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The thing I love most about TTRPGs is unrivaled customization and open creativity. I’m especially a fan of sci-fi settings(mainly Star Wars!) because of just how much of the game can turn into putting pieces together and making something new. In the system I run with my players, you can pick up a whole subclass that lets you build and modify things to no end, and they’ve just instinctually used that to strip weapons off of vehicles and attach other weapons to their droid companions, or design a whole ship with each weapon slot and area planned out.
It’s just awesome to be the GM and be able to put my players into situations where they can play and solve problems entirely by the book, but also go way out of the box and figure out a unique solution that people may have never tried before. That’s what I really love about RPGs, and I think GMs who don’t give their players a lot of freedom or who don’t plan their dungeons with multiple solutions are really missing out on that and turning the table into more of a storytime than an active experience. If others are fine playing in that, then I’m not gonna judge, but I’d personally always take the more open table if it’s offered
I think sometimes roleplaying even gets confused with acting. Immersion is an important part of the game for me, but at the same time I was never really comfortable with speaking in first person as my character. I would usually rather describe what they do and say. I can still be immersed in that character and make choices as that character would and have agency in the game world.
For us (kids playing in the early 80s) the "role-playing games" were never about pretending you are an actor and say funny things with "an accent", but always about the openness you describe – the party can explore any floor of the castle or its dungeon, or take a boat and go visit those islands barely visible from the shore. Or cross the mountains. Or hunt the goblins in that forest. Etc.
You are right on the money. Best advice ever to any new DM
I've felt in the past that if I put players on a path that they had chosen then I was honouring their agency and their freedom. This TUNIC principle explains succinctly why there was displeasure when I did this. Yes, I'm honouring their choice but I'm leaving a long Time Until their Next Impactful Choice.
I realized that this principle existed when I wrestled with abstraction in TTRPGs.
I found out that I can either describe ever increasing detail or at some point abstract detail away and use a die instead. I structured time in such a way that everything keeps going until something happens that requires a choice. So in combat an archer has a choice as soon as a target comes out of cover and then can decide to start and keep firing until the target goes back into cover, or he fired this many arrows. Either way this firing of arrows then can be abstracted away to save time or if everything hinges on this one shot you zoom in more. This makes the game a bit unfair (depending on what you abstract when the outcomes changes and you have to come up with rulings on the fly because no standardized systems can exist), but man the immersion. It feels as if you are there, because your imagination is leading and not some mechanics that may or may not fit the situation.
Look, I'm not here to yuck anyone's tum but this definition of roleplaying seems…obtuse.
Like yeah, you play a role in TI3 or call of duty. But that is not what anyone means by "roleplay" in a ttrpg context. Its a very specific thing that you really DON'T see in any other game and that is true whether you are playing a tightly paced linear adventure, a sandbox osr style adventure or something weird like fiasco.
The "Adventure Game instead of Roleplaying Game" idea hit me way harder than it had any business to.
I agree with you. I always thought RPG was a bit of a misnomer.
Another way to frame it: people are looking for moments of emergent gameplay. Gameplay that is a result of their actions. Gameplay that cascades from one event to the next like falling dominos.
I think I mostly agree with this. I find that newer games feel like theatre games compared to OSR games and I think that for me it's because I emphasize exploration and adventure over story and plot. I know that through gameplay an emergent story and thus plot arises but compare OSR "stories" to something like Critical Role and you will see what I mean. Not that I am knocking newer games or Critical Role. They just don't seem the same to me.
Your thoughts just blew my mind; thank you. I wish RPGs were less about actual roleplaying, like you just said. (I know that they can be, I just had this idea for a very long time that they should be about roleplaying/acting.)
Alexander Macris, designer of ACKS, would agree with you. He says that the telos of an RPG is agency: the ability to make meaningful choices. He made a good video recently in which he interviewed another designer, Daniel Jones, who thinks the telos is immersion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEKZjQRQSJM
I think there's merit to both views. The type of "roleplaying" that can be done outside of RPGs is not, for lack of a better term, authentic. You can't really do what your character would do in those games because you are constrained by the design; they're "closed", as you say. You can tell yourself a story about the choices you make in those games, but it's all post facto rationalization. It's just like trying to make sense of martial dailies in D&D 4e: you can spin a yarn about why your fighter just happens to only use his supposedly mundane but super cool sword technique once per day, but the truth of the matter is that it's because that's all the mechanics allow.
In the process of writing the above, I've come to think that immersion really be the final goal of RPGs. Think about it like this: the type of immersion that RPGs can achieve is unique because of the agency RPGs offer. No other medium can make you feel as though you're truly living in another world. For agency to be the telos , it must, definitionally, be the final goal, but here we see that it serves as a stepping stone to something else: immersion. From a platonic point of view, then, it must be immersion which is the telos , to which agency is subordinate.
That's not to say you can't have fun with just agency. I certainly have. But maybe I'll try a little harder to pursue immersion in the future.
I actually agree, and I think TUNIC is a good principle to keep in mind while running a game.