Where are the ‘Roles’ in Role playing games?

The term ‘role-playing’ as attached to the hobby of table-top role playing games (RPGs) has always bothered me. Despite this very explicit label, I have found very few persons actually interested in playing characters or roles that are assigned to them. Many players simply prefer to use the vehicle of the player character (PC) as an augmented avatar of their own personality within simulated gaming universes, a PC free to dare and attempt things that they would never attempt to do in real life.



The term ‘role playing’ itself has been used at least since the 1940s by psychologists, marriage counselors and proponents of social work theory as a technique used in creating change and personal growth in their clients unhappy with either themselves or the troubled relationships they inhabit. There are various examples in the academic psychological literature where it has been used to instill or model more appropriate strategies and help model more effective behaviors. Not only has this method of supervised psychodrama been used by therapists to help their patients gain insights about their personality, emotions and/or their disturbed interpersonal relationships, role-playing has been a means of providing familiarity for dealing with stressful and uncertain social situations.

Role-playing techniques have also been used in other forums of education, including business and political science courses as an adjuvant to the usual classroom teaching. It is especially useful when trying to model collaborative behavior (i.e. mock UN, criminal trials) and provide synthetic experiences to help with decision making (i.e. cold war scenarios developed by the RAND Corporation in the 1950s) or help provide practice with dealing with complicated emergency or other adrenaline drenched situations (i.e. Red Cross first aid training, Peace Corps scenarios for dealing with other cultures). It was even used in my own medical school education with “standardized patients” to help with interviewing patients and teaching clinical skills with helpful feedback from the patients to improve a very nervous medical learner’s communication and other skills.

In tabletop pencil & paper role-playing games the players assume fictional roles in an imaginary world created and animated by a games-master, and the interaction of the participants provide and enjoyable past-time in a collaborative and interactive fashion. Strangely, despite their shared name with the psychological technique mentioned above, role-playing in such games have little to do with playing a role, that is, a role assigned to you. There is precious little about playing and portraying a realistic role completely different from your own personality, the entire point of the original uses of such psychodrama techniques used by therapists and teachers. They instead have everything to do with playing a dispassionate persona that is better/faster/smarter than their player controlling them, one with none of the flaws of personality and emotion that hinder their operator.

Moreover, in my experience most RPG players avoid entirely playing in a role not completely of their choosing, and willfully resist any assumed restrictions, either mechanical ones (i.e. D&D rules for alignment), or those imposed by the social milieu of the imaginary world the player controlled PC inhabits. Even more hostile are those attempts to have any external influence (i.e. the GM) introduce or produce any emotional reaction in the PC other than the most crude and melodramatic (i.e. Sanity rules for Call of Cthulhu). I still remember quite vividly on the Alarums mailing list a threat on PC emotions and motivations the description of RPG personality mechanics by another person as being “…fascist intrusions into player's sole domain of control.”

Is there a place (or role…) for RPGs for playing a character who isn’t augmented with better looks, traits, abilities, strength, endurance, or supernatural powers? For simply playing a regular Joe (or Jill) caught up in extraordinary circumstances where the player can use their wits and ingenuity, and not rely on a matrix of numbers and stats as a crutch? For players to run character expressly designed by the GM to fit into the world setting that doesn’t have to have a rule-imposed pseudo-realistic state of ‘balance’? To run PCs using that same GM designed fictional role to make choices and decisions for their PCs that provide an payoff of fun and adventure? And can any of this be done to provide some psychological insights for the player that they can take away from the encounter?

Any thoughts?



::B::