Trying to Define Roleplaying Games

Anyone acquainted with me knows I have capital-O Opinions about tabletop roleplaying games. I think there are lots of people in the TTRPG space who don’t actually like roleplaying games, maybe don’t even know what they are, and are doing other things and calling them roleplaying games.

So if I’m gonna talk like that, I should probably lay out what I personally think constitutes a roleplaying game, right? It’s something I’ve thought about a lot — and in fact I’ve written about it before, though my thoughts have evolved enough since then that I want to start over. That’s what this is.

Why Does It Matter?

Who cares what can be called a “roleplaying game” and what can’t? Honestly, for a lot of people it really doesn’t matter. If you’re home with your own group of friends just doing your own thing, call it whatever you want as long as you all know what you mean and you’re having fun. That’s fine. You don’t need this.

But there’s also those of us who are connected to other people in the TTRPG space: players or GMs seeking new groups, creators looking to exchange design ideas, even just people who like to chatter about their interests online. As soon as “people who aren’t your 20-years-running home group” are involved, the language matters a lot more, because you need to be able to communicate.

What is a “game”?

This should be obvious, but roleplaying game exists at the intersection of “roleplaying” and “game.” We’ll circle back to that intersection later; for now let’s define the parts, starting with “game.”

A crude, first-impression thought might define a game as synonymous with “play,” meaning any activity you engage in for recreation. But this is too broad, as evidenced by all the forms of recreation that are obviously not games. You could eat a yummy meal, go for a walk, have sex, then watch a beautiful sunset, and still end your day having played zero games.

For a narrower definition, people often reference the inclusion of “challenge” — defeating opponents in a card game, clearing a level in a video game, and so forth. But this is too narrow, as there are plenty of games (such as Animal Crossing) which don’t really feature “challenge” in any meaningful sense but are still clearly games.

Another important aspect is that a game is not the same as its components. For example, a deck of cards is not a game, but poker is. Furthermore, poker and rummy are two different games, despite using the same deck of cards. Our definition must allow for this fact, which means that the parameters and processes of a game — collectively, its “rules” — are key to its identity and, therefore, to our definition.

Putting it all together, my definition of “game” is as follows:

A game is an activity with a set of “rules” — parameters and processes — which place the participant in a state of tension, which can be resolved through the participant’s actions.

Note the role of “tension” where people would often cite “challenge.” I think “tension” is better here because it covers non-challenge-driven games just as well as more traditional games. For example, I mentioned earlier that Animal Crossing doesn’t have “challenge” — but it does place the player in a state of tension: there are items you want to collect and decorating you want to do, but you don’t have access to everything at once. If you want to collect fossils, for example, you can only dig up four per day, and you can’t control which ones they are. The tension is mild, but present.

It’s also important that the game’s offer of resolution to that tension comes through player action. To keep with the Animal Crossing example, it doesn’t just add four fossils to your inventory every day, you have to go looking for them. You have to acquire a shovel, search the island, and dig them up. The fossil collection doesn’t happen until you make decisions and take action.

I have not yet thought of any counterexamples for this definition of “game.” Everything I can think of that is obviously a game fits this model, and anything I can think of that doesn’t fit this model is something I can comfortably think of as not a game. Everything from poker to Animal Crossing, from D&D to You Have To Burn The Rope, from Monopoly to hopscotch; it all establishes parameters, provides tension, and gives you activities you can do to resolve that tension.

What is “roleplaying”?

This one is a little trickier, since we don’t have near-infinite lists of examples that we all agree are or are not roleplaying, so our guideposts toward creating a definition are less clear. In my experience, many (most?) people have an unconscious, unintentional definition of “roleplay” which is somewhere between “kind of like cutscenes in a video game” and “kind of like improvisational theater.”

In addition to being inconsistent with each other, the various forms of this understanding have all sorts of conflicts with other aspects of roleplaying games. I won’t be going into all of that here (this is already going to be long), but allow me to submit a more useful definition:

“Roleplay” is when you put on an alternate persona, and use your modified sense of self as a lens through which you filter both your perceptions of, and your actions toward, your environment.

That probably sounds weird and hard to follow, so let’s use a down-to-earth example: a kid in gray pajamas who decides they’re Batman. When the kid becomes Bat-Kid, their world also becomes Bat-World. The grass by the wall is now an urban alleyway. The car in the driveway is now the Batmobile. Mom is now Poison Ivy. And Bat-Kid engages these things, not by asking “What would Batman do?”, but by first imagining a Bat-Self and then simply reacting.

That distinction is important. The kid might have a school assignment to write a story, and decide to write it about Batman. They will imagine scenarios and think of what Batman would do, but they will do so as an outsider. They are sculpting a story, not reacting to what happens to self-as-Batman. There’s no “me” involved. They’re not roleplaying. It’s not until “me” fuses with “Batman” — and that fusion becomes the lens of both perception and action — that roleplay happens.

This is something that I used to see more awareness of in the TTRPG space. I remember once, years ago on some blog that probably doesn’t exist anymore, reading someone’s joyful observation that when they would meet new people and talk about characters and adventures, everything was in first-person: “I went there” and “We did that.”

That sense of self is, I think, what differentiates “roleplay” from other forms of creativity. Yes, there’s a fictional persona, but we wrap ourselves in it like a space suit to let us — us! — go where we otherwise couldn’t. This altered self then guides our interactions with the world (usually an imagined world) in a way which, by its nature, is different than other directives (like trying to tell a story).

Intersection: a “Roleplaying Game”

So we know what a game is, and we know what roleplaying is. So if you play a game and there’s roleplay involved then it’s a roleplaying game, right? Eh, not so fast. Simply doing roleplay while you play a game doesn’t make it a roleplaying game. You could choose to roleplay as any involved party in any game — such as the king in chess — but that alone doesn’t put the game into the roleplaying game category. The roleplay needs to actually be built into the game itself.

But it’s not enough for roleplay to be included in the structure of the game, it must be a load-bearing pillar of it. After all, Monopoly includes the use of cards, but nobody calls it a card game. For that matter, nearly any game involves some degree of strategy, and yet only certain ones get categorized as “strategy games.” In the same way, just because a game includes the use of roleplay, that doesn’t automatically put it in the category of “roleplaying game.”

To illustrate the difference, let’s use the Monopoly example. It involves both a board and cards, so what makes it a board game but not a card game? The answer is the degree of integration. The board is absolutely central: it determines your access to new resources (passing Go or collecting rent), it determines your loss of resources (paying rent, etc), and you advance your relative power by modifying the board (building houses or hotels). Every mechanic, every action in the game loops back to the board somehow. By contrast, the cards only come up once in a while (and it’s always because of the board), and their effects are brief and self-contained. You could remove them entirely and the modified game would still be playable and recognizable. Not so with the board.

In the same way, categorizing a game as a TTRPG requires that the “roleplay” — which, again, means interacting with a world through the lens of an altered self — must be foundational to the function of the game as a whole. If the roleplay is secondary — that is, if some other goal or stance takes primacy over engaging the world authentically as the persona within it — then the roleplay is like the cards in Monopoly: present, but not defining. It’s not a roleplaying game.

Let’s make this point a bit less theoretical and a bit more practical. One common way for a roleplay-inclusive game to not qualify as a “roleplaying game” is if the core processes are insulated from the game world. If a title has a core experience it seeks — perhaps balanced and engaging challenges, or dramatically-appropriate narrative beats — and the authentic interactions between persona and world are affirmed only so long as they mesh with that goal, then roleplay is taking a backseat.

In other words, when a title’s core experience tends to clash with “roleplay,” if roleplay is intended to lose that clash, then it’s not very central to the experience, is it? Ergo, you’re looking at a different art form than “roleplaying game.”

A Few More Thoughts

Yes, this means that a lot of people who think of themselves as TTRPG fans aren’t, and some titles which market themselves as TTRPGs aren’t. Some people like to jump to the idea that this constitutes “gatekeeping,” but no. I’m not telling anybody they’re not welcome in the TTRPG space, I’m just talking about whether they’re already there or not.

Think of it like this: Imagine you’re a swimmer. Swimming is your hobby. You meet someone who also says they love swimming, but the more you listen to them talk, the more you realize the thing they call “swimming” is actually running and the thing they call a “pool” is actually a track. It’s not gatekeeping to correct them; they’re still welcome to come into the pool any time, you just pointed out that they’re currently dry.

Also! Hybrids can totally exist! To use the Monopoly example again, it’s a board game, but it’s still allowed to use cards. You can have roleplaying games with tactical or storytelling elements (or tactical or story game with roleplaying elements), or any hybrid you can think of, and they’re all valid art forms. But the fact that hybrids can exist doesn’t mean there aren’t separate and distinct art forms. The existence of Bob Ross does not disprove the separateness of painting and television as artistic mediums.

Furthermore, acknowledging art forms as separate and distinct is vital to the health of each art form. Despite some degree of overlap, painting and television operate on different sets of principles, theory, and tools; what’s good for one might be actively detrimental to the other, and vice-versa. Lumping them together stunts them both, but recognizing their differences gives them each room to develop.

Or to bring it a bit closer to home, roleplaying games originally branched off from tactical wargames. Imagine if the difference had not been acknowledged: What if people had insisted that what we now call RPGs were just a “playstyle” of wargames? Or worse, what if some people treated them as the ideal form of wargames? That would just make things worse for everybody.

Don’t be afraid of branches. Forcing every art form into a singular blob is not A Good Thing.