Initializing the roleplaying experience

[rrr]

Hi Eero, this is a very interesting thread. I'm only going to comment on one aspect as I'm not sire I have much to contribute to the rest of the very interesting discussion.

Larps have a much wider and more fluid social structure, so big that it isn't that different from golf players, for example.

This line is quite fascinating to me and reminded me of a realisation I had about a year ago.

I'm sure we've all experienced the situattion of chatting to an aquaintance, relative or work colleague about our hobby and having to explain what Roleplaying games are all about.  It can be quite difficult especially when the person has no real frame of reference.

One thing that struck me quite strongly however is the difference between trying to explain LARP and trying to explain Table-Top.  Explaining table-top is difficult.  People don't get exactly what is going on without actually doing it.  They have trouble understanding why it is fun to sit in a dark room for hours on end just talking and rolling dice.  There isn't really a comparable social activity which they can mentally link the experience to.

LARP on the other hand, people just seem to "get".  And usually they are suddenly interested.  Why?  I suspect it is because they can draw some analogy between other social experiences and what I am describing.  I have had all of the following kinds of reactions:

"You dress up and pretend to be someone else?  Cool! so it's like a fancy dress party?"
"You wear armour and have big battles?  Cool! So it's like re-enactment?"
"You spend a weekend camping with a thousand people and you get drunk in the evenings with your mates?  Cool! so it's like a rock fesitval?"
"You run around and point guns at each other?  Cool! So it's like paintball?"
"You pretend to be someone else in a made up world?  Cool! So it's like escaping from the real world for a while?"

And yes, it is a bit like all of those things, but it's also something else.  But the very fact that they can pigeon-hole the experience as being like something they already recognise is a very valuable starting point from which to explain the hobby.

With Table-Top, because the actual fun part is so abstracted, it's difficult for people to get what is actually happening.  In terms of the actual activity what you do is just sit around and talk...  and whilst people understand what "sitting around and talking" is, they still haven't got a handle on what might be going on in the game.

I love the bit in DitV at the beginning "What do the players do..?  They sit around, chatting, eating snacks, arguing with one another and describing the story"  it's one of the clearest descriptions of what the players actually do in a roleplaying game.

My impression is that in order for a game to efficiently engender play it needs to have a structure which is immediatley understandable to players who may have no RPG frame of reference; perhaps it's social structure should mimic the social structure of an already accepted leisure activity.

People like to readily understand exactly what the players actually do.  Not what kind of skills their character might have, not what type of stories will be told, but what they actually engage in as human players of the game.  Your comment about golf-club structures is very interesting in this aspect.  People generally understand that kind of social model.  Maybe they don't understand the GM-players model so easily in the way it is traditionally presented.  I suspect that the reason people "get" LARP easier in my experience is that LARP has the advantage that it is superficially "like" all those things people immediately think of.

Hope that makes sense.

Drew

[ffilz]

With Table-Top, because the actual fun part is so abstracted, it's difficult for people to get what is actually happening.  In terms of the actual activity what you do is just sit around and talk...  and whilst people understand what "sitting around and talking" is, they still haven't got a handle on what might be going on in the game.

That's exactly what led me to reject D&D when I first looked at it in the hobby store. Instead, I picked up Tractics (WWII Miniatures by TSR). When my friend got the original blue book Basic D&D for his birthday, and they proceeded to sit down and play, I sat out, because again, I couldn't understand what might actually go on in the game. Only when I had a chance to observe the game did I become interested (and the rest is history as they say).

Looking back to some of the questions in the initial post:

My early play was greatly expanded when I started participating in the MIT games club. There were relatively few people who only played in a single game, though probably more than half the people only played in a small circle of games, but there were folks who did crossover the various circles, allowing a propagation of ideas. This club model helps propagation to new players also in that at almost any meeting, there will be games open to new players (of course it is worthwhile to point out that the club started as a board games club, and that continued to be a major focus). When I went to college (RPI), the games club there didn't have quite as much propagation (and specifically had essentially no non-students, just a handful of former students), but there was still some crossover. After college when I moved to North Carolina for work, I immediately joined the NC State games club (which was mostly non-students), however, there was almost no crossover there and the club eventually died (new players would come in but the games would all be full, and there was only a small amount of board gaming that might hold them until a new game started).

Combining the above, I don't think a GMful game is a necessary model for introducing new players, what is necessary is a way for new players to see the game. A GM can introduce a new player by doing some informal one on one role play (I'm pretty sure this is how I introduced one friend in high school). But your observation of someone picking up the game at a bookstore with no exposure to role playing games might point to the value of a GMful game. Or perhaps not. Party type games are regularly picked up and tried out (though often someone has been introduced to the game at another party), and they aren't GMful. So how do they work? How do you convince someone to pick one up and try it out? Of course many can sort of link themselves to well known games (such as charades) or have physical components that can be illustrated on the box.

Certainly the hardest part of describing what RPG play is all about is the open endedness. Sure, you can reference "playing house", but I think the open endedness is what people don't get until rubber actually hits the road and they are actually playing, or at least watching. But maybe the open endedness is not necessary as the initial hook, especially since the open endedness isn't interesting without some other factor (if it was, we wouldn't need rules or genres at all), so use the other factors (genre, combat played out with miniatures, improv acting, whatever) as the hook.

So on to the concrete question: GM or not? My answer is: it depends. Sure, empowering the guy who takes the initiative to pick up the book and learn it is a compelling way to get a game going, but I think a GMless game could be just as compelling. Even a GMless game probably has a "rules expert," though as the players gain more understanding, they will be more able to share the responsibility of understanding and interpreting the rules (look at how people play board games - when the game is first introduced, someone, usually the person who bought the game, explains the rules and looks them up, but as people learn the game more, others buy the game, they ask to read the rules themselves, etc. and eventually they resolve rules issues by voting or consensus [I've certainly observed this with Scrabble]). So what's important is not whether there is a GM or not, but how the rules help the initial adopter to share them with the rest of the players.

I also disagree that GMing should not be featured in an introductory game because of the skills necessary. These skills are not unique to RPGs (the most important skill afterall is pretty universal in any group endeavor - leadership). In fact, I'm not even sure the role is really that weird (lots of endeavors have one person in charge of them, who is empowered to make the decisions, with varying levels of input from the others). And certainly when one compares RPGs to plays, novels, and movies, all of those have a single person in charge of the creative expression (so I think I would argue what is more weird about RPGs is the ability of more than one player to provide the creative expression - which goes right back to the open endedness being the hard thing to understand - the big question of what do you do when player X introduces something totally unexpected - in Scrabble, the rules say players can't make up words, but in an RPG, there are not absolute limits on what kind of character a player may create).

I wonder how much games really need to formalize the help in organizing the game? Doesn't the game just have to hang on whatever organizational method the adopter already uses? I guess it could be a valuable tool in helping people who aren't good at organizing social groups, but is that skill something someone can really learn from a book? Sure, the murder mystery games formalize the invitation process, but there may be a couple reasons for that. One is that unlike most social events today, a murder mystery does require RSVPs (they used to be required because you only had so many seats at your table, plus you wanted to be able to arrange the seating etc.). Another is that they are just a variant on the "host a party kit" (that mostly exist as birthday party kits for kids birthdays). What is probably most important is a compelling cover, which includes back cover text that hooks the initial player, and also may be used by that player to hook the additional players. Of course some additional hooks presented in the text can help the initial player (if they are in side bars or pull quotes, they can even help set the hook when the initial player opens the book in the store).

So going back to my initial experience with D&D: D&D failed because the box and books had no hook. Tractics had a hook. It had several. It had pictures of game setups. It had lists of tanks and other equipment. It was obvious what it was. D&D looked like a war game, but from the text, it didn't seem like it was a wargame, in fact, I couldn't figure out what the heck it was. The initial explanation from my friend also failed (why would I want to play a game with pencil and paper and no board or miniatures [and guess what - I'm still not interested in a game without a board or miniatures]?). In fact, I think it was seeing the dungeon maps that finally convinced me that the game did indeed have a board (and I quickly learned that people did actually use miniatures with the game, and you could use a chessboard for the squares, and I picked up Outdoor Survival at the suggestion of the game to have a "board" for the outdoors [though I quickly abandoned it for Judges Guild's Wilderlands of High Fantasy). These days I can imagine a game without the formality of maps, board, miniatures, etc. but I find myself not compelled by those games.

Frank