The Roll of the Dice and
The Role of the Player

First published in Phlogiston Twenty, May 1989.

I’m often asked why I don’t like fantasy role playing. Usually I just mumble and change the subject. However in view of the enormous popularity of role playing, I think my inquisitors deserve better than that.

My first exposure to role playing was about fifteen years ago. I’d been playing a lot of military simulations-hex games from SPI and Avalon Hill. The one we played most of all was called Wooden Ships and Iron Men. It was a nineteenth century naval game. You could play anything from single ship engagements to vast fleet encounters. We spent one entire Christmas playing the battle of Trafalgar. There was nothing subtle about Nelson. He just went storming right through the middle of the opposing fleet. His battle orders for that day are most easily paraphrased as “Get stuck in there lads, and make nuisances of yourselves“.

It was wonderful fun, and playing such games taught me more about history than I ever learned in school. You see, if you were fighting at Borodino with Napoleon, or breaking out of the double encirclement in Gaul with Julius Ceasar, it was more than just a game—you simply couldn’t play it properly without knowing something about why it happened in the first place. For several years I devoured history books—suddenly, because of SPI and Avalon Hill, I was expanding my mind and knowledge as well as my game-playing skills. It was fascinating, and I was enthralled. I had an uncle who fought in the First World War. He was a stretcher bearer on the Somme and he won the Military medal at Passchendaele. Quite apart from the light he could shed on those (for me) remote times it gave me a very eerie feeling to know that if he had shared my interests in history he could, as a small boy, have interrogated his old uncles about Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo. The timescale was tight, but it was just possible. The reality of what we were doing as we moved our bits of cardboard through the hexagons on the maps we spread all over our houses was never far away.

We began to hear rumours about something called Dungeons and Dragons. There were articles about it in the magazines we subscribed to. Fantasy games were becoming fashionable. SPI published something called Sorcerer whose rules were so confusing that we filed it away in a dark corner and forgot about it. Empire of the Petal Throne was one of the most beautifully produced games that I’d ever seen. Just to look at it was a pleasure. However it seemed to require that the players learn a new language in order to play it properly (the author, it seemed, was a philologist and the game was mainly a vehicle for showing this off). We filed that one away too.

Dungeons and Dragons, when it finally turned up, consisted of three small pamphlets tucked into a white cardboard box. Later a fourth pamphlet (Greyhawk, or perhaps I should say Grayhawk since it was American) was added. All were badly printed, on cheap paper, and they didn’t have an index so you could never find anything you wanted in a hurry.

We played virtually nonstop for several years. At one stage we tied our adventure into a naval campaign in order to allow ourselves to play Wooden Ships and Iron Men again (we were getting withdrawal symptoms), but by and large we were heavily into fantasy role playing.

Other games appeared, some good, some bad. We investigated them all, though the interest was starting to die. I still possess a copy of The Creature that Ate Sheboygan. Draw your own conclusions as to which category that one falls into.

SPI was rumoured to be in financial difficulty. Its production of traditional military simulations dropped off, and the standard of the few that did appear was low. The company’s hopes appeared to centre on something called Dragonquest. You couldn’t open a magazine without seeing adverts for it, all saying how wonderful it was going to be. The media hype was sickening. I was already losing interest, and this blatant attempt to manipulate my wallet was the last straw. Dragonquest, when it finally appeared, was no better (and no worse, let’s be fair) than everything that had gone before. My love affair with fantasy role playing games was over.

Partly it was saturation. I had simply overdosed on the whole thing and I needed a rest. But that rest has lasted for quite a few years. I have never gone back, so there has to be more to it than simple over exposure.

Just what is fantasy role playing? How many times have you tried to explain it to some outsider who wants to know exactly what it is you do on Wednesday evenings? It is very difficult, because there aren’t any short pithy definitions. One tends to ramble.

My various attempts, over the years, to provide some sort of an answer slowly began to convince me that I didn’t really want to be there. There are a lot of reasons, some trivial, some quite profound. But I want to make it perfectly clear right from the start that just because I don’t like role playing does not mean that I condemn it or disapprove of it. Nor do I disapprove of the people who play it. On the contrary, there is much that I find admirable about the concept. Unfortunately there is often a huge gulf between the idea and the application of it.

The mechanics of role playing irritate me. The whole silly business of character generation is profoundly annoying. Attempting to define a person by assigning numeric values to personality traits leads to caricature rather than to character. It is a hideous over simplification. It reminds me very much of the approaches taken by pop-psychologists like Arthur Janov (the “primal scream“ guru) or the engineering approach to the way that the mind works which led Ron Hubbard to invent Dianetics. It is an application of behaviourism, straight out of Skinner or Pavlov. I find it simple-minded.

The counter argument, of course, is to say that this is just a guideline. The skills of the players are what really matter. A good role player will put flesh on these bare bones and make the character real. Initial character generation is just the beginning.

There is some truth in this argument, but unfortunately not enough. It is one of the ideals of role playing, but it is seldom or never realised.

A role playing session is, in one sense, an exercise in improvisational theatre. The actors (role players) are playing out the game master’s scenario. They usually know where they are heading and have some rough idea how to get there, but they are ignorant of the details. They are rarely sure what is to come next. However it is vitally important for the integrity of the game, that their reactions to whatever happens to them are the reactions of the characters they are playing—not their own. That is what is meant by putting the flesh on the bare bones of the character sheet. However anybody who has ever studied acting will tell you that improvisation is one of the most difficult of skills to acquire. Very few actors ever learn to do it well. There was a film made in the 1960s called Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice which was almost entirely improvisational, and I urge you to avoid seeing it. It is terrible!

Because of this, I find role playing sessions exquisitely embarrassing. Few if any role players have the theatrical skills necessary to carry off a challenge of this magnitude. I have done enough acting on the stage to know that I do it very badly (I am not blind to my own faults) and I have enough insight to be able to see the errors in other peoples performances—though again I don’t have the skill to be able to help them correct those errors. In common with most people, I don’t like to be embarrassed—it is uncomfortable and it makes me squirm.

I believe that role playing is a genuine art form and it deserves to be taken seriously. It is a participatory art (intellectual theatresports, if you like) which means that everybody taking part has some degree of input. However the most important source is the game master. This is the person responsible for the success or failure of the session. The game master (God) defines the rules, describes the scenario and the society and is the ultimate arbiter. A good game master can elevate the session into art, a poor one can turn it into trash. Good game masters are very rare; bad ones are very common.

It isn’t really surprising when you consider the sort of skill required of a game master. In order to effectively control a session, the game master needs a vast knowledge of sociology, politics, economics, psychology and history (how do societies function; what motivates people, how do they react?). On top of that it is necessary to have good story-telling skills. Nobody is going to play if the scenario is boring. Who has all these multiple talents? I don’t. Do you? I doubt it.

As a result of this, very little role playing aspires to art even though the potential is there. Most role playing is trivial; it doesn’t mean anything (in any intellectual sense). And a lot of it is plagiarised. Game masters desperately seeking ideas rip them off from the books in the recommended reading lists at the back of the rules. In itself that doesn’t matter too much. Playing out a fantasy in someone else’s world is perfectly legitimate—it is the inspiration behind things like the Thieves’ World novel cycles. It is a process of exploration and expansion. There is a fascination about it which I find perfectly understandable. I too would like to know more about Silverberg’s Majipoor and role playing is a very good way of finding out. Certainly it is infinitely preferable to wandering around inside the pathetic imagination of a fourth rate game master without a constructive thought in his head. With a solid foundation to build on the game is off to a much better start. But it is derivative, not original, and that cheapens it somewhat.

In order to get the most out of a session, it is necessary to believe in what you are doing. On some level you know it isn’t real, but the further away you can push that level then the more involved you are, the more exciting, the more worthwhile the whole thing becomes.

It is very common in role-playing circles to sneer at the type of role player (usually very young) who is in the game because of its more bloodthirsty aspects. The let’s-go-out-and-kill-a-few-more-orcs attitude. That is not what it is all about, they protest. There is much more to it than that. I would phrase it somewhat differently—there should be much more to it than that. Frequently there isn’t because the thought applied to the scenario is at the same trivial level. I don’t mean that the players spend all their time killing orcs, but they do spend it looking for a hidden magical talisman or whatever, and to me that is exactly the same as killing an orc, albeit slightly more rarified. It is just as unreal, just as silly.

There is always a reason for a game session. The participants always have a motive (even the least skilled game master knows enough to provide that) but the motive is seldom exciting enough to persuade me to suspend my disbelief in the essential unreality of the whole enterprise.

I make the same demands of any art form; the books I read or the films that I watch. I require them to absorb me, to make me believe in them for the brief time that I am involved in reading or watching. If they don’t then I don’t read the book, I don’t watch the film. Let’s face it, they are all artificial constructs. None of them are real. A book is only paper with black marks on it. It is necessary to transcend that barrier, to make the reading or viewing experience real. The ability to do that is what separates the artist from the journeyman. Role playing, by and large, does not crack the reality boundary. I find it too hard to see past the artificiality.

Finally there is the sheer bloody complexity of it. All those tables to look things up in, all those rules in very small print.

I am not afraid of complexity. I make my living persuading computers to behave themselves and there are few fields of endeavour more complex than that. I am not put off the idea of role playing games just because the systems are complex. However I am not convinced that the complexity is justified.

SPI once published a set of games called Blue and Gray. They are fairly simple games about the American Civil War. They belong in a genre of wargames known as “beer and pretzel“ games. You can play a game in an evening over beer with some friends. Serious war gamers sneer at them.

A few months after Blue and Gray appeared, an article was published in Moves (SPI’s house magazine) entitled Adding Complexity to Blue and Gray. The article consisted of a set of additional rules for the games together with some specious casuistry about adding reality to the system. The nett effect was to turn a very enjoyable game into something totally unplayable.

There is a type of mind which cannot see virtue in simplicity.

I find that much of the complexity detracts from the enjoyment of the game and adds to the unplayability. It seems to be there simply for its own sake (how can we make this magic system “real“? I know—we’ll make it complex). Role playing is not alone in this; many “wargames“ share the same fault. If you let it, it turns a game session into an exercise in bookkeeping. It becomes quite sterile. It also produces that most obnoxious of players—the rules-lawyer. You all know him—every game session has one. The campaign is going great, everyone is having a ball when this guy points out that rule 564 subsection 42 prevents a fifth level magic user from casting invisibility spells when there is an “r“ in the name of the food he had for breakfast. Someone else points out that “porridge“ doesn’t have an “r“ in it in Elvish. Everything comes to a dead stop and the rest of the evening is spoiled while you argue about rule interpretation and whether or not elves eat porridge.

In some respects the original D&D was the best of all the role playing games. The few rules that it did have made no sense whatsoever. It was easy to ignore them, and everybody did. All that was important was the idea.

Like all really clever ideas, the concept of a role playing session is very simple, very elegant and very powerful. It is very important to hold on to that and not to get bogged down in detail.

Now you know why I don’t like role playing.