David M. Ewalt explains — in the Wall Street Journal — why Dungeons & Dragons beats videogames like Grand Theft Auto V:
After four decades of accelerating technological and artistic growth, even the best video games are still hobbled by a fundamental limitation of the form: players can only get out of them what programmers put into them. Clever game designers can create the illusion of an open world by anticipating player behavior and accounting for most possibilities within the program’s code. But at some point, the player will try to kill an unkillable character, open a door with nothing behind it, or have a conversation with a character who seems intelligent but only parrots a few pre-recorded lines. The illusion will fail, and the player will be torn from the fantasy world.
But the good news is that gamers can find truly limitless exploration and genuine freedom of choice. They just have to look back to the pen-and-paper games that gave birth to high-tech simulations like Skyrim and GTA V: Video games are fun, but they still stand in the shadow of their august ancestor, the fantasy role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons.
Yes, D&D — that geeky hobby with the strangely shaped dice. If you’ve never played, here’s the pitch: Dungeons & Dragons is a game where players control a fantasy hero through an adventure that takes place mostly in their own imaginations. It’s a kind of collaborative storytelling, where one participant, the “Dungeon Master,” acts as narrator and referee; he describes a scene for the players, who respond by explaining how their characters act.
Because D&D is largely improvised, it offers a degree of freedom that’s impossible to simulate in a video game.
Shorter WSJ: Get offa my lawn.
In other news from the WSJ, Grand Theft Auto 5 pulls in a cool $800M the first day it goes on sale.
;-)
This is not much of an argument they’re making. Pen and paper RPG’s have rules, conventions and limitations, too. If well crafted, both media allow you to find the sweet spot where for a few minutes or hours, you almost forget you’re playing a game.
You’re right that pen-and-paper RPGs have rules, too. I found that they tend to be the weakest part of the gaming experience.
Depends on the RPG, in my experience, and especially in what you’re looking to get from it. Some systems are very “crunchy,” with lots of rules and tables and a simulationist bent; these tend to be for combat-heavy games. Others are much more about the narrative. They don’t necessarily have fewer rules but the rules govern the story rather than the player’s actions.
If you’re interested in the latter then check out:
Sufficiently Advanced
Post-Singularity adventure with plausible science (the creator is a particle physicist – and an acquaintance)
Mythender
You play as a magically imbued god-killer, but if you chose to gain power from the gods you end you will become a god yourself – and then the rest of the party will seek to end you.
Amber (diceless roleplaying game)
Based on the eponymous Zelazny fantasy universe
In general you might want to look at diceless systems, come to think of it.
Rather than diceless, consider ruleless.
This ties into some of the ideas from How to Measure Anything.
As I see it, the purpose of the rules in most (good) games is twofold.
First, they are an attempt to crystallize the expertise of the game designer into a form that can be procedurally applied by the players, thus taking the load off the referee or GM. A game might have more combat rules so that the GM need only generally set up the party’s fights and can instead concentrate on making the story more interesting. The opposite is also an option (rules for generating narrative with combat left very freeform).
Second, they allow the GM recourse to impartiality. Dems da rules, as it were.
All that said, those games my wife and I have run in the last few years since college have certainly orbited closer and closer to rulelessness. An exception would be that Mrs. Africanus likes a good crunchy combat system because she doesn’t have faith in her tactical sense or, more specifically, would prefer to focus on characterization and story.
As an aside, I’m in love with free Kriegspiel and am trying to organize some of my more military-history/tactics minded friends into a league, or at least some playtests.
I would agree with those design goals, but I don’t think many role-playing games do a good job of modeling combat — real or fictional. Instead, they replace the game-master’s (flawed) judgment with an opaque system shockingly divorced from the modeled reality.
The rule-books generally read well though, and they seem to make sense.