Spaceships and Simulations

There is an OSRism that “Role Play is not performance.” Or I thought it was an OSRism. Put to it, I struggle for a citation to someone who wrote it. But I know that the sentiment has been offered, and if it has not, I offer it here.

Role play in a table-top role playing game is customarily perceived as all that Critical Role shit, except that it predates Critical Role. Trust me, I stopped playing at conventions for a while after some grognard from an era that we were only grognards said I wasn’t role playing because I did not do the voice. His words. Besides, why are you hating on Critical Role. It’s neither novel nor clever to do so. You just look jealous.

Prescriptive linguistics is bad, so I am not trying to get you to use different language. However, ‘role play’ is generally used to describe the act of performing the character – how you emote, how you speak, the skill at character embodiment. This is correct, but limited. Like with acting itself, the fundamentals are the choices, frequently the material choices, involved. Role play requires no performance, but that may be something to return to later on.

As people use ‘performance’ and ‘role play’ synonymously, they also use ‘improv’ as synonymous with both. Customarily, it is meant to refer to skilled performance. A good role player is good at improv (eg. see negative conversations, again, about Critical Role). I get why this language is used, but I hate that it is used that way.

I hate that it is used in that way for the same reason I hate a number of descriptive linguistics problems. If you use ‘beg the question’ to mean ‘raise the question,’ all I can say is that I’ve done it, too. But by doing that, we remove the concept of begging the question, or have to start talking about a certain class of circular reasoning rather than a term for it.

Improv, and I mean that core historical Viola Spolin Improvisational Theater for the Actor, is much less to do with performance and more to do with structure and response. It even uses the language of ‘game’ to refer to specific invocations of the structure of the experience. This sort of thing has broad applications, but in general, it suggests that there is a lot of looking at the finger rather than the moon involved in improv and RPGs.

People focus on the results because they are looking for performance, rather than the process that exists in the rules. The play comes from the rules, and listening to other people. They tell you how to perform. They enable the existence of role play.