The Evolution of Fantasy Role-Playing Games - Michael J. Tresca [42]
Dungeons & Dragons models certain kinds of fantasy very well, most specifically teamwork during a time of conflict. The distinction of classes separates skill sets such that no one character is good at everything. As a result, this encourages groups to balance one another by choosing a role. These roles slowly became more and more formalized as the game evolved. Gygax explicitly identified the class roles as the fighter taking the role of infantry, the thief as spy, cleric as medic, and as the artillery magic-user (Gygax 2007).
The fourth edition formalized these roles. In Worlds and Monsters, Chris Perkins explained how the fourth edition of Dungeons & Dragons reinforces party roles as a mechanism rather than an assumption as in the third edition. In the fourth edition, players can understand what role each class plays and where there are gaps in their adventuring party (Wilkes 2008:87).
Part of the necessity of a group of characters working together is survival. Certainly, the Fellowship of The Lord of the Rings came together for the very survival of their race. In game terms, a larger wargame acts as the backdrop of The Lord of the Rings, transitioning to a role-playing game’s focus on just the heroes themselves. Without this imminent threat of danger and the need to rely on one another for safety, the game takes on a different feel. It’s possible to reinforce story for story’s sake, but that isn’t necessarily an intrinsic part of a party. Role-playing games that didn’t explicitly rely on the party paradigm would develop in the 1990s, with games like White Wolf’s Storyteller system (Borgstrom 2007:61).
Because Gygax encouraged campaigns of length, the social cohesion formed by repeated play is strong. Players can spend as much time role-playing as they spend optimizing the statistical advantages of their character, creating a dizzying variety of entertaining possibilities at every session. Gamers can play for years with the same group and in the same world, with a level of agency far beyond that of reading a novel or seeing a movie because the players are collectively responsible for their character’s creation and development (Costikyan 2007:9).
Narrative
Ron Edwards breaks down role-playing games into three kinds of experiences: gamist, narrativist, simulationist. Gamists seek victory and loss conditions and play the role-playing game like other forms of gaming—with the goal of winning. Narrativists enjoy story first and foremost, attempting to tell a good tale through narrative conflict and even failure. Simulationists attempt to accurately and realistically reflect the imagined world (Edwards 2001).
Initially, Dungeons & Dragons was largely gamist, doing little to encourage in-depth role-playing or any form of storytelling. However, the fact that a character existed in multiple installments of long-term play (Gygax’s “milieu”) offered an opportunity to further develop game play and story (Costikyan 2007:5).
For Gygax, the only valid purpose of role-playing games is entertainment. He cited mythic adventure, escape from the routine and mundane, socialization, and a sense of heroic immortality as draws:
There is a message contained in the true role-playing game. It is the message of the difficulty in surviving alone, and the folly of trying to profit from the loss of others. The inability of any lone individual to successfully cope with every challenge is evident in RPGs and reflects life ... the role-playing game brings the heroic into better perspective by demonstrating a course of progress which requires the association and cooperation of like-minded individuals [Gygax 1989:150].
Dungeons & Dragons is at heart a heroic fantasy game. Gygax defines this form of fantasy as a game in which the natural laws do not apply, the heroes and deities of mythology are real, and people are capable of amazing physical and mental feats.