Defining good roleplaying; or, How to play Horsey
What is good roleplaying? This is a question that doesn’t get explicitly discussed nearly as much as the near endless discourse on “what is good X roleplaying”. For X substitute your name/label/acronym of choice: Horsey/OSR/NSR/FKR/Trad/Story/5e/lyric/etc.
Why is there this disparity in what people talk about? Without getting lost in the weeds of human desire for categorisation, I am going to take the line that people talk about “how to play Horsey” as opposed to “how to play” because the latter has an incredibly obvious answer and potentially one that actually invalidates the former. I’ll get to my answer after I take a running leap off the spring board of yet another interesting post by Weird Writer.
In the post Weird was writing against a specific set of statements that an original author was trying to present as objective features of OSR. These statements, along the lines of “we explore dungeons, not characters,” Weird clearly demonstrates are not inherent in the aesthetic/products/community of OSR. Instead they suggest that the original author is engaging in that common trope of conflating their own personal tastes with the definition of a term: “what I like = OSR”.
This is the logic of how to play horsey: “I like to play Horsey this way = this is how you play Horsey”.
How it feels when people play horsey wrong (Bing AI art crap)
I would suggest that one of the reasons why we as the ttrpg community engage so frequently in discussions of what a thing is or isn’t, is because our emotional investment in an idea. At times that becomes strong enough that we begin to conflate the genre/aesthetic of an acronym with our view of what good roleplaying universally is: “what I like = OSR = good roleplaying”.
We’re getting a little closer to my answer for what good roleplaying is but I want to get there by describing where I got it from.
In the earlier days of the application of free kriegspiel to roleplaying, there was an evocative sense of promise. This emerged from its general approach to “hard mechanics”, that is resolution systems, character sheets, stats, moves etc. This approach, and the promise, was that: ‘you only need to use the mechanics that are needed at the moment that they are needed’.
This is a freeing idea. It draws us out of the adherence to labelled/acronymised systems, games or playstyles. It pushes us to see that play is the centre of the experience and the way that we play, the how/tools/mechanics, is a product of the table of players in the moment. The game we play is not pre-ordained but is being generated in the moment of play.
Free kriegspiel perhaps gives us more than this, but I would suggest it is the main thing. Even some of its associated ideas such as “play worlds” are almost a natural conclusion of the introduction of freedom into the relationship with mechanics: If you can’t rely on the published/pre-written rules, you can rely on the rules of the shared imaginative world.
There used to be a sense of excitement about this idea, that pushed one towards an even broader idea. A definition, if you will, of what good roleplaying is: good roleplaying is playing the way the table wants to play.
There it is. My answer to the definition of good roleplaying. If it is in any respect true you can see why people never talk about it and instead talk about how to roleplay in X style. There is very little to say about “play how you want to play”. What this suggests to me then is that discussions of definitions of types of play (Horsey/Ponies/Unicorns/OSR/etc.) are engaged in because it is a way of interacting with the freedom and openness of play in a way that can be argued, discussed and (perhaps at worst) made objective. By talking definitions we are in fact engaging with the general discussion of how I as an individual enjoy playing in a certain style: “I like to play like this = this is Horsey”.
How it feels when people play Horsey right (More Bing stuff)
The value of this understanding to me touches on a couple of things. The first is that I find I can always get something from peoples’ different definitions because I never feel they are talking about a real thing in the world, they are only talking about themselves; the second is it highlights again, as does so much in life, how useless a lot of labels are. I feel that what people are really saying when “we play 5e” is “we play in this way”. There is no way for me to know what “this way” really entails until I sit down to play with that group. I have played games that called themselves OSR that have made me want to die of boredom and others that have matched my tastes exactly.
My conclusion is then, that debating the definitions of things is simply another way for people to discuss how they like to play horsey. People write “good X is Y” or “proper X is Y” but they are really always saying “I like to play horsey this way”. And, if we want to learn new and interesting ways of playing horsey then debate and disagreement is simultaneously potentially valuable to oneself as an individual, and utterly meaningless to any true or external definition.
PS
When I have made this point in the past it has been suggested that without strong definitions dialogue breaks down and becomes impossible. Though I personally think I have seen the opposite far more — that adherence to definitions interrupts dialogue — the sentiment is clearly true for a lot of people.
Itch: thewyrd.itch.io Twitter: @TheWyrdLands TikTok: @TheWyrdLands Email: wyrdrpgs@gmail.com