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On the Nature of FRP

Why FRP?

FRP, or Fantasy Roleplay, is a venerable acronym for tabletop RPGsand less unwieldy than โ€˜TTRPGโ€™. It can be interpreted as referring to the fantasy ๐˜จ๐˜ฆ๐˜ฏ๐˜ณ๐˜ฆ, but if we instead take 'fantasy' to mean ๐˜ต๐˜ฉ๐˜ฆ ๐˜ข๐˜ค๐˜ต ๐˜ฐ๐˜ง ๐˜ค๐˜ฐ๐˜ฏ๐˜ซ๐˜ถ๐˜ณ๐˜ช๐˜ฏ๐˜จ ๐˜ถ๐˜ฑ ๐˜ข ๐˜ง๐˜ข๐˜ฏ๐˜ต๐˜ข๐˜ด๐˜บ, it becomes genre-neutral.

What is a game?

A game is -

the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.

โ€“Bernard Suits, The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia, 1978

And gameplay is -

a series of meaningful, transparent, but non-trivial decisions.

โ€“??? (Does anyone know where I heard this?)

Gameplay is satisfying when you have some idea what the consequences of your choices are going to be, but donโ€™t know for sure. You can place your opponentโ€™s king in check, but you donโ€™t know which move heโ€™ll make in response. You can try for a headshot in a videogame, but what if your opponent ducks? You can cast a spell in an RPG, but what if your opponent interrupts it? Itโ€™s non-trivial. You donโ€™t know the precise outcome.

But in every case you know that itโ€™s ๐˜ฑ๐˜ฐ๐˜ด๐˜ด๐˜ช๐˜ฃ๐˜ญ๐˜ฆ for the king to move out of check, for the opponent to duck, or for your spell to get interrupted. Itโ€™s transparent. You can take a calculated risk.

This transparency gives players a measure of control over the game. If their actions have predictable outcomes that arenโ€™t at the whim of a referee, they can make plans and anticipate the outcomes.

But that whim is important to - because it's the referee's imagination which provides the radical freedom and sense of mystery to turn a wargame into a real adventure!

Letโ€™s Play

As a child I could go up to another child - sibling or cousin, friend or stranger - and say โ€œlet's play Xโ€; describe a fantastical situation, and begin playing out roles in it. It was universally understood and the most natural thing in the world: Simply to ๐˜ฑ๐˜ญ๐˜ข๐˜บ.

Yet as we get older we almost completely stop doing it.

Thereโ€™s a tragedy here where the demands of adulthood and the awkwardness of growing up robs us of a source of simple joy. Thereโ€™s also the question of why this type of play is so natural to children and whether it serves a learning and bonding function which we would do well to maintain into adulthood.

But there are also more practical questions of how adult tastes and egos deal with questions like how to resolve disputes. โ€œI shot you, youโ€™re dead.โ€ โ€œNuh-uh!โ€ Children just sort of live with these arguments, or resolve them through sulking or force of will, but adults wonโ€™t find this satisfying.

One theory I've heard for why adults stop playing make-believe is that we're already playing a game all the time - the game of being adults. And the stakes of that game are too high for us to allow for squabbles over who killed who. Adults need a definitive answer.

Make Believe & Mechanics

The wargame clubs that gave rise to D&D were very much about definitive answers - they developed their own rules and methods of refereeing to provide those answers. In the process they found that refereed games like Braunstein could open up a new space for open-ended and ultimately imaginative play. It was their fascination with this mode of play that created the fusion of wargame and wonderland we enjoy today.

It was that freedom that Dave Arneson made the most of when he approached the 4th Braunstein game by making his own props for forged documents and used them to convince the other players to give him a million dollars and a helicopter to escape Banania. They'd created a style of play in which you had both the certainty of predictable rules and the freedom to approach problems ๐˜ช๐˜ฏ ๐˜ข๐˜ฏ๐˜บ ๐˜ธ๐˜ข๐˜บ ๐˜บ๐˜ฐ๐˜ถ ๐˜ค๐˜ฐ๐˜ถ๐˜ญ๐˜ฅ ๐˜ช๐˜ฎ๐˜ข๐˜จ๐˜ช๐˜ฏ๐˜ฆ.

In the early fantasy campaigns, Blackmoor and Greyhawk, the freedom to play drew them down into the dungeon, there was something addictive about that descent into the underworld and returning with scars and riches. It was in that form that D&D became a phenomenon, and the world had its first taste of structured FRP.

Links

On the Appeal of FRPGs

Six Cultures of Play by the Retired Adventurer

Arneson in Banania

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