What are the strength of a table top rpg anyway?

I was pondering the ways people approach their rpg sessions lately. One brain child of that was my previous post about Rifts. Now I have been thinking about that roleplaying aspect again, and more specifically the immersion some of us crave.

For some they see the game session as an opportunity to wind down, kill some orks and hang out with their friends. Yet others play it as they would chess or a game of bridge, they sit down with some strangers, maybe in a game store, and try to manipulate they rules and procedures in order to grow and develop their in game persona. There are more than one way to approach a rpg session.

Like you might know by now, I love the old school games with their relaxed attitude and how they are first and foremost games. But, I also like the new school games, the story games which focus on enforcing themes and crunchy parts for things like relationships.

It's not unheard of the latter to focus on more emotionally engaging subjects and themes. A game of that school might actually be intended to emotionally engage and challenge not only the character, but also the player. I find that interesting, in more than one sense.

When you sit down to play a game with strangers in a game store, you might prefer a game which lets you sit in your comfort zone. You do stuff which anyone can understand and follow along, without getting their panties in a twist.

Compare that to a game of Rifts, playing Coalition soldiers. For some that is just as abstract as playing chess. You gain XP by wasting the opposition, fair deal. For some others it might make them sit up straight and wonder what it means to play racist bigots with guns.

A few years ago I could see and hear how gamers I used to play D&D with now talked about how they had a "raid" or a "run" to attend with their guild in World of Warcraft. They had been hooked and online gaming took time out from planning a face to face session with friends. Personally I thought it was nuts!

Now, consider that WoW probably does that part of "playing an abstract logical game of chess with strangers" part quite well, what is left for the table top?

Maybe, just maybe, those games which plays best with friends, or at least with people who might like to get somewhat emotionally engaged, is what is uniquely well done by a table top rpg?

Could it be, that when immersion is key, is where these peculiar games really shine? I have a very varied view of the would be thespians at the table, but I do think going that extra step while engaging the game is what WoW will not let you do. For good, or bad...

What's your attitude toward your character?

Having just read, and chuckled a bit about, the latest post on Grognardia about silly names, I think back on my attitude towards my own characters. How do you approach the creation of a new being in the imaginary worlds? Do you toss some dice and tack on a jokey name and then rush head first unto glory and death? An experience with one of the CD based products from the late TSR illustrates my attitude well.

Our local game club had started regular gatherings, and someone had just purchased some kind of introductory set of D&D. He wanted to test it on us who were familiar with the hobby before using it to introduce others to the hobby. This was back in those days during the nineties when TSR experimented wildly with new package formats and loosing money on all of them. The idea with a CD with examples of player interaction and sound effects to play when entering specific rooms is an intriguing one. Done well it could show how a typical session sound like, and add an extra element to build atmosphere around the table. Starting our test run of this product we listened through the initial explanations of our character cards and the the set up of the game. That part was ok but the next part was where it broke down. In the example session the voice actors were sounding like total dorks, which was unfortunately but something which we could endure. What we couldn't endure without giggling, or even breaking out the big guffaw, was that these people were referring to the other players by their role in the party! Hearing someone without any acting ability yell "Thief, help me out over here!" just sounded too silly to us.

Silly, yes. That's the connection to James post I mentioned in the beginning. Anything that makes you and your fellow players take the game seriously, i.e. a serious intent to have fun an no one else's expense, works fine. But, something that signals to everyone else around the table that they don't care and might as well be playing a video game or watch tv, that's not fine. Hearing people talk about their character as a game piece, "Fighter, you have a higher STR score than my hobbit. Help us lift this thing!", grates in my ears. Among most players I've met, talking in the first person and referring to your character as "me" and the other characters by their name, is the way to roleplay. Once there was a poll on one of the forums where old schoolers lurk, and it became clear the most of the crowd there didn't play the game that way. I have no idea of why the majority of gamers in Sweden, where I grew up and learned to play, seem to do the immersion thing. Is it more common among gamers in North America to not do the immersion method of roleplaying? Is it just old school or is that just the habit of generally conservative gamers? I don't know.

In the end we decided that the introductory box of D&D was not to be recommended. We felt it taught bad habits and wasn't all that great as a tutorial anyway. Now, many years later I realize that I think that even though I like it better when the player make some effort to name their character "seriously", the deal breaker for me is if they treat the character as a real person. If they try to make those numbers come alive by at least refer to them as "me" when doing actions, I can live with some silliness.

I'll end with a personal memory of a silly name, and a hint. One time when we where playing WHFRP, our game master had to invent a name on the fly for a bouncer. He became Bruno (he might have based it on a relative or picked it off a list, for all I know). This is not a silly name as such, but his way of portraying this brute was nothing but. After that, every time we encountered a bouncer or a city guard, we asked "Is it a Bruno"? Needless to say, that name was never used for anything serious in that group again. The hint? When running a game, always have a list of names beside you. If you can rattle of a name without hesitating, and without resorting to blurting out something less than inspired, your players might treat that NPC as someone real. Having a name does a lot to make that encounter feel like you meet someone real.