What's In A Name?

While it might seem rather trifling to some, recent references to Role-Playing Games as "table-top" RPGs disturbs me. What do those people who refer to actual RPGs with the unnecessary appellation, "table-top" mean? What are they trying to do? If one plays with a group on the internet is it then "monitor-stand RPGing?" If seated in the living room "armchair RPGing?" Patently this is foolish. So as to establish the groundwork for the insidious attempt at name stealing by a certain element, let us now go back over the history of the Role-Playing Game.

The first formal RPG was published in 1974. Before that, folks called such games "Let’s Pretend" or "cops & Robbers" and the like. The latter versions of the RPG lacked form and substance, though. Actually, as they had no rules at all, and nothing else but the imagination of the players, they were and remain likely the purest form of role-playing, but let’s not go down that path… So the commercial RPG has been with us for 25 years and counting.

Now what is it that constitutes an RPG? Pretty easy. It has a Game Master who sets up the environment and manages all within it, alters and expands it as necessary. It has players who create game personas, their character for assumption of the role designated by its statistics. The players, through their game avatars, then interact with each other and the environment to explore, discover, solve problems, overcome obstacles, and grow progressively more able thus. Random probability, chance if you will, plays a continual part in the adventures of the characters in the make-believe environment. The game itself has no winner per se. It has no conclusion. It ends only when the participants—notably the Game Master—cease playing. That defines an actual RPG well enough, I should think.

If the game form is taken to the internet, it can indeed be played online, or through messages, and this does not alter its basic form or structure. Such play is certainly RPG activity, as I am sure you will agree.

Something entirely wrong is occurring, however. Those offering a much lesser and entirely inferior form of semi-role-playing seem to be attempting a coup-de-main. That is, the computer game industry has attempted to seize the RPG name, apply it to their electronic products, and pass them off as actual RPG. While such products have certain elements of real role-playing, they are not actually valid RPGs as has been defined by a quarter-century of play. They are Computer RPGs, or CRPGs.

CRPGs lack a thinking and responsive Game Master that can alter the course of play as called for by players’ needs. While some wags in the electronic games industry might suggest that this is often true in "live" GMs, I suggest you ignore such rude comments as I have become accustomed to doing.

CRPGs have limited character creation scope, as their Game Master, the memory chip, has no imagination, and can not manage more than a very limited number of choices for the players’ game personas to make, actions to perform. Again, some wags in the actual RPG field have suggested this is mainly a problem with the capacity of designers and programmers. However, most of those same detractors are notorious LARPERS, so need more be said?

The whole CRP "Game" is likely little more than a most restricted and limited adventure scenario, or maybe a mass-murder-mess (MMM, sometimes called MUD, MOO, etc,). It ends when it ends...you "beat" the machine or get tired of dying horribly. Even in the best of the so-called multi-user CRPGs, the player’s character activities are prescribed and must, perforce, then become repetitive. There is no room for growth and change, of course, and no Artificial Intelligence is likely to enable that soon. Real, Game Mastered multi-player RPGs run online do not fall into this category—at least too often, I am assured by some.

CRPGs allow "cheating." In theory at least, RPGs do not. Forget the few games with young players whose characters have levels of at least twice their years of age, or whose skills surpass that of the most accomplished person ever known in a dozen different specialties. Remember, "beginner’s luck" is the likely reason for this. CRPGs are flawed. RPGs are not.

Finally, can you imagine a CRPG that goes on forever? Not likely! The poor benighted persons playing it would never survive. While one might spend days and weeks doing little else but playing so as to "beat the game", months and years are right out.

In summation, let is be clear that the CRPG is not now, and will not likely be in the foreseeable future, a real RPG.

Now we come back to the matter of "table-top", odious as it surely is.

Do the publishers of actual RPGs point to those garishly illustrated but pale imitations of their real products and call them "view-screen" RPGs? I should say not! Unthinkable. They are managed by a computer program, so that are best identified as Computer Role-Playing Games. The CRPG form cane well after the actual RPG, and it is a limited (cramped, crimped, curtailed) form of true role-playing, no? It is the CRPG, then, that must accept a nominative before the RPG, not the progenitor, and currently only actual, form of RPGing.

Should the weight of masses of ignorant participants in this lesser form of RPG activity be taken into account in this matter. Never! Put any who champion this to the test by asking: "Just to whom is it that you play your role, pray tell? Do you speak eloquently to the monitor?" Ha! You’ll have them then. There is no role-playing at all in the CRPGs, let it be trumpeted. They are nothing but vehicles for role-assumption play. All those big-money types producing such inferior imitations of the RPG should be tickled pink that the community of real RPGers, publishers and players alike, haven’t forced that appellation upon their products. Rather than CRPGs, they might be offering RAGs. So think about that, all you computer guys!

My advice to all the players of true RPGs is to stand firm. Hold your ground. Never agree to add any word before the name of your game. Let the foe beware. They have (clearly late-coming, lesser, inferior, limited) CRPGs, and we have (real, actual, authentic, full-scale, wonderful, real-live-human-GM) RPGs.

On the other hand, remember to be nice. CRPGs even as marginally role-playing as they are, seem to be fun, and are getting better all the time. When real "intelligence" is available in computers, when the chip adds to its own memory and programs on its own, then the days of the second-rate GM are over. When the computer is akin to that on the Starship enterprise, and a "holodeck" is available for RPG activity, perhaps we might be willing to surrender the title RPG, admit that its (still loyal) adherents play "Old Fashioned RPGs". Then again, I noticed the other night that they were playing military miniatures on the table top in Deep Space Nine, so...

-Gary Gygax is a long time member of the gaming community.