Che Webster

Wargamer or Roleplayer?

Roleplaying games are a chimera of elements and the question is how to re-balance the elements to better suit my own tastes. I have been on a journey through the tension between roleplay (in-character, in-World, make-believe) and wargame (in-combat, in-rules, in-process). This is, of course, design thinking and moves me towards the terrifyingly complicated world of game design.

One realisation is that I trend towards opting for the familiarity of combat scenes whenever I sit down to play solo. While I express the desire to play in-character as my character in an interesting world, most of my gaming is in fact not played in this way.

I tend to opt for highly detailed skirmish wargaming at a man-to-man scale, enjoying as I do the too-and-fro of those kinds of game. The blow-by-blow detail gives rise to a narrative that emerges out of the many dice rolls and decisions made as we leverage the rules of the game.

Does this mean that I am, in fact, a wargamer and not a roleplayer?

Zooming out for a moment to larger scale wargaming campaigns, I enjoy two broad categories of resolution: I like highly-focused skirmish battle games and I like higher-level world-scale strategic war games.

The level of highest wargaming interest for me lies somewhere between the one-to-one tank battle scale, in which I can just about stomach the idea of small squads of infantrymen being abstracted to a single “unit” on the table or board, down to the man-to-man scale OR in the high-level nation-to-nation strategic wargame in which I can make decisions about not only troop movements on wide fronts but also about technological development spending and the length of supply lines.

At all levels, I am deeply drawn to the hex-based battle map – whether it be the hexed battlefields of tank-to-tank combat in “Panzer”, the hexed European-scale war room boards of “The Rise and Fall of The Third Reich”, or the small-scale hexed battle map of GURPS Man-to-Man.

The answer lies in the lack of satisfaction that I experience once a game built around man-to-man fighting and combat continues into anything like a campaign without starting to take into account the longer-term human and material costs of such play.

Thus, the classically stereotypical D&D dungeon-based campaign that features a long sequence of fights with monsters quickly bores me because, ultimately, the combat is aimless and mostly played for its own sake.

Of much more intense interest to me would be, for example, a World War II military campaign in which each mission was played out with definite tactical goals within a strategic framework that gave the whole sequence of combats significance and meaning.

On this analysis, I am entirely a wargamer and clearly derive a great deal of interest and enjoyment from the challenge of playing tactical skirmish wargames within the context of a campaign framework. It occurs to me that I should 100% go and scratch that itch, developing games around those kinds of play goals.

But I am also drawn to a different experience in my play, that of the deeply imaginative and character-focused play within the role of a single protagonist. I long to explore the experience of being someone else, of psychologically encountering different ways of being and seeing myself, and of taking risks that I cannot or would not otherwise be able to experience.

Along with this is a deep desire to explore strange new worlds, meet strange new forms of life and civilisation, and to boldly go where no one has been before… largely because it exists in our individual imaginations. This is surely the purview of the roleplayer, who takes on the role of a different being and imagines what it might be like.

For this very different imaginative and creative experience, I find the technology of wargames to be somewhat restrictive and confining. While I might well find it possible to conceive of a character and then try to exhaustively define that imagined person in terms of lists of traits and numbers, the complexities of what it mean to be a human are too interesting to be fully and easily quantifiable. In other words, whenever I try to list the qualities I would want my character to have access to, I run up against the time-consuming reality that this is simply too long a list to quantify.

The most common suggestion is that to quantify a human (or other) being for roleplay, you are better served in abstracting the details down to broader categories. My main objection to this approach is that the abstractions down to categories (such as D&D’s “Fighter Class” or “Elf Race”) become in themselves restrictive because they produce stereotypes that lack individual character (if you’ll pardon the pun). Abstractions then also tend to expand outwards, leading to an unsatisfying clash when we reach the need to defend your character in combat but are forced to simplify the peril to the level where it feels meaningless.

This abstraction and the difficulties I’ve experienced with it have been the reason to resist “lightening” my roleplaying game rules over the years. I find that while I might well enjoy the less-burdened general roleplay of different situations through many types of engagements or challenges, once combat arrives then I feel the whole thing is totally unsatisfying. I suppose another option might be to play in only non-combat roleplaying scenarios, assuming I could stomach such a limitation as believable. Given the worlds I want to explore, no combat seems unlikely.

All of which might explain why I keep circling back to the familiar wargame-styles that I have found solace in over the years, even though they keep jarring hard against my desire to roleplay and (as GM) encourage more roleplaying within my game worlds. The tension has come to a head and about the only resolution I can see is to separate the two experiences and play battle-focused military-style games on the one hand, and more adventurous free-wheeling and exploratory games focused on the roleplay on the other.

If only I could find a satisfactory combination of rules to scratch the roleplay itch! My suspicion is that a pathway towards that particular desire might best be forged through the wilderness by first of all dropping all my existing gaming baggage.

What if I begin with no tools in my hand, or perhaps just one simple tool, and see how far I can get with my own ingenuity and descriptive powers? For now, left feeling somewhat stuck, it seems perhaps most practical to simply strike out alone and roleplay my way to something different.

Game on!

10 comments

  1. Some might say that you’re quite hard to please, mate. I wouldn’t, because I too am quite hard to please. I’ll just venture this: in order to get the roleplaying experience you’re after you’re going to have to find the people who want that too, maybe not all the time, in every game they play, but at least in the games they play with you. What I have noticed in this regard is that it requires a huge amount of trust, good humour, tolerance, generosity of spirit, and, yes, vulnerability. Maybe the equation doesn’t work exactly, but I suspect that that all adds up to love, love of the guys who really get it, and love of the games we play. I think, on some fundamental level, and in some Taoist way, we have to play with a love that isn’t demanding, play with freedom to find out what will happen, even whilst really wanting it be great and to last forever.

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  2. Well Che. I have avoided commenting on your posts for some time, as even though we share so many concerns in roleplaying ( like immersion), I felt my take on these issues differed sufficiently from yours as to be unwelcome and unhelpful to you. And perhaps you tire of my naivety. But I have still followed your discussions as they are always subjects I am interested in. I have also wanted to reply to Anthony’s (aka runeslinger’s) podcast on immersion as I feel he mentioned a few things that I agreed with and that I could expand upon, but I feared they might be taken as challenging your’s and Daniel’s takes on immersion. However I think my ideas on the matter might be more of an antithesis to what would therefore be your thesis on immersion, and I would hope that perhaps a synthesis of those ideas could be reached… However, on this blog post. Which is a subject I broached in my ‘Frankenstein’s’ monster podcast. I would like to tell you how it was wargaming with 2nd edition Warhammer that actually brought me to what people consider roleplaying today. Before Warhammer, I played DnD in the very old school, classic, mechanistic, almost boardgame style way of early ‘adventure” games. Characters were tokens in a very puzzle like dungeon. The dungeons were like escape rooms to be solved or defeated. A monster. A trap. A riddle. Each room presented a problem to be solved before moving on. There was no acting. No ‘silly voices’. Hardly even any evocative description. It was very sober and must have looked totally boring to any non-nerds that witnessed it. After a year we got bored and sick of the absurdities and frustrations of DnD and gave it up for collecting miniatures. Through the minis we discovered Warhammer. It was the little section in that rulebook, that described personal challenges between champions and the encouragement given in the rule book to use dramatic language, to shout and act up the part of the challengers across the table, and to put on voices, that eventually led us back to roleplaying. Not to the classical, staid, sober, roleplaying of the previous classical era, but to the new early story telling style of the late eighties. What some more recent commentators have described as ‘Trad’ style. This time we were standing up. Waving our arms about. Putting on silly voices and chewing the scenery up. We were having a whale of a time with a smaller, select group of friends we trusted and did not feel self conscious about ‘Larping’ around in each others company. So it was wargaming that brought me to ‘roleplay’ style adventure games. Therefore my suggestion to you. Try hamming up your wargames. Orcs are great for this. Think of your orc troops arguing with each other in that typically ‘mockney’ style of early Warhammer. Yes, clichéd and insulting, perhaps.
    But great fun for flights of fantasy and getting into those spiky, steel toe capped boots of your green hordes..or think of your elf cavalry complaining of the mud on their boots in that stereotypical and prejudicial way that we thought so harmless ‘back in the day’. Everything is just a stimulus for your imagination. Everything is a catalyst for your fantastical faculty of mind. Ham it up. Even if it feels foolish. And all the better to do it as a solo experience in this regard! Feel AND think. Dice, audible description, written rules and written description , pictures, miniatures…all can be turned by the imagination into roleplay fuel. Immersion can be resilient as well as fragile. It can be easy to acquire as well as difficult. It is always transient, and thank goodness it is, as I would hate to be trapped in a day dream! But I think these things can be synthesized. I do not think you have to divide wargames and roleplaying into two camps. That seems to very much be both an old and very new concept born from different tribes with different values and interests. The old ‘serious’, historical wargamers wanted nothing to do with us silly fantasy types and the modern 5e roleplayers see nothing for them in wargaming. But for us in the eighties, fantasy roleplaying and fantasy wargaming felt like different parts of the same hobby. I have never felt more immersed in a world than when my noble imperial knight challenged my friend’s chaos wizard to a personal duel across the field of a desperate Warhammer fantasy battle, at the end of a full day of wargaming on multiple tables, with multiple armies. We were exhausted and invigorated at the same time…Sadly the old 2nd edition rules were so slow and clunky the duel was never resolved before we had to wrap up for the day. As I remember both combatants had injured each other and I was surprised at how tough that chaos wizard was. I think the wicked sorcerer’s mutations had given IT the edge. But they are still locked in that desperate conflict in my minds eye even today!
    I am fully aware that my comments and thoughts on this could be considered glib and self satisfied, but I am comfortable with the balance I have already achieved for myself on these matters. And I have to say I do not share your difficulties with those matters, but I still appreciate that those difficulties can and do exist for people as the tensions betweens the separate disciplines that influence roleplaying games is something I acknowledged in my podcast. But I do believe a balance is possible, and it involves accepting the tension is actually an essential part of the hobby that gives it it’s dynamism. It’s just I think you have to stop fighting that tension and use it and direct it in ways that you want and actually translate the one element into the other. So convert the horrible dice roll into a disastrous bit of story telling. And convert the imagined scene into abstract processes for consistency and fairness of play. They can work together, or at least along side each other in a way that is complimentary and not conflicted. At least I believe there are ways to make the roleplay robust enough not to be harmed by mechanical elements. Make everything a story, and live and feel that story. Perhaps my comments are not welcome. But I think accepting that these seemingly separate disciplines are opposed, damaging to one another, and fragile to each other CAN be true, but it is also possible that these seemingly separate things can be supportive, helpful and resilient of each other. I think the trick is not accepting the fragility and finding ways to accommodate it that is the preferred answer, but far better to look for ways to make them more resilient and easier to move between which will then lead to ways of making them work together rather than against each other in this new medium of ‘roleplaying’. I have already made a couple of suggestions in this comment on how this could be achieved, but, perhaps it is naive and privileged of me to think that those that find it difficult can find ways to make these things easier. I don’t know.

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    • Safer, I hope you will call in to Casting Shadows. In your response here, I think you have presented an excellent description of what an immersive experience of ‘immersing in play’ is like. Examples like this are invaluable in opening up the discussion into more areas than the more commonly discussed immersion in character. That in turn does what you may have intended here: makes immersion seem both more obtainable and more common than many believe~

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      • Thank you Anthony. I am hesitant to call as I probably need to script my response to present my thoughts in the best way I can and not to sound difficult or disruptive, but actually trying to engage with, encourage, and explore the concept. Do not get me wrong. I do not present my example of theatrically challenging my friend in Warhammer as just immersion into play, but as a moment of feeling like I was standing before the chaos wizard and feeling the knightly wrath in me. My friend actually imitated the stance of the wizard figure to help me feel more like I was standing before him. I find immersion into character the easiest. But that can also produce problems as there is the risk of becoming the jerk who just ‘does what my character would do’. I have broken the meta etiquette of roleplaying groups by becoming immersed in the emotion of a scene, and blurting things out, against polite table order at times. I use ‘mini larping’ to immerse myself into place and emotion or sensation of an imaginary place. This means I do a lot of my immersion in the background. Absorbed in myself and my own world. As such some of my most pleasurable moments in gaming are out of the spotlight. I actually find being in the spotlight and engaging with the GM one of those more difficult immersion breaking pressures. Less so if the GM is in first person. But I can also work myself into a frenzy in the background and then break social RPG norms as a result, which is a problem of too resilient or easily obtained immersion? I can use almost any input stimulus from minis to maps to pictures to even GM description ( which is often one of the poorest aids to immersion for me!) to establish my immersive state. Either of an imagined place and the sensory perceptions of it, or the emotional state of a character and the feelings from it. I do far more of that than the immersion into play, or process, or focus, or flow. I just daydream too much and too easily. If I can order my thoughts I will call in with some more specific examples of what I mean and expand on this. I think you hit the nail on the head with some key words that you used, and recognising that ‘immersion’ can be resilient and easy and resistive to distractions at one end, while also being fragile and susceptible to breaking from distractions at the other end of the scale. It is always transient though and I like it that way. I like to move between my engagements and interactions at the table so I value techniques that make that movement easy and smooth. Which I certainly feel is possible for myself. I would hope, as a synthesis of ideas that it could be possible for others too. I think your podcast could be a good place and host for discussion and hopefully suggest ideas for this synthesis. I think.you have a greater handle on the scope of the concept then I do. I also feel that the GM has a special privilege when it comes to RPG’s that allows them to immerse in their worlds, characters and stories regardless of the mechanical load the GM has. I think this is probably my main antithetical position to Che and Daniel’s solution to their problem of immersion (and it absolutely IS a solution, just not the only one that I perceive). The GM has the direct power of creation and description at the table and some of that privilege could be used as a boon to grant to the players as an alternative solution to the problem of immersing at the table without the need to remove mechanical distraction. I perhaps do need to call in and consider my thoughts better as I don’t want to sound like I’m picking at Che and Daniel’s valuable experiment in immersive gaming. In truth I’m glad someone is even actually pursuing practical methods toward the goal of immersion at all, and so I’m delighted to follow their progress, even though I think there might be other ways of achieving it. I think some of those ways may only be discovered by challenging our ideas on the concept. ( I would be delighted to have my ideas challenged if it brought about some new and surprising realisations.)

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      • Thanks Che. I appreciate the response. I would ‘like’ these comments but the site is asking me to set up an account with them to do that and I’m kind of at my capacity on social media at the minute. I’ve actually reduced some of my accounts to make them more manageable and less intrusive. But thanks.

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  3. Che, I follow this approach myself when considering things in play – stripping the subject back to its essential parts and then identifying in myself what is “missing” for whatever goal I am after, and in the grouo for whatever intention we are trying to fulfill.

    I play games RAW first. For me it is often enough these days as I pick games I tend to like as is (nowadays). For the group, adjustment is often needed~

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  4. About the difficulty of quantifying all the details of a character, my feeling is that as the map is not the territory, the sheet is not the character. The character is the the sum of the things quantified on the sheet, the player’s mental image, and all the decisions the player makes in character. Things only have to be on the sheet if they meaningfully interact with the mechanics of the game. I have a player in my group that has a tendency to want to represent every detail of a character and their backstory with GURPS advantages and disadvantages. This results in a very unwieldy character in play. I’ve more or less convinced them to break that habit, but they still like long lists of quirks.

    When I most feel the tension between roleplaying and wargaming is when I’m playing a character that isn’t supposed to be battle-hardened and tactically aware. The gamer in me wants to play to win the battle, using all my knowledge of the rules and tactics in the game. On the other hand, I feel like my character shouldn’t have the perfect situational awareness and cool-headed reactions that I can have as a player at the table.

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