Make Mine . . . Adventure Roleplaying?!

Friend of the blog EOTB at Chronicled Scribblings of the Itinerant Overlord recently outlined the precepts of classic adventure gaming (CAG), defined thusly:

It is the style of gaming presumed and presented in the 1E PHB and DMG which was common before a playacting style of "roleplaying" grew into a new normal. It rejects the term "roleplaying game" or "RPG" because today those names firmly convey implicit expectations running contrary to practices of successful adventure gaming.

I've liked the phrase "adventure gaming" as a description for the hobby since I first encountered Tim Kask's regrettably short-lived Adventure Gaming magazine decades ago, and a lot of what EOTB and friends write hits hard for me, in particular:

Adventure gaming is campaign based; the idea of one-shot games is foreign to adventure gaming. A game world exists and persists apart from any group of characters. When combined with the expectation that players grow in mastery of a set of rules, a single set of rules is used for very long periods of time (if not indefinitely) so that players gain enough time in a single ruleset to understand it thoroughly as opposed to a superficial understanding.

Nobody is trying to tell a story. A GM writes places and situations; if a future is written, it is the future of what will happen in that location or what those NPCs will accomplish if the players choose not to engage with it or them at all. No attempt is made to pre-determine the course of what will happen if the players decide to engage with that content. Because the GM has determined the goals, resources, abilities, local geography, and "personality" of any NPCs at a location, they have all the tools necessary to react believably and distinctly to whatever actions or plans the players may devise at the time of contact.

Should their plans and luck dictate such a result compared to the preparations and abilities of their opposition, players are allowed to "win" situations convincingly and without artificial tension or danger imposed by the GM. Conversely, the game is generous with 2nd chance magic so the GM need not prevent bad plans and poor play from reaping a whirlwind.

Player agency is paramount. The burden of what course of action is taken is on the players, not the GM. Adventure gaming is not well-paired with a table made up entirely of passive players, regardless of how excited a GM may be to try it. Many tears occur when a GM attempts to run an adventure game with players who really want the GM to tell them what they will be doing tonight, with players making only minor decisions through the course of the evening but otherwise seeing if they can succeed at the goal a GM has set before them. It is tailor made for groups having a minimum of one player who likes to make decisions. Not everyone has to be a decision maker if the rest of the group is comfortable with allowing a minority of however many to perform the role a GM performs in typical roleplaying campaigns of deciding what the group's course of action will be for a gaming session.

A GM accepts that world building and location/scenario writing is a parallel but separate hobby to the game itself. GMs enjoy worldbuilding for its own sake. There is no feeling that time spent devising locations and NPCs is "wasted" if players do not interact with it. Instead, because the GM has written out the effect of players not engaging with that content at all, the game world changes accordingly and seems to the players to move even where they've not personally intervened.

Music to my ears, truly.

I do hang up a bit in a couple of places, and let me make clear right from the giddyup none of my hang-ups are meant to disagree with or cast aspersion on the precepts of classic adventure gaming presented here. Rather, my hang-ups reflect the ways in which personally I'm not a "classic adventure gamer."

My personal conception or ideation - I'm loathe to call it a definition - of roleplaying is, "Making decisions as your character." If your character is a game-world avatar of you sitting at the table, as in CAG, then that still fits my concept of roleplaying. So does the "playacting style" EOTB describes as it's practiced and advocated for by many in the hobby. From where I stand, roleplaying isn't strictly deep-character-immersion or "talking in funny voices." "My guy" is a perfectly valid approach to roleplaying for me.

That said, I find that while I start generally somewhere in the vicinity of "my guy" - random generation, optimising what I can where I can, handwaving backstory - I rarely stay there for long. For those familiar with the history of GDW's En Garde! the game started strictly as tabletop fencing skirmish rules but over time and repeated play, the players started to think of their characters as existing in the setting, and wanted to know more about their lives. From this came rules for military service, carousing, mistresses, and gentlemen's clubs. That fits my concept of roleplaying to a tee, and indeed it slots in with CAG as well, which reinforces for me the notion of En Garde! as one of the earliest adventure games.

From my own experience, making those kinds of decisions for my character - what to pursue and how to pursue it - suggests a nascent personality which influences subsequent decisions. While I start off an adventure gamer, as I play the campaign I'm prone to make decisions less based on my own logic sitting at the table and more from the perspective of the imaginary character in the imaginary setting, their experiences, their ambitions, their place in the game-world. As I make more and more decisions as the character rather than as a player, that's when a backstory may emerge, in dribs and drabs, further coloring how I think of, and think as, "my guy."

This is the essence of Develop-In-Play rather than Develop-At-Start gaming. Old-school and roots gamers tend to be speak in terms of "story" as an emergent property arising from actual play rather than one planned by the referee - story is something seen in hindsight - and from my own experience, so is characterisation. The more decisions I make for my character, the more subsequent decisions are likely to reflect a consistency and a coherence with what came before. My characters develop interests, habits, and quirks that build on those experiences and ambitions and "my guy" becomes someone else altogether, very different from where the campaign started.

I don't know if EOTB's concept of CAG necessarily excludes or proscribes this. Consider the following:

There is no expectation players will act at the table as if a game were not occurring; players are expected - not discouraged - to use what the modern hobby mistakenly disparages as "metagaming". A player who knows that fire prevents trolls from regenerating but declines to use it because "my character doesn't know that" is roleplaying instead of adventure gaming.

Conversely, GMs must not metagame - because a GM has perfect knowledge, they must limit themselves within the knowledge, goals, abilities, resources, and quirks of the NPC or monster they are running at the time in order for a functional game to occur. This is almost the exact opposite of how most roleplaying games view the player-GM dynamic, and an example of how character-first roleplaying flipped the playstyle in a 180 away from how early games ran. (emphasis added - BV)

I agree with the idea of "metagaming" as presented here: I tend to think of anything in the rules as within the realm of knowledge of the player characters, but I also tend to violate one of the principles of CAG EOTB sets forth - "Because a GM is comfortable with highly experienced players, rules tinkering for tinkering's sake, or perhaps to artificially reintroduce an atmosphere of player uncertainty due to ignorance, is discouraged." - in that I will switch things up to create surprises or new challenges, such as introducing trolls that are vulnerable to salt rather than fire, frex.

More to the point, if the referee can be expected to create characterisations for non-player characters, monsters, and the like, and hold to them, perhaps the intent is not to limit players from doing the same so much as it is to not lose sight of playing the game. Hopefully EOTB may weigh in on this in a future post.

As I said, as things stand, while I'm very much a roots gamer, I wouldn't label myself a classic adventure gamer as styled here. Perhaps "adventure roleplayer" is more my speed, because after weeks or months or, ideally, years of playing, "my guy" is rarely just my avatar any longer.