Not all RPGs are a conversation

I’ve had this maddening…koan, I guess, spinning around in my head for a couple weeks now. It came from a buddy being completely dismissive of solo RPGs. Maybe it was a bit? But he stuck to the bit, despite having never played a solo RPG himself. And I have, well, played a whole lot of solo RPGs over the years at this point.

But was I playing “an RPG?”

On the one hand, taxonomy arguments are a sucker’s game. I don’t participate, they’re silly and generally unproductive. But! If you’re trying to settle on a common understanding, you (sigh) have to agree to terms. Sometimes. I guess.

Which brings me to the past decade’s favorite replacement for “it’s like cops and robbers!”: “Roleplaying is a conversation.”

The Definition of Is

I’ve always been a casual “roleplaying is a conversation” skeptic. Mostly it’s because I’m wildly oversensitized to the inevitable taxonomical nonsense that comes with this. What do we mean when we say “conversation?” What do we mean when we say “is?”

Some folks, dear friends in fact, take this phrase to mean “conversation is the medium by which we participate when we roleplay.” Words traded back and forth, either spoken or written. It’s pretty self evident and because of that, this doesn’t really strike me as meaningful or useful. “Roleplaying is a conversation” becomes “water is wet.”

Others take the phrase to mean that roleplaying is conducted as you would a conversation: ask questions, get answers, parlay back and forth. Everyone at the table is of approximately equal value even if some folks are more or less central to the conversation being held. You walk into a party and there’s five people in a circle, drinks in hand, having a conversation. There might be wallflowers and there might be folks taking up all the air in the room. But despite social disparities, if you’re in the circle you’re having a conversation.

“Play as if you’re participating in a good conversation” at least carries some interesting connotations. It’s the definition I prefer. You can look at normal human conversations and get good advice: be curious, remember and incorporate what you’ve been told, be polite when interjecting. Despite preferring the definition, I also kind of hate it! Because there are whole genres of tabletop roleplay where these are not especially useful skills or a useful metaphor. To further torture a metaphor: sports referees are not having “a conversation” with players.

Hello? Who’s There?

Okay so that’s my skepticism: Mostly useful when it’s more than self-evident “there’s talking involved,” because then “The Conversation” describes a form of play I personally prefer. I like conversations! I’m good at them! But conversation is often not an appropriate social format when there are formal disagreements about winning and losing.

Applying all this thinking to solo RPGs has sent me into a tailspin though. Who am I conversing with when I’m playing Ironsworn? Or Thousand Year Old Vampire? Or journaling about The Magus? Running myself through a trad game using Radiance Adventure Engine? And if I’m not conversing with anyone but myself, does that matter? I have “conversations” in my dreams, and everyone in there is me.

You Sly Dog!

As silly as this sounds, connecting these two things in my head has been something of an existential crisis. In one very real way, my assertion that solo RPGs are, yes, RPGs just further entrenches my skepticism about them being conversations. At best, my operating theory is “if you’re playing with other people, treating the game like it’s a conversation is the best way to get the kind of game I want out of this.” But “treat an RPG session like it’s a conversation” is quite different – it is! – than “roleplaying is a conversation.”

This ridiculous self-inflicted existential crisis has made me reconsider my own understanding of what roleplaying is, if it’s something more or different than “a conversation” depending on player count and each player’s aesthetic and experiential goals. Like, if there are at least two players involved and both players want to minimize the power/authority/credibility differential, then treat it like a conversation. If you want to break up the hub-and-spokes style of play where each player takes their turn talking to the facilitator but never talk to each other? Make playing a conversation and don’t monopolize it!

When I think about what it feels like to move back and forth between author, player, and audience in my own head as I do any sort of solitaire roleplay, I confess it is … sort of conversational. Do we have conversations with ourselves? Or are we just monologuing? And if we are, to whom?

Are You Not Entertained?

I’m sure a lot of this comes down to how I like to solo roleplay. When I was playing Starforged, my eye was toward producing compelling fiction. I think I did, but you can decide for yourself if you want to read my Echo Sedano stories. But I don’t write fiction for myself. I write it for an audience. As a professional writer, I always write for an audience. Intuitively I want to reject the “roleplaying is a conversation” axiom because I don’t ever converse with myself. At best, I’m weighing each addition to my solitaire gameplay in three different ways: as a GM (is this interesting?), as a player (is this true to my character?), and as a notional member of a future audience (is this compelling to anyone but me?).

But then I started bringing Jason Price’s Notorious along with me to my kid’s voice lessons. I’d have an hour to spend in the car, and Notorious is a delightfully compact package of one book, a notebook to doodle in, and a die-rolling app on my phone. Anyway, the way Notorious is written is more like a Lucasfilm script generator: your mercenary goes to one of several locations, investigates and gathers clues about the bounty’s whereabouts, has a final confrontation, gets paid and moves on. It’s an amusing way to spend an hour. But I don’t journal it and I don’t think about the audience at all. And it doesn’t feel like roleplaying.

Mouth Feel

So what does it mean for an activity to “feel like roleplaying” anyway? Stupid taxonomy! You just have to keep digging deeper.

There are board games that feel more RPG-y than many games on my shelf claiming to be an RPG. Cole Wehrle’s John Company? Just this side of an RPG. Nemesis, ditto. Some board games push my head toward a role-inhabiting mindset more than others.

Notorious, the Star Wars-y solo game I mentioned, is entirely driven by prompts with die rolls, and almost no creative input other than to color within the lines of what the game gives you. It’s fun! But it doesn’t feel very RPG-y because at no point do I feel like I’m inhabiting a role.

Which, I suppose, brings us back to a very old idea: RPGs are for inhabiting roles. And maybe that happens in conversation with other people. And maybe you can have conversations with yourself, with similar mental contortions authors go through as they move from character to character. Or maybe there’s no conversation at all if it’s a game-as-sport, or something edge case-y like The Quiet Year (discussion only if you choose that action) or Alice is Missing (communicate only in-character via text).

Or! Solo RPGs need to come up with a new name and are clearly not “real RPGs” because having a conversation with yourself isn’t a thing.

…

Nah! Solo RPGs are RPGs. Argue with yourself if you disagree.