D&D Isn't A Roleplaying Game

Spicy Statements

I play a variety of role-playing games. I started playing Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition — what a start. I’ve played D&D 5th edition, Pathfinder, Numenera, and GURPS (which is my favorite). I’ve played Final Fantasies 4, 6, 7 & 8, I’ve played The Legend of Zelda 1, 2, OoT, LttP, MM, LA, OoA, OoS, WW, TP, SS, BotW. I’ve played Fallout 1–4, NV (but never 76). I’ve played, and replayed Mass Effect 1–3. I loved KOTOR. I’ve Played Elder Scrolls 1–5 (never online COME ON BETHESDA). I love these games, and they’re (generally) dubbed RPG’s; but these are wildly different games. When I think about it at it’s core, D&D isn’t an RPG.

A lot of the times when I play D&D I find it really hard to get into the worlds, and for me that’s why I play. But the sandbox I’m playing in isn’t telling me to “be” another person or “live” in another world — it’s telling me to focus down healers, buff high DPS, use high-ground and flanking, etc. Role-playing in D&D is the goal, and the game doesn’t give you that out of the box; you gotta bring your own.

Ahead there be Spoilers

I’m going to be using examples from several video games. Most are pretty old, and I’m not really giving too much away in most cases. I’ll list out what I may be spoiling.

• Mass Effect (1)
• Lisa: the Painful
• Fallout
• The Elder Scrolls: Arena
• Final Fantasy VII
• Final Fantasy IV

Everything is an RPG

I have to break down the “RPG” because it’s an overloaded term. It encompasses a lot of different games over a lot of different genres. It’s not locked into one genre or time period: an RPG doesn’t have swords and shields, or dragons and dwarves. Earthbound is set in the contemporary, early 90’s world of suburban America — it’s considered one of the best RPGs. The RPG also doesn’t (apparently) rely on player choice, or at least the classics don’t. Final Fantasy, as far as the ones I’ve played, divorces the player’s choices from any impact in the world: Aerith always dies, Mist is always destroyed, you always become a paladin, and you always kill god with friendship. You can never choose to go a different way, you can’t really pick what your characters say, and if you can… you still have to hit the story beats.

In other RPGs your actions have a lot of consequences. In Lisa: the Painful your choices define what state you get to the end in, who gets hurt and how, what is there at the end, and which ending you get. In the Mass Effect series, your actions have wide-ranging impacts on the galaxy: which species live and die, who of your friends and companions are struck down on missions you brought them on, and where humanity ends up on the Galactic stage. Mass Effect was criticized for giving you a lot of false choices that seemed important, but in stark contrast to Final Fantasy’s lack of choice, Shepherd can actually affect things in their world, and the ultimate fate of a lot of the people in this world isn’t set in stone. In Final Fantasy IV you can’t destroy the Dwarves; you can’t force Cecil to stay as a Dark Knight, and you can’t accidentally kill Kain; so Mass Effect is a huge step up.

Really, the term RPG is devoid of meaning. Why isn’t Uncharted or Assasin’s Creed not a Role-Playing Game? Because you don’t have choice? Why is The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time a Role-Playing game? You don’t even have a say of what happens in that game — you’re predestined to defeat evil. The term has gotten mixed up with the content: RPG’s look a certain way and play a certain way, even if the game isn’t about playing a “Role”. So I’m going to redefine the Role-Playing Game for this article to fend off confusion, and then explain why D&D isn’t designed like an RPG.

What is “Role-Playing”

“Role-Playing” is character-driven interactions impacting the game world. For example: in Mass Effect if you don’t have enough rapport with Wrex by the time you get to Virmire, you have 1 option — Shepherd has to kill him. This is driven by decisions you made as Shepherd; did you decide to help Wrex and gain his trust? If so you can convince him that you’re call is right. Alternately, if Shepherd is charming or intimidating enough, they can talk Wrex down — these are game mechanics relating to your avatar’s personality.

Another example is in the Fallout game. At the final confrontation with The Master, if your character didn’t take the time to figure out why the villain’s apocalyptic plan won’t work (because the super mutants are infertile) then you can’t talk him (it… them?) down. The Master doesn’t listen to reason, or morality, or pleas for mercy. In his mind, the plan to replace all of humanity with super mutants is the only way to survive the world, and even then you have to know how to talk him down, otherwise you still have a hard fight on your hands.

So a key aspect of this definition of “Role-Playing” is interactions affecting gameplay: if you don’t make friends, you won’t have allies. If you help out this person, they help you mechanically, you get benefits and drawbacks in organic, meaningful, and sometimes unpredictable ways. It’s not just “Do action A to character 1 to get perk B and a +1,” (though it can have those effects) it’s more immersive. You might change the outlook of a single character that changes the entire balance of an encounter. You discover a secret bit of information because of an interaction with someone you didn’t even know had impact. You accidentally doom your quest because you decided to try and do “the right thing.”

Critically, this interactions-based gameplay is a core mechanic of the game. For Fallout (1 and 2 at least) the 2 main ways you interact with the world are combat, and talking. You can talk with almost everything in the world and most people give you clues to how and why the world works, what they want, and how they might help or hinder you on your quest.

What isn’t “Role-Playing”

A lot of RPGs have many common elements: Fantasy settings are common, stat progressions and complex equipment is common, and wide expansive worlds are a mainstay. I don’t think these things make an game an RPG.

Stat Blocks are not Role-Playing

If you look at a lot of Japanese RPGs what most people associate them with is a huge stat screen. STR, INT, MAG, whatever; you have characters that have a bunch of stat blocks behind them. I think this is often a holdover from Dungeons & Dragons (which isn’t a role-playing game at its core), and is usually included to give the player a sense of progression. Design-wise, I think game makers want to make the player feel like they’ve grown and a good way to show that is by making the avatar stronger. At the beginning of your adventure you might have difficulty dispatching a few goblins, but by the time you’re taking on the BBEG you’re tackling dragons, demons, and things far more threatening than you’d ever be able to tackle before.

In Pokémon the entire game is these numbers. The original Red, Blue, and Yellow versions had a bit of story in there, but the whole point of the game was to build your team grow them, and beat the snot out of your rival’s team. To me, that’s not role-playing, that’s growing numbers and grinding. That’s not a bad thing; I loved those games as a kid, and by the end of the Gold version of that game I felt like I had really gone on a journey. One could argue that what kind of team you build is the role you play, and the experience of building your favorite team is a part of that. Sure, I guess, but that would also make Risk of Rain 2 an RPG, right? You might also say that the avatar provided gives the player a canvas to project themselves, but that’s not really the game doing anything — it’s actually getting out of your way and providing less impact to that character. You can’t play anyone other than yourself because there’s no way to be anything. That’s sort-of a way to get you in the mindset, but I’d say that your game isn’t encouraging playing a role by not having mechanics.

So an RPG doesn’t need to have a numbers system — a lot do, and it’s an easy way to give your player a sense of progression. But you don’t need it.

Large Worlds are not Role-Playing

Final Fantasy was ridiculously expansive when it came out. Pokémon was huge and on handheld it’s even more impressive. The Elder Scrolls had a frankly gigantic world; it was dangerous, sparse, boring, and generally a bad idea, but it was big.

You know what other games have big worlds? Assassin’s Creed 2, with it’s city of Rome was impressively expansive for the time. Just Cause 2 was supposed to have the biggest game world since Grand Theft: Auto 5, which had it’s own expansive world. I don’t think anyone but a contrarian or pedant would seriously consider either Assassin’s Creed 2 or Grand Theft: Auto 5 to be a role-playing game.

Large worlds give characters plenty of places to express themselves, and plenty of diverse people and situations to encounter. The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind gives the player character vastly contrasting areas to interact with, each having it’s own collection of characters from different factions and cultures. The Tribunal temple is probably the most alien yet serene place I’ve ever experienced, while the Imperial strongholds remind you of a more traditional castle fortification. Those strongholds begin to stick out the longer you acquaint yourself with the Island of Vardenfell.

The original Fallout’s world is comparatively small: most of the locations you can interact with are predetermined dungeons or small towns, only a few screens wide. When you do travel the wastes, you see a small red line travelling over a dusty, barren map. You can stop and check out the scenery, but more often than not, you’ll see a patch of dirt, some cacti, a few rocks, and maybe a radscorpion. The post-apocalyptic California isn’t nearly as expansive as the game world in The Elder Scrolls: Arena, a game released 3 years prior. But what it lacks in content it makes up for in character and quality. The weakest part of The Elder Scrolls: Arena is probably how lifeless most of the world is; you have a fairly standard story line, a wide open world, and every town looks the same and acts the same. The most intricate part of The Elder Scrolls: Arena is the holiday and summoning systems. Hidden away in the drab pre-generated nothingness that is the majority of the game you have local and national holidays, and if you can find the dark secrets hiding the arcane knowledge, you might find when you can summon the Daedric princes, essentially Demonic gods, who can grant boons and send you on their own quests. This mechanic was so interesting it’s one of the only things that’s (mostly) survived with the series as long as it’s been going.

Most RPG systems include an expansive world because it’s more believable to exist in a world that’s more expansive and you can make a variety of stories in it: it’s much easier to make a story fit what you and your players want it to when the world is so wide that it can totally accommodate that. But can you have an RPG without a large world? I’d argue, yes: Fiasco is what I’d call a pure RPG. There are no other mechanics other than your character in Fiasco. If you haven’t played or haven’t heard of the game, essentially you get a role, and a series of random scenes, and each player has a goal. If that sounds too abstract, that’s really the point. You “win” by scoring points, which are awarded by the players. It’s basically an improv session game-ified. So if you want to win, maybe study up a bit on improvisational techniques.

I think Fiasco was the first game that really crystallized what role-playing was for me. You can have a game about characters, and it doesn’t have to wait for you to take an Improv class or get on Stage and act — you can play games with characters as the core mechanic.

Characters are Role-Playing

At the core of role-playing is the role or the character we project that role onto; a role-playing game should allow for diverse actions, consequences, interactions, and reactions to take place based on how you or your character interacts with the world. If you make different decisions, different things happen and your character’s relationships with those things are clear.

If you are like me, whenever you make a character in an RPG, you make yourself. I did this with Fallout 3, and The Outer Worlds, and to an extent Mass Effect. It’s easy to do this: every time you come to a decision, you don’t think too hard and just do what you’d do. How? Well you’re you — so you can figure it out.

What ends up happening is I play these as morally as I possibly can; I try to help as many people as possible, talk to them, help them out because in the end I like to think I’d want to do that. In Fallout 3 this is painfully obvious: don’t kill nice people, and kill evil people. In Mass Effect it’s also color-coded, so that’s pretty easy. Often this means that my experience is not different from many other people: not many of these decisions are nuanced, and most consequences are direct. If you check out this Forbes article from last year, you’ll see that 92% people decided to be Paragon Shepherd according to John Ebenger. Once again the original Fallout made it real; when I first tried to play with no walk-through, I sent water to my Vault from The Hub to try to shore up their water supply and buy me more time. What I didn’t know was that this shortens the timer on your final quest. Sure, the Vault has water now, and you have more time to get a water chip, but The Master now knows where your Vault is, and now he’s coming for them. I lost that run of Fallout because of the decision I made to try to help the Vault, and that’s awesome.

I have a few other games and stories that I’d love to dive into mechanically, but this article is already ballooning. Maybe I’ll die into great scenarios in a later article. The scenarios that stand out to me all feel like what your decisions and actions are matter — if you choose even slightly differently, you might have completely changed the world.

Dungeons & Dragons Core isn’t Role-Playing

With all this prep-work out of the way, why isn’t the most popular “Role Playing Game” not about role-playing? Well, my title is a bit overstated, but really the core of Dungeons & Dragons isn’t playing the roles, and it isn’t the characters. Sure, it can be about the characters and how they affect the world. A lot of Dungeon Masters (DMs) do that, and that’s great. The most famous “Real Play” show, Critical Role, is about the characters, because they get a bunch of highly paid actors to do their work of portraying those characters. Most DM’s nowadays seem to care about characters and their arcs — watching them struggle and accomplish or fail to accomplish their goals is the game.

From the Player’s Handbook (PHB), Wizards of the Coast says this: “The Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game is about storytelling in worlds of sword and sorcery.“It says, and the “pillars” are “Exploration,” “Social Interaction,” and “Combat.”

D&D as a game is mostly combat — you and the DM have to bring the rest of the game to play.

Mechanically, the game is about 3 main things: Fighting, Loot, and the world (including Characters). In that order. Here’s why: just about every race and class has a feature that distinguishes them in combat. If you thumb through the PHB, I count 3 races that don’t explicitly have a combat feature: humans, half-elves, and rock gnomes. Every other race has either a proficiency with a weapon, bonuses to resist specific damage, or they can breathe fire. That’s not to say the PHB doesn’t flesh out the relations between the different races and factions, but none of those give you the ability to breathe fire, or do anything as concrete as the boons you get for combat.

So each race has a bit of fight in them, sure, but every character needs to have a Class too. This is an esoteric kind of thing with no real-life parallel, but in general each Class gives you diverse ways to deal damage and deal with damage. Each class also determines how you get Hit Points and what options you have in combat. Why does this matter? Well if you make a giant wizard they’re going to have way less health than a giant fighter of the same level. Kinda weird, but really the classes are balanced for their role in combat. That’s their main design. There’s no class who’s sole purpose is to role-play or affect the world or live in the world. They’re all focused on fighting because the core mechanic of D&D is HP and gold.

Bard doesn’t count! The bard class is the closest you get to a role-oriented character, but there’s no requirement that you role-play. Your first class-specific feature is “Bardic Inspiration.” This doesn’t make you better at stories, or singing, or anything like that: it gives your target a bonus to something, usually attacking. Now you can say that it dosen’t have to be for attack rolls, but really that’s it’s main purpose. Your level 20 feature gives you more of this feature when you enter combat. The game is combat.

How do you play your role? Well not with D&D — well you can play a character with the stat sheet given to you from D&D but there isn’t a game around making a character in the book. You’ve gotta build that. The introduction tries to say that this game is about role-playing but the layout and content of the book betrays it. The PHB dedicates 10 pages to combat. Social interaction has 2 paragraphs split across about 1 page. Mechanically, there is nothing to encourage social interaction, the game is designed to have you fight and kill monsters, disarm traps, find treasure, and that’s it. There’s no game to role playing.

Is this a bad thing? Not necessarily, but mechanically Dungeons & Dragons makes no distinction between my Level 5 Human Warrior named Bob, and Trellius Bacus the deposed knight from a forgotten land (who is also level 5). D&D doesn’t directly reward or punish Bob or Trellius, or me the player for that reason. At the end of character generation, when fighting our first hobgoblin, we both swing and kill at roughly the same pace. That’s the core of the game. The DM has to make up for the “story” part of the game — maybe Trellius gets boons for his past relations, or maybe Bob doesn’t know where some treasure is, but this is no longer the game it’s who ever is running it.

Some Other Systems

Dungeons & Dragons isn’t a bad system, but it’s not good for making good characters. One system that focuses on this aspect of gaming is FATE, in which characters are the core mechanic of the game. The FATE core book is 291 pages compared to D&D’s 371 for the PHB (and you need at least 2 other books usually to make D&D work). FATE doesn’t give you classes, races, or even equipment that you can use. Instead basically everything is based on Aspects. Characters have aspects, items have aspects, the GAME has aspects. This is mechanically simple, yet profound.

FATE’s aspects aren’t tacked down +1’s and -2’s or CON saves, or “Advantage,” they’re literally just phrases that describe something about the situation like “dense underbrush” or “thick hide”, and they aren’t necessarily good nor bad — they’re mechanics to themselves. Players and the GM can invoke aspects to produce effects. It’s interesting with character aspects: if you have a “Mechanical Arm” aspect, you could invoke that to give bonuses to defend from something like a knife… but that same aspect can be invoked when something like a magnet, or metal detector comes in to play. These two interactions are basically the same, and you might notice there’s not this divide between the story part of the game and the “fighting time” part of the game. FATE gives the players, that’s both the GM and players, all of the tools to play a role or in other words; it’s a role-playing game.

Takeaways

I don’t mean to bash D&D; I love playing the game. I’m only pointing out that it’s not designed to facilitate role-playing. It relies heavily on the dungeon master running the experience, and the players buying in. It can be derailed by either party, or it can be profoundly immersive. There is no mechanic for playing as a character; really the role-playing as a part of D&D is the goal for most players, not the frame. I’m not even calling on D&D to add these mechanics to the game — imagine if Wizards of the Coast tried to game-ify bards making songs.

I’m also not saying that FATE is the best system; it might be a bit too fuzzy for some and a bit too bare bones on what’s possible. Some people are immersed by the logical consistency of a world and its systems. Some people really only want the lore. Some players want to hang out and joke with their friends. Some want to have a story with their character. There’s no right way to play RPGs.

What I realized when I played a different system to D&D (and when I read FATE) was that game design has a huge impact on how the game is played. I didn’t realize it, but often when playing D&D I find myself looking at my character sheet trying to find something in my toolkit of skills, abilities, and spells to apply to some situation. A lot of the time, I’m not my character, and I’m not in their head and seeing the world, because the game was telling me that “this list of spells is important,” and, “your HP total is important,” and, “the action economy is important.” For the fleeting moments of immersion when we find some place undisturbed for centuries, or when we encounter a macabre ritual with intricate set pieces, or when we find an artifact which reminds me of the time we encountered another character… those were the times when I had the most fun, and that’s why I play.