Captain Anorak's Guide to Gaming
Musings of a Roleplaying Fundamentalist
It amuses me ofttimes to style myself a roleplaying fundamentalist. This does not mean that I think roleplaying has to be taken with po-faced seriousness or that I treat it as a highbrow art form and myself as a fine thespian. What it means is that I like roleplaying primarily for the roleplaying. By roleplaying I mean literally playing the role of a charater who isn't me.

SOCIAL GAMERS

I like gaming for the game itself. Some people seem to do roleplaying mainly because it's something to do with their friends. They could equally well be seeing a film or going bowling. To these people it's interacting with their friends that matters and what they do is secondary. They tend not to enjoy roleplaying with a bunch of strangers, as for them this takes away the point of being there.

I'm not like that. I've been to conventions and roleplayed with people I've never met before or since, and enjoyed it just as much as roleplaying with people I know. In those periods of my life when I have what's generally regarded as a 'normal' social life, revolving around knowing normal people and doing normal things with them, I begin to pine for the days when I did roleplaying regularly, and I go out and try to find gaming groups I can join, even though such a group will be made up of complete strangers. Thus, when I have a life, I actively seek out the geeksome pleasures of the gaming table.

POWER GAMERS

There are many other people who, like me, enjoy the game for the game, but are not roleplaying fundamentalists. These people enjoy the game for reasons other than playing the role of a character.

A lot of people roleplay to play characters as powerful as possible. Commonly this involves trying to accumulate as many experience points as possible to make the character progress swiftly through the levels of hardness. Are these people playing the game to enjoy playing the character or not? In a sense they are: they enjoy playing a character who has power, who can kill things and push people around without getting hurt for it. Many people, including Bob Herzog of Knights of the Dinner Table [1], describe this as playing 'mighty heroes'. (Their idea of heroism seems to differ from mine - I think of a hero as someone who stands up for right, whereas these people seem to think of a hero as someone who goes around killing anyone or anything he likes.) But the personality and motivations of the characters are irrelevant. They exist only to be hard; they don't have reasons for doing things in the world they live in. In that sense, the players of such characters are enjoying playing out their power fantasies regardless of the character. The character is not important; hurting things is.

Imagine the archetypal bad game of AD&D. There is a party of 'fantasy adventurers'. What is that? What are fantasy adventurers? Is there any imaginable reason why someone would actaually choose to be an adventurer? In such games as I'm talking about here, adventurers seem to be people who look for 'dungeons' which are full of monsters and treasure for no readily apparent reason. Why would a charcter choose such a life? Why would a highly-trained professional soldier, or an assassin, or a thief or a wizard or a priest take up such a life?

The obvious answer is that they're looking for treasure to make themselves richer. If so, what would you expect them to do? I would expect them to keep on collecting treasure until they are rich, then retire and live a life of ease and luxury off what they've made. 'Adventuring' would then be a dangerous way of getting rich quickly: an adventurer spends a few years taking big risks, working hard in unpleasant conditions, crawling down dank tunnels that smell of orc shit, and after that has the big pay-off and spends the rest of his years wallowing in obscene wealth. That makes sense as a character motivation.

But I've never known any fantasy RPG to be run like that. Generally in bad AD&D, and many other games, people play fantasy adventurers to become better fantasy adventurers. They actually want to go around fighting orcs and dragons. They go down dungeons and come back with experience points and treasure. The experience points make them harder and they spend the money gained to buy more adventuring equipment - magic items and the like. What this doesss is make them better fantasy adventurers.

The motives for playing characters like this are to have adventures and to make the character into the best (ie. most powerful) adventurer possible. I think this is the motivation of the player rather than the character. In other words, instead of playing a character with the motivations of a real person, the player is just using the character as a gamepiece whose personality, if it exists at all, is irrelevant. Add to this the fact that the player is playing to these motivations using knowledge that the character does not have. The character doesn't know about experience points, that slaying a dragon will secure him another level and higher stats. When the player craves power gained through experience points, that is purely a player's thought, not something which would cross the mind of a character.

It's true that in real life some people crave adventure (mountain climbers, the European explorers of the Age of Discovery, etc) and some people try hard to be very good at what they do (athletes, musicians, etc) but these people are rare. There's nothing wrong, of course, with roleplaying people with rare and exceptional lives: that's where a lot of the fun comes from. Please don't imagine that I'm saying it's somehow wrong to play people who want to live adventurous lives or to excel. I'm not saying that.

My point is that I don't think these players are playing characters with those motives. Rather, their characters don't even have motives. The motives for excellence (ie. higher stats) and adventure exist only in the player, not the character. What they enjoy is not playing the character.

[1]	BA Felton: 'You guys don't know the first thing about role-playing!!! It's not about having the most powerful relic or the maximum stats!!! What possible sense of accomplishment can you garner from that?'
	Bob Herzog: 'I just don't get it! We role-play so we can be heroes and kick the butts of dragons, orcs and beasties. BA role-plays geeks and losers!'
	- Beating the Odds from Knights of the Dinner Table #5, reprinted in Bundle of Trouble #2, p48