An Interlude: What is Role-Playing?

My first post about classes vs skills seems to have drawn a lot of response from the rec.games.roguelike.development newsgroup. The responses seem to fall into two categories: those people who pretty much 'got it' straight-away, and those people who said 'no way' and objected in various ways. What felt quite nice, is that the list of people who 'got it' coincided nicely with my mental list of people whose opinions I respect a lot on other topics on the newsgroup.

I've just tried to summarise the arguments of those people who said 'no way'.

1. Classes and/or skills restrict what the player can do.
2. Classes and/or skills give the character bonuses to do certain things.
3. Classes and/or skills are a feature of (the genre of) RPGs.
4. Classes and/or skills allow me to role-play.
5. Classes and/or skills give me pleasure because I can tweak my character to reflect what I want.
6. Classes and/or skills are something other than what you're talking about.

Now none of them convince me. 1 feels wrong, and was the basis of my initial objections. 2 is probably the best argument
I've seen. 3 feels like they should be using the word 'convention' rather than feature. I don't have any problems with breaking conventions, and so this argument doesn't sway me. 4 and 5 have a tenuous connection to classes and skills at best, and I don't believe rely on an implementation of classes and skills. e.g its possible to role-play and tweak the character without implementing either classes or skills. I'll come back to the role-playing discussion a little bit later. 6 is an objection, but not a discussion I want to get into. I don't want to get involved in semantic arguments, and the articles I initially referred to didn't either.

I really want to focus on points 2 for the moment. Now I have absolutely no objection to giving the character incremental improvements. Its basically part of how gaming works: you get the player to overcome an obstacle, you give them a reward, you present a bigger obstacle. My objection to classes and skills on this point, is that the rewards are given meta-game rather than in-game. Consider how an experience point based skill system works.

Example A: You slay 50 ninjas. This gives you enough experience points to increase your stealth skill by 5 (or in a class based system, to increase your level). This gives you the Superstealth ability.

[I only want to discuss experience point based systems here, because practise based systems are a lot worse. I'll go into detail on that at a later date.]

However, in the above example, all the features of the system (except the 50 dead ninjas) take the player out of the game, into the meta-game e.g. rules about the game. This removes the player from immersion in the game, which breaks all sorts of continuity about game-flow and suspension of disbelief and so on. I'd rather present the Superstealth ability as an in-game reward.

Example B: You slay 50 ninjas. As you are about to slay the 51st ninja, he cries out 'I'll spare your life in return for teaching you our secrets.' If you do spare his life, he teaches you the Superstealth ability.

Now, this doesn't interrupt the meta-game nearly so much. You can even be smart and include the ninja teaching the abilities within the game. Some players may object to have in game characters discuss keyboards and buttons. But there are plenty of games, particularly console games, that have no problem providing the information this way. And what's more, this doesn't rely on any implementation of classes and/or skills. The ability is given directly, without mandating that certain types of characters have to have it, or that learning the ability detracts from an internal points pool somewhere that the player must spend.

This ties into what I want to discuss about role-playing as well (objection 4: classes and/or skills allow me to role-play). Now, a big part of my objection to the role-playing argument, is that I don't believe it is possible to role-play in a single player game, and that you are instead making a story up in your head. I don't disagree that this is still valid, but to me role-playing is about taking on a role and playing it. Its a performance art, and without an audience, you aren't actually role-playing. And a computer is not an audience. Sure, you can tell people the story later, but that's the point you start role-playing.

However, I'll humour you for the moment, and assume that it is possible to role-play in a single player environment. And that, to me suggests that, while you play you are going through the process of mentally translating example A above to example B. That is, you are justifying the meta-game experience point system, to yourself, as an in-game mechanic. In fact, if you are a *hard-core* role-player you actually do the following:

Example C: You slay 50 ninjas. This gives you enough experience points to increase your stealth skill by 5 (or in a class based system, to increase your level). In order to justify this in game, you hunt down a 51st ninja, and act out the training process of learning the Superstealth ability. The in-game mechanics don't support this very well, as the Ninja keeps trying to kill you, so you have to keep casting the Sleep spell during the 'training' and then cast a Flee spell on the Ninja at the end of this. Of course, this requires that you learn 'Sleep' and 'Flee' spells, which are not in character for you, but you justify these as allowing you to act out the performance of 'training' when you need to do so. This gives you the Superstealth ability.

Now, personally, I'm not *hard-core*. In fact, I'm not a role-player. I'm a gamer. But it seems to me, that a game that plays like example B, would support a role-player a lot better, than a game that plays like example A. And that is why I think classes and/or skill based systems actually prevent role-playing than help it.