Dolls & Cats

I promise this ends up being about tabletop roleplaying games. Bear with me.

Dolls are passive; they have no agency of their own. They don’t move unless you move them. They sit where you put them. They are wholly under your control. They will never act on their own or surprise you. They will never resist your actions or push back against your intent. When you play with dolls, you are fully in control; the doll is basically a vessel through which you realize your own acts of creativity, offering nearly endless possibilities due to the lack of limits or resistance. And that’s exactly why we love them.

Cats have their own agency. They move when you’re not looking. They sit where they please. They surprise you. They will sometimes give you resistance or pushback (and some of you have the scars to prove it). When you play with a cat, you are not fully in control — you must contend with actions originating from the cat, which may or may not align with your own goals or desires. Might even be wholly unpleasant sometimes, because it’s a separate entity with its own ability to act. And that’s exactly why we love them.

You act upon a doll. You interact with a cat.

Some people approach tabletop roleplaying games as a means of telling a story. The exact details vary from person to person, but broadly this means treating the RPG something like a doll. Ultimately, we’re here to produce a creative expression (a “story”) and the RPG is — like a doll — merely a vessel for that expression. You are in control; the RPG can never resist or push back. You decide when (or whether) to invoke the RPG’s rules or mechanics, and even when you do, a result which would not further your creative goals can be discarded. You are the one who acts, and like a doll, the RPG can do nothing but embody your actions. The point of the RPG is to realize your creative endeavors.

Other people approach tabletop roleplaying games as a means of interacting with an imagined world. Again, the details vary, but this generally means treating the world like something with its own sense of existence and agency. Like a cat, the imagined world can — through the mechanisms provided by the RPG — do things that you didn’t tell it to do. You are not fully in control. The things you attempt might not work. Events can resolve in a manner that you’d rather they hadn’t, but it’s not up to you, because the point of the RPG is to give the world the ability to act upon you just as much as you act upon the world.

Storytellers act upon the imagined space. Roleplayers interact with the imagined space.

Safety Tools & Disengagement

In the past when I’ve tried to explain that these two approaches are fundamentally different, I’ve had doll-fans say things like “So you’re saying we shouldn’t ever override what the rulebook says even if it hurts someone?” or “But you can always choose not to do XYZ, doesn’t that mean that [playing with cats] is still the same as [playing with dolls]?”

Even with a real cat, you can still overpower it if there’s an emergency. Or you could choose to not have a cat, if the cat-person lifestyle isn’t what you want. Neither of these facts mean that living with a cat is the same as having dolls. This (frankly obvious) fact maps perfectly well onto the roleplaying game analogy.