious authories of Marakesh grew. When I finally got to the city, the French had pulled back and I was able to magnanimously protect the French consulate from the one radical group that had not joined me. The war game was won by role play and playing the game master.

Do people look at you funny when playing like this? You bet they do! Which is why wargames are limited as simulations. They suck at point in history when systems shift. In 1944 all Germans were bad. By May 1945 that system shifted to a peace game in which Germans had to be seen as good or potentially good and be reformed.

Your take on D+D not being a role play game in its original play is interesting. The rules were the same. I've got the old white box version and have seen the original brown box version (same books different box). The difference was who was playing. The historical miniatures gamers who were the first to buy and play D+D were moving on from it by 76 (at least in Louisville KY). The teenages like me who were moving in were raised on Tolkien and Saturday morning cartoons. So the rules stayed the same - it was just how people used the rules that altered.

I don't think that any of the 5 miniatures versions of RPGing that I mentioned are bad games. All were and are fun in their own ways. They certainly arn't RPGs as is understood at the Forge. More like separate evolutions. Just like the old Game Designers Workshop game "En Garde" was an odd evolutionary divergence from D+D gaming that only appeared again in GDW's Taveller game as character creation.

I'm going to just read this list now and not post anymore because I think I've said my piece.

Chris Engle
Hamster Press

[Mike Holmes]

Your take on D+D not being a role play game in its original play is interesting. The rules were the same. I've got the old white box version and have seen the original brown box version (same books different box). The difference was who was playing. The historical miniatures gamers who were the first to buy and play D+D were moving on from it by 76 (at least in Louisville KY). The teenages like me who were moving in were raised on Tolkien and Saturday morning cartoons. So the rules stayed the same - it was just how people used the rules that altered.

Yes, there were people who were drifting the rules early on to what would become the norm for RPGs later. But the first text to suggest stuff like this was possibly AD&D1E?

Think of it this way. In earlier editions you had the dungeon, and you had price lists, but you didn't even have "town." Even in Blue Book Basic D&D, they mention the town, but simply as an abstracted place in which you could get stuff, and get healed.

So, yeah, there were people who were playing an extrapolation of what they felt RPGs could be. But the rules didn't support this form of play particularly, and those who were playing them verbatim without the additions of the characters being extant in a full world, were very much just playing a complex wargame.

No surprise, given where they came from. Gygax and Arneson et al were just wargamers who stumbled upon this stuff by accident. Yeah, they too knew that there was this something more that was to be had. But they certainly didn't have any idea how to encode it into a text. That wouldn't occur for at least four years after they started.

By AD&D, Gygax had gotten the idea across. Yeah it was still largely gamism, but he was talking story and characters existing in a world where the economics had to make sense. The world had to have it's own internal causality. This was new in texts. I remember the original Traveller stuff and thinking, gee, you know, you never really have to play your character as a role, you can just roll dice and accumulate wealth as a merchant flying from planet to planet. Then reinvest that money in a new starship. Very much even games like Traveller didn't even tell us about the idea of actual roles.

In fact, I'd go so far as to say that it was people who understood that there was this something more that RPGs could be, who were drifting the rules to play that way, that it was this effect that lead to the tradition of people modifying RPGs as they are won't to do. That is, I think it's breaking out of "elemental gamism" meaning pre-RPG gamism to other forms that are the original cause of incoherence, and the move to modify systems.

Of course, that's through the lense of more than 25 years of history now, so I may be seeing things as other than they were. But I do remember pre-1980 thinking that some people were just playing a game, and other RPG people were doing something more. And I'm just talking different forms of gamism here - I wasn't into sim (much less nar) at this point. I wanted players who would make up goals for their characters in-character, and then play gamism to get them. Instead of just following the scenario.

Anyhow, that dichotomy continues to exist. People play games in which role can be injected, but doesn't at all matter to resolution (a sort of author stance where the character motives are ascribed to fit the game motives). And people play in games where the mechanisms only serve to reward the player driving the character (in several possible different modes). It's identifiable enough that the wargamers think of the RPGers as "flakey" and the RPGers think of the wargamers as "staid." Still, after 30 years.

Mike

[komradebob]

Hmm, I hate to draw too retsrictive definitions of what either rpgs or miniatures wargames are, since someone inevitably comes along and muddies the border eventually. Further, most definitions seem to look at particular evolutionary lines of development at a certain stage in that development and declare that to be the definition of ( insert wargame /boardgame /LARP /CRPG /miniatures wargame/whatever as appropriate), causing all sorts of grief for later developers. Personally, I'm willing to concede that these hybrid games are neither properly rpgs nor miniatures wargames as normally understood, so long as other folks are willing to discuss the ways that these games can utilise elements from both of those forms. I've seen a number of different terms suggested: semi-rpgs ( I believe by Mr. Holmes, in fact...), Floor Games (Wells), Narrative Wargame ( GW), as well as several othert terms.

My interest is more along the lines of "what sort of things can we develop, after 30 years of experience with developments in rpgs, and apply to miniatures gaming?".  

For example, from the more collab-storytelling end of the rpg spectrum, I'm interested in the question of whether direct and consistent faction/character to player identification is necessary. Can you have non-consistent faction identification, but still have gamism? How far can you move from direct, bottom-up design and have a design be considered simulationist? How can GM duties be dispersed in a game and still get something that at least vaguely resembles an rpg?

And that is before even touching on the way the physical nature of miniatures themselves affects design...

Robert

[contracycle]

For example, from the more collab-storytelling end of the rpg spectrum, I'm interested in the question of whether direct and consistent faction/character to player identification is necessary. Can you have non-consistent faction identification, but still have gamism?

Yes you can; the game "History of the World" varies the factions all the time.  What you play is a colour, and the cultures you control are then represented in that colour.  These will change every turn, as cultures are replaced by others in the historical framework.

[komradebob]

The hero clicks, star wars, prepainted figs would be best for this since they are open and play toys.

Homies.

[Hereward The Wake]

I think that the lines are now so blurred in many senses, the mixing of ideas and concpets from different aspects, RPg, Wargames, Matrix games etc are used, at least by some people. I have added elemnts from all in to my games of all sorts for years and use ideas from Matrix games in both RPGs and Wargames.

Jonathan