Do you enjoy acting out your character’s
words, even adopting a different voice for your character? Do you hate it when people
do that?
When I got back into gaming a few
years ago, I noticed that “amateur thespianism” has become one of the things in
role-playing games that a certain sort of player now complains about. Thespianism means
acting. We are told that acting has no place in “old-school” play.
As an old-time player, this made no
sense to me. Sure, everybody has play-style preferences, but I never saw a role-playing
game in which players did not dip into acting out their characters at least occasionally.
It was not as if my games were degraded by that, either.
Putting down acting in a role-playing game seemed odd to me. So, I decided to figure out where the
negative attitude toward this part of the hobby, which I thought to be essential,
came from.
This post looks at the phenomenon of
disdain for acting out a part in role-playing games and the claim, explicit or implied,
that it was not part of the original, intended usage of D&D. Spoiler: the
claim is false.
Typical complaints about “amateur
thespianism”
Here are several
examples of what “old-school” gamers say about “amateur thespianism,” with the
terms highlighted. Skip to the next heading if you are already familiar with this
kind of stuff.
"Roll over"? "Roll
under"? That all sounds suspiciously like amateur thespianism to
me. Back in the day with REAL D&D, they're was no rolling for
success; you just told the DM what you wanted to do, and they would think about
it and say "HaHaHa No. You fail and die." It was so much simpler
then.
posted by happyroach at 11:21AM on March 5, 2016
The author of
this amusing comment five years ago seems not to have known
what thespianism is. Thespianism means acting—not ability checks or skill rolls—but
for this comment’s author, “amateur thespianism” represents everything bad
in “modern” role-playing (the opposite of “back in the day with REAL
D&D”). For this person, thespianism includes rolling to succeed at skills!
The complaint goes back to the
beginnings of the OSR. In 2007, Hussar wrote that “amateur thespians” were those who
ruin games by acting too much. (He calls it “melodrama,” but that’s not
what melodrama means.)
However, amateur
thespians, at their worst, try to turn the entire game into melodrama.
Every moment must be played out in full, excrutiating detail. Note, it doesn't
have to be this way, but, "Amateur Thespianism" IMO, as a
perjorative, means exactly this.
Eric Tolle wrote in 2009,
that using first person to describe your character’s actions is “just creepy,”
and acting the part is “worst of all”:
Do you know
what's worse than creative descriptions and excess verbosity?
It's when players switch from referring to their characters in the third
person, to using the first person when describing what they do. "Bob the
barbarian hits the shopkeeper" is OK, but "I will go talk to the
shopkeeper is just creepy, if you know what I mean.
And worst of all is when they start talking like their character is actually
speaking! Saying "Good Day my lady, fine day for shopping!" is going
way too far into Amateur Thespianism land.
Just listen to the GM describe everything in a monotone, and then just say who
you hit. That's not too much to ask for, is it?
Rose Embolism wrote this in a
discussion in 2014 to describe what “Old School” is:
Eh, based on
what I've seen, it's pretty much D&D. And yeah, that excludes Runequest,
Traveller, The Fantasy Trip, Bushido, Space Opera, etc.. all of those games
were symptoms of the upcoming degradation of rpgs into amateur thespianism.
In 2019, one player asked on an
anonymous forum,
Anything
wrong with incorporating XP for roleplay, or something similar to
"Resolving Player Bonds" like in Dungeon World?
An unhelpful respondent, who apparently
thinks that roleplay always means acting, answered,
Yes, you
risk derailing the already functional gameplay loop, and to what end? Amateur
thespianism has nothing to do with OSR gameplay, so if you want that, why
run an OSR game?
One player in 2020 asked on Reddit where he could find help learning to do voices in game. A respondent chastised
him,
Ask yourself
first: do you really want to get good at voice acting, or you just want to do
it because others are doing it? D&D isn't amateur thespianism.
I could give links to more general
discussions about why acting the part in role-playing games is supposed to be
bad, but this is enough to demonstrate that I’m not making this up. At least
since 2007, when the “old-school” sentiment was morphing into “the OSR,” this
has been a matter to rally around. Acting out the part of your character has
been something to fight against.
In summary, for at least fourteen
years, “amateur thespianism” has been a pejorative term that describes the degradation
of the original, pure game into something that sucks. It’s not REAL D&D,
it’s not Old-School—or it’s not D&D at all! For some, it’s even bad if you
refer to your character in the first person (as in “I attack!”), but the worst
thing possible is speaking as if you were your character during the game.
Having played in thousands of game
sessions since 1981 in which players (including first-time players) spontaneously
declared actions in the first person and dropped in and out of the voice of
their characters when in scenes of social interaction, I had to wonder: how did
it get this way? When did “amateur thespianism” become a target, in those
terms? Why did the complaint become so sharp?
Hang on. I will explain all of that
here. This is a long post.
A problem: acting the part belongs
to player skill
As seen, acting the part of a
character while playing role-playing games has a bad reputation among some players,
especially among those who have created a putative “old-school” approach that
claims to recreate the earliest way to play (rather than merely reprinting old
rules sets, an effort that predates the OSR strictly speaking).
What’s strange is that “old-school” players
also advocate for “player skill, not character abilities.” This means determining
outcomes of in-game actions not according to rolling dice but rather according
to player ingenuity.
If that is so, then acting out a
role in social situations—rather than rolling dice to win allies or saying, “I
use my high Charisma score to convince them!”—seems to be what the OSR method is
calling for, but these same players look down on acting the part of a character.
The problem of this discrepancy will come into focus
below.
Back to the beginning
Although D&D was not called a
role-playing game at the start, it wasn’t far from the term:
Before they
begin, players must decide what role they will play in the
campaign, human or otherwise, fighter, cleric, or magic-user. … First, however,
it is necessary to describe fully the roles possible. (Gygax and Arneson,
OD&D book 1, page 6)
If roles were indicated solely as
fighter, cleric, and magic-user, one might argue that role here referred to function
within the party. As it also includes race (“human or otherwise”), there is
more to “role” than mere function. “Elf” and “hobbit” are more than party
functions; they are roles in the sense of personas.
According to the OD&D rules,
players should not roll for their own characters’ stats, but players did
have to decide the moral “stance” of their character. We call that moral position
alignment.
Before the
game begins it is not only necessary to select a role, but it is also necessary
to determine what stance the character will take – Law, Netrality, or Chaos.” p.9
From its first reception, many
players did dive into playing roles. They made choices according to alignment and
personalities that they generated. In the interest of space, I’ll omit here the
many early play reports and zines that document how players got into their roles
from the beginning. You can also read Jon Peterson’s book The Elusive Shift
to learn about the early thoughts and debates about role-playing and acting. It
was there from the first years of the hobby.
In hyping the new game, Gary Gygax expressed
the feeling of immersion into the role that one can experience when playing
this new kind of game.
Even a brief
perusal [of this new book] can infect the reader with the desire to do heroic
deeds, cast mighty magical spells, and seek to wrest treasure from hideous
monsters. (Gygax in September of 1975, Foreword to the Blackmoor
supplement)
In this way of talking, it is the
prospective player who will do the deeds (not a neatly distinguished character).
This is the perspective of immersion. Gygax continued to write this way when he
developed AD&D:
ADVANCED
DUNGEONS & DRAGONS is a fantasy game of role playing which relies
upon the imagination of participants, for it is certainly make-believe, yet it
is so interesting, so challenging, so mind-unleashing that it comes near
reality. (Players Handbook 1978, p. 7)
And then... Gygax described
that immersion as a matter of thespianism, but as a virtue of play.
In the explicit conception of the first edition of Advanced Dungeons &
Dragons, you act out the game and interact
with other players as your character and you, the player, become skilled
at doing that. Here’s what Gary Gygax wrote:
As a role player, you become Falstaff the fighter. You know how
strong, intelligent, wise, healthy, dexterous and, relatively speaking, how
commanding a personality you have. Details as to your appearance your body
proportions, and your history can be produced by you or the Dungeon Master. You
act out the game as this character, staying within your "god-given
abilities", and as molded by your philosophical and moral ethics (called
alignment). You interact with your fellow role players, not as Jim and Bob and
Mary who work at the office together, but as Falstaff the fighter, Angore the
cleric, and Filmar, the mistress of magic! The Dungeon Master will act the
parts of "everyone else", and will present to you a variety of new
characters to talk with, drink with, gamble with, adventure with, and often
fight with! Each of you will become an artful thespian as time goes by—and
you will acquire gold, magic items, and great renown as you become Falstaff the
Invincible!
One could scarcely be more explicit.
According to Gygax in 1978:
- player
characters have histories (i.e. back-stories)
- you act out the game as your
character.
- you
become an artful thespian with time.
The idea that the player IS
the character, meaning that the lines between the two were blurred, was
commonly heard in the first decade of RPGs. This describes the experience of
immersion.
I think of the Fighting Fantasy
Gamebooks (from 1982 onward) that are emblazed on the cover with the expression
“A Fighting Fantasy Gamebook in which YOU become the hero!” Same idea:
immersion. It was everywhere in the early years.
It wasn’t just Gygax who thought
that you were supposed to act out a role. Mike Carr, future author of the module In Search of the Unknown, wrote something similar in
the Foreword to the AD&D Players Handbook (dated 2 June 1978),
encouraging players to give their personas (characters) unique personalities
and to interact with other characters in that way:
Get in the spirit of the game, and use your persona to play with a
special personality all its own. Interact with the other player characters and
non-player characters to give the game campaign a unique flavor and
"life". Above all, let yourself go, and enjoy!
Let go and play your character’s
personality! That was the advice.
In his renowned introductory
adventure module, Keep on the Borderlands (1980), Gary Gygax wrote a
section on “Notes for the Dungeon Master.” While his advice is widely treasured
today, substantial parts of it are assiduously ignored in “old-school”
discussions:
All of this play
[in the Keep], as well as what will come afterwards [on the adventure], requires
that the players play the personae (personalities) of the characters that
they will have throughout the length of the campaign, much like an actor
plays a role in a play.
You,
however, have a far greater challenge and obligation! You not only must order
and create the world, you must also play the part of each and every creature
that the player characters encounter. You must be gate guard and merchant,
innkeeper and orc, oracle and madman as the situation dictates. The role of DM
is all-powerful, but it also makes many demands. It is difficult to properly
play the village idiot at one moment and the wise man the next, the noble
clergyman on one hand and the vile monster on the other. In one role you must
be cooperative, in the next uncaring and non-commital, then foolish, then
clever, and so on. Be prepared!
…
When the players
experience their first encounter with a monster, you must be ready to play
the part fully. If the monster is basically unintelligent, you must have
it act accordingly. Make the encounter exciting with the proper
dramatics of the animal sort - including noises! If the encounter is with
an intelligent monster, it is up to the DM to not only provide an exciting
description but also to correctly act the part of the monster.
D&D requires that players
and DMs play personalities much like actors in a play. Gygax basically said
that if you don’t act out the part, with proper dramatics and funny voices, you
aren’t doing it very well.
The selectively old school
Players today who envision an “old school”
representing the original playstyle have mined early D&D books for every line of wisdom to recapture what they
imagine role-playing games were like in their earliest years.
What most characterizes the
“old-school revival,” named “OSR” from about 2008 onward, is taking the early
D&D books and their rules more seriously than most of the early players did
when those early D&D books came out. Early OSR-oriented players closely
scrutinized the old rules on wandering monsters, time-keeping, dungeon
procedures, treasure types, and much else—all of which early D&D players
had ignored freely. The new idea was to play the game as it written
back then, how it was apparently supposed to be (although even the two
authors of D&D did not play according to their own rules, as they directly
testify).
The OSR movement has created immense
enjoyment in this way.
But close study of the same early
rules shows how selective the attention of the OSR has been. This is one
of those examples. I haven’t seen any “old-school” guides to acting the part
and playing your character, following the clear lead of the Players Handbook
of 1978 or Keep on the Borderlands of 1980, where it says you “must” do
that, with “the proper dramatics”? Dramatics looks like a neglected “old-school”
topic, yet Gygax delivered his injunction to play the part as clearly as he
stated in the DMG, “You can not have a meaningful campaign if strict time
records are not kept.”
For “old-school” players who value
player skill above rolling dice, acting out a part would seem to be a special subject
for commentary. Instead of rolling to persuade the gate guard or merchant,
doesn’t the prescribed “old-school” emphasis on player skill suggest you should
tell the referee how you persuade the merchant, by playing it out? Or do
you roll to persuade, instead, finding the answer on your character sheet under
the heading CHA? Where are the blogs of “old-school” advice on how to act out
your character skillfully, as a Gygaxian “artful thespian”?
Frames of reference in play
Gary Fine is a senior sociologist
who studied the phenomenon of role-playing games as a researcher-participant
back in the years 1977 to 1979, when fantasy role-playing games were novel. He worked and taught at the University of Minnesota and ran games
in that vicinity as well as played in them (including one of his colleague
M.A.R. Barker’s weekly Tékumel games). The result of his investigations was the
monograph Shared Fantasy, published in 1983. It is still worth reading today, one of the most insightful studies ever
written on role-playing games.
In the book he wrote about the theatrical aspect of role-playing games:
Fantasy
games are similar to theater, but with the difference that the game is improvisational.
Significantly, one of the claimed benefits of these games is increased thespian
skills. … The ability to adopt a persona
is central to gaming. (p. 205-206)
Fine further cited Ed Simbalist
(1979), co-author of Chivalry & Sorcery (1977, a game which he
played) on the point that in a role-playing game,
We are all
playwrights and actors and audience rolled into one. If it is a good
performance, we are highly gratified and, though limp with repeated adrenaline
surges, we make plans to meet for the next foray into ‘Our World.’
Fine’s subsequent comments on
Simbalist’s words refine our expectations of play-acting in RPGs in the
heartland of the hobby in the 1970s:
Simbalist’s
rhetoric, however, should not disguise the fact that role-playing is difficult,
and players do not always role-play well. … latitude exists in role-playing in
the degree to which a person submerges his own self in a role, adopting the
identity implied by the role. The relation between person-self and role-self in
fantasy gaming depends upon the player, the components of the role, and the
expectations of the group. Sometimes the gamer plays himself as his
character, on other occasions the gamer essentially becomes another person.
One of Fine’s general arguments in
the book is that RPGs are an excellent example of a normal social process, one not
exclusive to games, by which we humans change our social and relational frames
of reference fluently as we interact with one another. He singles out at least
three frames of reference that shift amongst themselves during a fantasy role-playing
game: frames of reference of the player, of the game, and of the fantasy.
Fine writes in this vein of “the
strain between role-playing and game-playing.” This is apparent in the kind of role-playing
game session at hand. Whereas tournament games require winning the game,
This
contrasts to many private games, in which success is connected to how one
plays, not just how many enemies one defeats. … [emphasis added]
If one is in
a regular gaming group that aims for character realism, one is rewarded by the
group rather than by the results of the game. (p. 212)
He also quotes a personal interview
with M.A.R. Barker, in whose game he played. Barker said to him,
My players
tend to try their damndest to put themselves into the role. (p. 213)
I would add that what constituted getting into a
role in the earliest games of the 1970s (as today) aroused ongoing
discussion that confused at least two different things: (1) getting into a role
as reflected in the choices one made for a character, based on
alignment, background, and statistics like Intelligence and Charisma, and (2) acting
out the role. These two aspects of role-playing blur together as two different
frames of reference that players unselfconsciously and automatically blend.
Fine notes that role-playing is not
the same as acting out every action of the character assumed.
The game
does not imply action by the players;
because, after all, we don’t swing
swords or attack each other. Yet:
it does not
usually involve ‘speaking’ in the voice of the character.
This is an interesting insight into
the early play-styles that Fine encountered in the late 1970s. Acting out a
role was not usual, but it was not unexpected, either. He observes that
voice-acting a character was often done to entertain and to arouse laughter:
Flowery
language [in a faux-medieval style] as a counterpoint to the natural language
of players is used as a joke to suggest the dichotomy between the fantasy frame
and the natural order of everyday life.
Acting out the part with one’s voice
definitely occurred, but it was interwoven with the other aspects of play. This
makes sense, of course, as players need to give directions in their players' voices for their
characters’ decisions, and roll dice, as players, not as their characters.
The simultaneous coexistence of multiple frames of social reference were just what interested
Fine. The humor of it comes from the discrepancy between frames of reference.
Fine never reports, in a few years
of play and innumerable interviews with players, that acting was
offensive or detrimental to the game. As one of his chief concerns was the interrelationships
of the hobbyist players, and status relationships between them, we can only
assume that when Fine says that “thespianism” was a claimed benefit of
the hobby (and cites Gygax to make the point), his fellow players in Minnesota believed
it, too. His basic description of the hobby was as something resembling improvisational
theater, yet he never observed non-stop in-character acting.
Reasons for disliking when players
act out the part
I’m not telling you how or how not
to play. If your idea of D&D is moving third-person meeples on a grid map
and rolling dice to represent their attacks on monsters and accumulating points,
that’s great. If your idea of D&D is a soap opera about superheroic cosplay
characters, go for it. If you are having fun,
keep doing it.
Regardless of our preferences, it’s
crystal clear that acting out a role, in the capacity that one can while
sitting around a table, was part of role-playing games from the start of this
leisure-time hobby. Some did it more, others less. Not just Gary Gygax, but
many others, too, assumed that you would act out a part in some capacity and
that this was a benefit and a pleasure of the game for its
participants. For Gygax, it was a matter of skill for both player and
referee. He considered those who couldn’t act out the part not skillful.
If acting out a role was something
gamers spontaneously did from the start, and they often enjoyed it, why would
play-acting at the table bother some people so much today?
One obvious answer is that some people
wince when they witness inept acting. To me that smacks of snobbery and
unkindness, especially coming from people who are engrossed in a game of imaginary
fantasy adventure that seems absurd and geeky and even antisocial to those on
the outside.
But inept acting does have an
in-play effect. By drawing attention to itself, the discrepancy between the
frames of reference of reality and fantasy becomes conspicuous, momentarily breaking
the bubble of engrossment and immersion for others at the table. That’s why
it can create laughter. But not all scenes are supposed to be funny. Perhaps, then, a solution to this may be to encourage better
acting, as Gygax encouraged it, rather than to shame those who do it badly,
just as experienced players encourage unskillful ones to develop their
all-around gaming abilities in making decisions for their characters,
understanding the dice mechanics, the setting, the trappings of genre, and all
the rest.
Another likely reason for the
disdain at acting the part of the character as an aspect of role-playing is embarrassment
at one’s own ineptitude or lack of confidence at play-acting, especially as a grown-up. If you are already shy,
or if you are playing with strangers, you may hesitate to take on a fantasy
role and adopt the voice of your character with gusto for fear of the disdain I
just described. Some players sign up to roll dice and kill monsters through paper
doll characters, using it like a video game avatar, and have no intention of
bringing their characters to life. I don’t look down on that way of playing, but
when expectations clash over hours at the same table, emotional reactions can
arise.
A historically newer reason to
disdain play-acting may be distaste for studio-produced actual play videos
like those of Critical Role: recorded and staged role-playing games starring professional
voice actors who play much of the game as their characters (and use “modern” rules).
Gamers who like old rules seem to dislike whatever appears mainstream and
whatever makes a lot of money while they approach it as a do-it-yourself hobby.
(Never mind that any version of D&D is mainstream within the hobby:
it’s all D&D, licensed by Wizards of the Coast, Inc., a subsidiary of
Hasbro.) If acting the part of the character is associated with popular actual
play videos, reactionary gamers reduce play-acting behaviors in their
games, even those behaviors that are well attested in the “classic” times
emulated by the “old school.”
The endorsement of early retroclones
If you look at the earliest
“old-school” licensed D&D retroclones, just before the “OSR” took off as a
phenomenon, though, you won’t find those books telling people that thespianism
is a problem.
OSRIC (2006, p. 144), a recreation
of the first-edition AD&D rules, in discussing one of the benefits of town
adventures, acknowledges without a negative remark that some players
particularly
enjoy the in-character ‘play-acting’ aspect of the game.
The introduction to Labyrinth
Lord (2007), an early retroclone of B/X D&D, says,
Labyrinth
Lord is a roleplaying game. When you play a role playing game it is like acting
in a play. You take on the role of an alter ego, and progress through an
interactive story.
Playing Labyrinth Lord is
like acting in a play in an interactive story!
There are more retroclones of early
D&D editions than I can count, but these remarks in a few of the early ones
suggest that the original “old-school” impulse did not include animus against
acting out the role. I suspect that the disdain for adopting roles is something
that developed in online OSR forums.
Two kinds of role-playing
The “D&D Basic Rules” booklet
for the Fifth Edition (2018) is available as a free download. There, on pages
69 and 70, a useful distinction is drawn between descriptive role-playing
and active role-playing. The former entails describing what your character does, and the latter means acting out the role. It says, “Most players use a combination of the
two styles. Use whichever mix of the two works best for you.” Notice the lack
of prescriptiveness.
These D&D “Basic Rules” explain
how dice rolls can be substituted for role-playing or blended with it. In this
latest edition of the game, characters have a small bundle of skills with statistics
of their own. In practice, these are mostly special applications of the six
core stats. “Old-school” players tend to decry these skill modifiers as the death
of the game, because these skill-stats tempt players to roll for solutions
rather than thinking them through on their own.
But the alternative to rolls for
success is describing what your character does and then awaiting referee fiat.
If the game action is social, you will either be playing out the scene,
inviting amateur thespianism, or you roll dice for the outcome.
I guess you could play out social
interactions descriptively instead, saying, “My character makes an impassioned plea!”
without stating the contents of the plea, as if it were a move in a boardgame
(or a move in a PbtA game).
You could also do it by way of
summary, saying, “My character appeals to reason in discussion with the wizard,
making the case that it is in his interest to help us.” That doesn’t give the
referee a lot to go on, though, when deciding the outcome—not without rules
mechanics and skills that take the place of player skill.
As I see it, though, players who denounce amateur thespianism denounce player skill (a strange thing to do).
The first RPG mechanics for social
interactions (and my own method)
This brings me to a side remark. Even
the original D&D rules of 1974 had primitive procedures to roll dice in
place of acting out social interactions (just as it included skills, only
not by that name).
The best-known original social
mechanics are reaction rolls, used originally to determine whether a monster
would join the service of a player character upon receiving the offer of a
reward. You roll for the outcome, with a modifier from the predetermined
Charisma score. There is no stated rule for modifying the outcome according to
persuasive play-acting. The social effects of the dice and the Charisma stat
are also present in the game at this point, taking the place of player skill.
The Charisma stat in this function
is not essentially different in function from those used in a 5e Persuasion
skill. The old one uses 2d6 and the newer one uses 1d20, making a Charisma
bonus of +1 much more meaningful in the old system.
The point is that the means to roll
the dice without the need to play out an interaction were there from the
beginning. Some players of old editions of D&D disdain the Persuasion stat
in 5e as the corruption of the original game-style, yet they happily roll for
reactions from strangers, just as they happily roll to determine whether they
find secret doors without describing how they search for them. To me,
rolling for reactions is similar to rolling to search for secret doors: they take
the place of player ingenuity.
Retainers and monster followers in
OD&D had loyalty scores, another numerical social characteristic bearing on
the outcome of morale rolls, yet another social rules mechanism present in the
first D&D set.
In my own games, I avoid rolling for
outcomes of social interaction unless it’s a sort of interaction that the
player can’t act out. There are different reasons that this may be so:
- The
player’s performance of social interaction may be far below that expected of
the character’s. In that case, the player can roll to simulate the character’s
greater effectiveness (just as the player rolls to indicate the character’s
greater effectiveness at shooting an arrow from a bow, for example).
- The dice mechanics can avoid the
need to play out roles that are contextually inappropriate between players, one
of the frames of reference active in the game. For example, in some groups, one
may prefer to roll dice to persuade through flirtation, rather than acting out
the flirtation.
- It
may be expedient to roll dice so as not to spend real time on trivial social
interactions in which there is a stake for the direction of the game. For
example, when player characters go to a market to buy gear and supplies before an
expedition, and one or two of them want to haggle for better prices, I prefer
to get the game going and not spend a half hour playing out a scene of bargain-hunting.
If they insist on haggling and a character has a trait indicating ability at
that sort of thing, I may just have the players roll the appropriate tests in
the interest of time, to see if the haggling works, unless I make an instant
ruling.
But if my players want to attempt to
act out their character’s speech and manner, I only encourage them. If they perform
badly, well, they aren’t going to get better without opportunities to try. It’s
just a game, after all, and nobody is getting hurt. We may all have a good laugh
about it, too.
Gygax 1998: against “amateur
thespianism”? The origin of the misunderstanding
So, why do self-described “old-school”
gamers ignore Gygax’s mandate to act the part of your character? How did this
aspect of player skill come to be the object of disdain especially by players
aligned with the putative “old school”?
Where does this widespread
expression “amateur thespianism” come from?
It actually comes from Gary Gygax in
1998.
The problem is that he didn’t mean
what others have thought.
Here’s how it started. Wizards of
the Coast bought TSR in April of 1997, acquiring D&D thereby. The D&D
property was to be revitalized and made profitable again.
In Dragon Magazine 248, June
1998, p. 120, Allen Varney published a profile of Gary Gygax, in anticipation
of the publication of Return to the Tomb of Horrors, based on his
early module Tomb of Horrors, and which Gygax endorsed with a Foreword.
The Dragon profile includes snippets of an interview Varney had with Gygax.
On the revival of the Greyhawk setting, Varney quotes remarks by Gygax, in which
the “amateur thespianism” remark first occurs.
Though his
future role in the revival remains undecided, Gygax believes the world’s prospects
are bright “if the products aim at new [players], as well as the shrinking ‘old
hands’ market. It seems that TSR is looking to attract young gamers, so I
believe the project will be very successful.”
He [Gygax]
feels new GREYHAWK products should resurrect the line’s early-1980s approach: “The
Oerth [Greyhawk world] needs demons and devils to plague it, and why not PC assassins
and the like, too? Those who object to such things don’t buy RPGs anyway.
Similarly, those who want 'storytelling,' an emphasis on 'roleplaying' (read:
boring yakking and amateur thespianism), need to be ignored. The action is
difficult to create, [but] opportunities for roleplaying can be created easily by
even a moderately skilled DM.”
This is the source of the “amateur thespianism” quip.
Gygax’s words “amateur thespianism,”
taken out of context twice in a row (first from the live interview, not given
in full, and then from the magazine article), sound at first like a reversal of
what Gygax wrote in 1978 about “artful thespianism” as a desirable goal for
players and referees.
But this isn’t a reversal.
Gygax’s words, in context, are about
who would buy what. He was optimistic about new players for Greyhawk
products. As a veteran of the ups and downs of RPG sales, he was talking about how
to market a Greyhawk revival. He had a financial and personal stake in this.
Understood correctly—in context—Gygax’s
complete remarks are about what to emphasize in these products. He indicates
that action scenes are difficult to run (requiring rules scaffolding and monster stats
and preparation) but even a moderately skilled DM can easily create
opportunities for role-playing. He’s saying that role-playing itself doesn’t
need rules systems or emphasis in rulebooks because it’s easy to create
role-playing opportunities. If anything, his complete remarks are an endorsement
of playing a character in role: it’s something he assumes even unskilled DMs
can foster. He also expresses clearly his preference that too much talk and
not enough action is boring for new players.
Let’s give this even deeper context.
In 1998, LARPs (live-action role-playing games) were in the midst of a boom in
popularity. They were role-playing games blended with theater improv. One of the very biggest RPGs at the time was Vampire: The
Masquerade (1991) and the biggest LARP was Mind’s Eye Theatre: The
Masquerade (1993), based on that. The Vampire RPG system, with its
many well-selling spin-offs, was called the “Storyteller System.” The emphasis in
those days was to see RPGs as producing stories, relegating early old games
like D&D to an inferior status. In 1998, if you said, “storytelling RPGs,”
you thought of this line of games, and games like Ars Magica. I remember
this personally.
Greyhawk was Gygax’s creation. He
had hopes for bringing a new generation of young gamers in, as it was in the
early 1980s, when he presided over a massive boom in D&D.
All in all, I interpret his remarks
about “amateur thespianism” as saying, in effect, “In a Greyhawk revival, don’t be shy about including
edgy content that was already in first-edition AD&D, like devils and
assassins, that later iterations of D&D played down. People worried about
that stuff aren’t in the hobby, anyway. And I don’t think you need to take into
account the recent influx of players who are invested in Vampire games and LARPs, either, because
they similarly [his word] won’t buy Greyhawk revival materials. We need
to find young new players instead, players who like action.”
The whole point of his remark was to illustrate what he meant by saying “if the products aim at new [players], as well as the shrinking ‘old
hands’ market.”
The next year, the Living Greyhawk
campaign (2000-2008) was launched by the RPGA, timed alongside of the new Third
Edition (2000). Gygax must have profited from royalties from this nine-year
“living campaign” in Greyhawk involving tens of thousands of players and many publications
for sale. It certainly boosted his presence as a revered old-time RPG
world-builder.
Gygax was not saying you
shouldn’t act the part of your character or that your games should not tell
stories. He was saying that new Greyhawk products would not find a market with
the recent influx of new players that came into the hobby with the Vampire and
Storyteller system craze, and LARPing, and the obnoxious pretense of that time,
used to market those games, that those games evoked a more deeply felt kind of
roleplaying and more profound storytelling of character arcs. He was saying
that new Greyhawk products should not cater to those interests because that approach
would not be successful. They should aim at young new players instead, players who
liked action in their games.
Therefore, it is false to hold that
Gygax was telling people not to play their parts or to tell stories, at
least here in 1998. Yet that’s what his words have been taken to mean.
What Gygax actually wrote about thespianism
was that players should develop it artfully.
It’s also interesting to see this
early remark, from 1998, about “resurrecting” an “early-80s approach.” These
are early hints of the brooding nostalgia that would soon be given a vehicle
through the Open Games License in 2000, on which the “old-school” movement has always
depended.
Gygax’s attitude toward “amateur
thespianism,” based on marketing considerations specific to 1998, has been
taken out of context and redeployed to win points against fellow gamers who
like to enliven their role-playing with a little acting.
In 1998, people were getting internet access in a huge boom of online participatory development (which I remember well from my grad school days). Gamers were
among them, and some were reacting to Gygax’s “amateur thespianism” quip, read in an electronic version of Dragon, on rec.games.frp.dnd. Immediately, the words were taken
out of context. William McCarthy approved the remark.
I did enjoy
the 'amateur thespianism' jab though... it always strikes as ridiculous
hilarity when I witness the common affliction of extreme over-acting at
convention games. Most role-players would not be invited to perform with the
Royal Shakespeare Company for good reason.
Apparently, if you can’t perform with
the Royal Shakespeare Company, you shouldn’t even try to act out your role!
The responses to McCarthy in turn focused
on whether Gygax was “still an arrogant, egotistical asshole” or not, with gamers
predictably either swearing their loyalty to the man or stating how vehemently they
disliked him.
The mistaken idea of what Gygax
meant by “amateur thespianism” has been out there, and it is still with us, evolving
further out of its 1998 context and repeatedly misapplied to the point that it
is embedded in the dogma of the OSR gaming movement.
There were a few defenders of
“amateur thespianism,” such as Doug Ironside of Ontario, who wrote a letter
printed in Dragon Magazine 295 in May 2002, saying,
Gary Gygax
seems to think (or used to anyway, just read the 1st Edition Dungeon
Master's Guide) that amateur thespianism was something ridiculous that
wouldn’t be tolerated at a table of “serious gamers.” I think what that opinion
is lacking is the perspective of time; Gary wouldn’t be able to recall half the
stories he does about his old campaigns if the narrative wasn't prominent.
Pretending to be an actor at the table doesn’t necessarily mean the experience
will be memorable, but rather, having everyone accomplish something notable
does.
This is odd, too, because Gygax
never used the word “thespianism” in the DMG (1979), and he only advocated
for thespianism in the PHB the year before, as I showed above.
Thus, within a few years of Gygax’s reported
remarks in 1998, his meaning had been twisted to make a quite different argument about play-styles and spread far
and wide via internet. Gygax was portrayed as being against acting out roles in
RPGs. But there is no support for this that I have found, only
misinterpretations.
Gygax’s complete view: acting and
action
In October of 1985, Gygax would be
ousted by surprise from his leadership role at TSR (a story told well by
Peterson’s new book Game Wizards—my review of it here). In that
month’s issue of Dragon (#102), Gygax included a substantial article
entitled “Realms of Role Playing: Let’s Start Pushing the Pendulum the Other Way.”
This was apparently written when he still thought he’d be leading the future of
D&D and the RPG field. It’s his last big statement about how he thought the
game should be played before he left TSR.
In the article, he described two
components of RPGs: action and role-playing. (These are the same
terms he would use later in the interview of 1998, discussed immediately above.)
Already in 1985, he was concerned that the exciting action component
was giving way too much to role-playing, and that the character of the game as
a game was not emphasized enough:
Personification
and acting are replacing action of the more direct and forceful type, be it
sword swinging, spell casting, or anything else.
Why was this a problem? He thought that
acting, by itself, without game rules and action, was childish and
boring:
Too much emphasis
in this direction tends to make playing out an adventure more of a children’s let’s
pretend activity than an action-packed game which involves all sorts of fun,
including the playing of a role but other fun aspects as well.
Notice the word “action” again. That’s
the opinion of a veteran wargamer. He liked rules that structured action: the
rules that he was, at the time of writing, in charge of selling for a
profit.
But was Gygax against acting
in role-playing games? Absolutely not. He wrote:
Games are
not plays, although role-playing games should have some of the theatre included
in their play.
He explicitly stated that some of
the theatre should be included in D&D. This is the opposite of what the
current opponents of “amateur thespianism” state.
It gets more interesting. Gygax was explicit
that you grow more and more to become your character:
A
role-playing game should be such that players begin the personification portion
as role play, and then as they progress the activity should evolve into
something akin to role assumption. This does away with stilted attempts
to act the part of some character. In place of this, players should try to
become that person they are imagining during the course of the game, and conduct
the actions of their characters accordingly. A spy, for example, speaks in one way
to his superiors, in another way when he converses with his equals, and in yet
an entirely different way when he is attempting to penetrate an enemy
installation and is impersonating a plumber, perhaps. Implemented in this
fashion, the concept becomes one of roles within roles.
This applies
to all role-playing games, of course. Straining to play a role is certainly contrary
to the purpose of the game. The actual reason for gaming is fun, not
instruction in theatrics or training in the thespian art. Role playing is
certainly a necessary and desirable part of the whole game, but it is a part. Challenge,
excitement, suspense, and questing are other portions equally necessary to a
game of this nature.
This is a nuanced argument. Let’s
break this down.
Gygax advocated for inhabiting the
role of the character increasingly as one plays, so that one can interact with
(and speak with) others in different ways, assuming that role fully. But
“straining to play a role” as if one were taking acting classes was contrary to
the game, because its purpose is a more light-hearted fun. He argues that inhabiting
the role is a matter of progress, and that it should evolve, lest it be “stilted.” The more you become the character, immersed in it, the less strained your acting would be (so he argued).
Put simply, though, it sounds as if Gygax is
saying that it takes time to get the feel for your character, and that it’s
desirable to do so. Notably, he was saying you should act out your
character, immersively, without straining. He regards that as “a necessary and desirable part of the whole game,”
but insufficient for the game by itself. He puts it again in another way:
While some
considerable amount of acting is most beneficial to play, this is by no means
the sole objective or purpose.
Gygax further stressed that players should
play as they wish. If they want to stress acting, let them do so:
Not every
game of this sort must be completely
balanced with regard to all of these aspects [of play]. Such a decision is
entirely in the
hands of the game master and the players. If a particular group desires to
stress acting, or combat, or problem solving, or any other singular feature
of the whole, that is strictly up to the individuals concerned. How
they enjoy gaming, and what constitutes fun, is theirs alone to decide.
He then offers a view on why RPG
products had begun to emphasize role-playing in that time:
The current
vogue of placing seemingly undue importance on the role-playing portion of the
game is simply meant to inform and educate participants about a very important segment
of what differentiates these games from other types of games. … Once it is
understood that role playing is a vital ingredient of the game, and players
understand how to actually accomplish it, the undue attention can be discarded.
This accords with my interpretation
of Gygax’s later views in 1998 as well as his ideas expressed in 1978. He wasn’t
against thespianism. On the contrary, he thought it was an essential part of
the game. It took time to develop it as a skill. He was just concerned that the
action and excitement would disappear if acting was all it was. Importantly, teen
boys would not get into the hobby, and buy the products, if the games lacked
action. He didn’t think that there needed to be in-depth discussion of role-playing
or emphasis on it because it would develop automatically as players become
skillful and mature. It did not need special emphasis because it would happen naturally by necessity.
Summary and conclusion
Some players, particularly
self-described “old-school” players, disdain “amateur thespianism” as alien to “real
D&D,” and even as a corrupting force within the whole hobby. The idea is that you
shouldn’t act out the part of your character, because it’s a game, not in any
way theater.
The punching bag for this dubious notion, “amateur thespianism,” derives from a
misinterpretation of an interview with Gary Gygax in 1998, which was picked up
immediately by internet users and spread in increasingly decontextualized ways.
Gygax came to symbolize a very particular and mostly unprecedented playstyle, which he had never represented, that denies a traditional aspect of player skill.
The real record shows that Gary
Gygax, the co-author of original D&D and author of AD&D, strongly believed
that players and referees should act out their roles as one component among
many in the game, and some theater is a part of D&D and role-playing games generally. He stated
directly that if you like your games to emphasize acting, you should do it that
way as long as it is fun, but he warned players not to lose track of all the
other aspects of the game.
This post does not tell you how to play.
“Old-school” players should, of course, freely avoid play-acting in their own games,
as they like. But they are incorrect when they assert that D&D did not
include thespianism in the old days. On the contrary, it was specifically advocated by that name as a part
of the hobby from its beginnings.
They may also consider dropping the
complaint that “amateur thespianism” is bad fun, too. Reactionary attitudes can
rally sectarian support, but it divides hobbyists into factions.
The parroted doctrine that “amateur
thespianism” is bad and corrupting illustrates the dogmatic and selective tendencies of the OSR movement. It’s not just that other people’s fun is wrong,
but that their own fun is the correct fun. In this case, the appeal to the
authority of a founding figure is completely false. It is contradicted by the
record, not to mention millions of hours of play in which role-players have
enjoyed playing out their parts, whether they were embarrassing and awkward or inspired and skillful.
