Jonas Ferry’s blog

I’m going to try and divide roleplaying games into different categories based on… something I don’t have a word for. It’s more for my own sake than anyone else’s, but perhaps you can see where I’m going with it. If my divisions seem arbitrary to you it’s because I haven’t thought things through enough; in that case, please point that out. I know it’s kind of stupid to want to categorize and label stuff, but I do this in order to sort some things out that I’ve been thinking about. My conclusions, if I may spoil them before you read on so you won’t feel cheated when you reach the end, are that there’s no way I can divide games this way without forcing games into places where they don’t belong. But I can at least clear my mind by writing down my thought process.

First I’m going to divide games into the three categories LARP, table-top and freeform. This is mostly done for historical reasons, and is not based on any difference perceived between them by me.

I’m going to divide LARPs into general-system LARPs, specialized-system LARPs and system-free LARPs. I don’t like the names that much since all roleplaying games make use of some kind of system, even the system-free if you take system to mean “how things are decided while playing”.

System-LARPs are games like Mind’s Eye Theater, Fading Sun’s Passion Play or Nobilis’s The Game of Powers. As far as I know there are not that many generic LARP systems, but one I’ve heard mentioned is Rules To Live By.

Specialized-system LARPs are games where the rules don’t look as much as classical table-top games, but instead formulate rules based on what’s needed for the specific scenario. This could be either the fantasy LARP with rules for sword fighting and magic, but nothing else, or it could be the LARP where getting a blue note means that it’s in-game and a red note is out-of-game.

System-free LARPs are games where the situations and interactions are everything, and there are no ways of resolving things out-of-character. This could be the high-school reunion LARP or the kitchen-sink LARP, where everyone play characters and in situations that require no external way of resolving conflicts. The situation could of course be fantastic, like survivors on a space-station that is falling apart, but should not require any handling of events outside of the normal. I want to put one kind of freeform here, but I’ll save that as a separate category.

I would say that table-top games can be divided the same way into general-system, specialized-system and system-free. General-system table-tops are the standard, both with generic games and with a narrower scope like Vampire, Fading Suns or Nobilis. Some Forge games would be placed here, like for example InSpectres. One could argue that it would be a specialized system since the ghost-hunting setting is fairly specific, but since you can use the rules to resolve a very wide range of conflicts (from punching people to hacking a computer or driving a car) I would call it a general system.

Specialized-system table-tops are some of the Forge games, where you have a situation and rules that apply to ways of resolving the situation. I’m talking about games like My Life with Master (MLwM), where you have a setting and a limited amount of character types you can play. The minions in this case can only perform actions of villainy or violence, and there are now rules for riding horses or climbing trees. This could be due to a different focus, a focus on conflict resolution instead of task resolution, where you can actually use villainy for climbing a tree if you do it to perform something villainous. In that case I’ll have to rethink this. One could put certain free-form games here. I don’t think I’ve seen any table-top scenarios with rules include only for the situations that can occur, but I’ve talked about writing one. I guess it would look a bit like White Wolf’s new World of Darkness demos, with described scenes and how to resolve situations that occur in them.

What a system-free table-top game would look like I’m not entirely sure. I mean I want to put one kind of freeform here as well, but I’ll just have to save that for a little while longer. Perhaps it would look a lot like a system-free LARP, but with more of the action taking place in the minds of the participants.

This leaves me with freeform games. There are two different kinds of freeform games that I want to talk about. I have no idea if there are any general-system freeform games, but instead I think most of them are specialized-system games.

The specialized-system games can be divided into the scenario-focused or the form-focused. ASFs “From Atlantis to Blekinge” are scenario-focused, with specific rules for how to break scene 4 (when the characters discover a hidden door) and not that much focus on form, except for playing two characters in the scenario Prometheus’s Mistake. The form-focused would be games where you want to explore memories, and have characters and techniques suitable for that, but not a specific plot or a pre-determined scene structure (unless of course that’s the part you want to experiment with). The techniques could for example be things like giving other player’s characters thoughts by saying them while standing or replaying a scene to show the different characters’ memories of the situation.

I don’t think I can talk about system-free freeform games, but I think they would be very similar to system-free table-tops or LARPs. Anyway, that’s not important at the moment.

One main reason I did this division was to see where I would fit freeform in. I wanted to put it as a sub-category of LARPs, but that would both be unproductive and upset Sven and Tobias. One big reason I didn’t put them there is because of the willingness to allow the player’s imaginations to fill in a great deal of what’s going on, something that is less encouraged in LARPs, I think. I also wanted to put them in two of the table-top sub-categories, but since freeform games from my point of view are something in between table-top and LARP I wouldn’t do them justice.

Perhaps I should settle with this. I think I’ve proven Wittgensteins use of games as a family-resemblance example, where one can find overlaps between many different games but no way of telling either what a game is or divide them into any meaningful categories. Perhaps this is the basis for the difficulty of explaining what a roleplaying game is to people who don’t know?

Rather than forcing different kinds of LARP, table-top and freeform games to fit into their categories, I think I’ll just have to find a way to positively describe them. Defining them would be impossible, and describing them from what they’re not would lead to comparisons with other types and therefore blur the lines. If one could describe LARPs, table-tops and freeform games from the games’ own point of view it would be a lot easier to describe them to people.