This article raises questions that came to me through a list that has nothing really to do with role playing games.  It is a list of authors and publishers eager to work with Christian fantasy and science fiction, and as far as I know I am the only gamer in the group.  My presence inspired them to address role playing games, and to recognize (what we all take for granted) the link to childhood games of make believe.  As I responded to that suggestion, I was starting to say that role playing games were make believe with resolution mechanics; but then I perhaps for the first time saw that make believe games must have resolution mechanics as well–I had just never thought of what these might be.  I am not as yet certain whether it is of any help in game design or game play, but at least there is the aspect that understanding the theoretical basis for different styles of play has the potential to enable the discovery of new approaches, even if the specifics of a particular concept won’t work for us.

  At one time or another, it’s likely that all of us have used just such a description of role playing games:  something like make-believe with rules.  We’ve compared what we do to childhood games of army, cops & robbers, cowboys & indians, or whatever else we played when we were young, and then explained that role playing games provide a way of deciding who was hurt, who was killed, and what the outcome of other actions really was–in short, resolution mechanics.  Role playing games have them, make-believe does not.

  But as I was trying to explain this to the aforementioned list, it suddenly occurred to me that this probably was not true.  Make-believe wouldn’t work at all if it didn’t have some kind of resolution mechanic.  As I wondered what that was, I began to get an idea from my own recollections of such play.

  This was going to be a forum post, to start some discussion and to consider posting something about it here.  I foreshadowed this discussion with a post on one of the forums, and someone gave an answer that I think may not be entirely correct:

The resolution mechanic for a kid’s make-believe game has a name they use in some MU*’s. When the computer doesn’t resolve actions, the players do so using “Consent”.Nothing happens to your character that you don’t agree to. If the game breaks down to “I got you!” “No, you missed!” then the game is over, and noone wants that.

  I can understand that being used in MUD/MUSH/MUX games; but my recollection of childhood play was that this was not the resolution mechanic that was used in play.  There is certainly a sense in which it could be said that all players “consented” to the outcome as presented; but it was not, I think, a mutual consent.

  I am inclined to think that the resolution mechanic of such games is based on what might be dubbed social pecking order.  That is, if you were a more important member of the peer group, you always succeeded over a peer of lesser importance.  The outcasts of the group, those kids with whom the important kids deigned to play because they needed more people in the group, were always the ones killed.  Sometimes it was as blatant as declaring that certain kids everyone liked would be the cowboys or the cops, while those who were not considered friends were immediately relegated to indians or robbers.  In games such as army it was more subtle; the sides were drawn up such that all the preferred kids were on one team and all the outcasts were on the other, and whenever the shooting started, the preferred team always had plot immunity and the others were always mooks.  The outcasts couldn’t win, but “consented” to stay in the game because the alternative was to go home and have no one to play with; the cool kids allowed themselves to play with the outcasts in this context because they could never lose, because the decision would never be that the outcast beat the cool kid at anything.

  I’d like to know if this is not anyone’s experience in such games.

  One of those in the discussion thought that perhaps those who were the critics of role playing games were the kids who were always shot first in make-believe games.  My reaction was that many of the gamers with whom I played had been in the category of “shot first” in such games, and that one of the attractions of role playing games to us is that the rules create a level playing field, a way for us to play the same games but not be killed merely because “no one wants to play with us”.

  Is there something else going on in these games that I’m missing?

  Next week, something different.

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M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc.  His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.