Individual & Collective Action

From Tab Wiki

There's a innate conflict at the core of RPGs (at least in RPGs as currently exist). You see, short of playing something solitaire, game playing is a collective activity; and having a good time in the game depends not just upon a player as an individual, but upon the collective group of players. This is especially true in cooperative games, in which RPGs are a subset. It is the nature of current RPGs that the game world is shared between players: My character in a game is in the same world as every other characters and normal rules of cause and effect apply. I blow up a building, the other players are going to have to deal with a blown up building. I shoot an NPC, the other characters are going to have to deal with a shot NPC. This being the case, every action I take in a game may have an affect on other players.

Now, in theory one could imagine an RPG where this is not the case. An RPG could exist wherein each player exists in a separate game world which is in no way causally related to the game world of any other player. (Although you would still have a causal relation between each player's actions and the shared GM's actions.) While perhaps theoretically interesting, I am more than willing to assert that an RPG with this property would not be as fun as current RPGs. Without the potential for interaction between players, the game would seem less like a unified game and more like several smaller RPGs that compete for the spotlight (and attention of the GM to resolve rolls, actions of NPCs, etc.) within the same time frame.

The major reason this is undesirable comes back to my earlier point: playing an RPG is a collective activity. This being the case, situations that focus on the party as a collective tend to be the most interesting for all players involved and thus dominate sessions. Take for example the case of combat: a staple of RPGs, going back to their origins. There's a reason combat began and remains a staple of almost any role-playing game ever marketed: it works well in the medium.

Let us examine why this might be: For one, combat is a collective activity and is supported by this mechanically. Certain other things like picking flowers often boil down mechanically to a single character making a Survival (Flowers) check to accomplish the task. This type of mechanic often results in an individualistic approach to the activity (after all, why send the entire party out to make picking flowers rolls, when one guy has can accomplish the task just as well). In combat, on the other hand, it is beneficial mechanically to bring the whole party along. Not only does the success or failure of the combat matter, but how quickly it is resolved matters, as does the shape of the survivors.

And here we see that combat is a lot less abstracted mechanically than many other activities; this abstraction helps to make combat a collective activity. Let me give another example: Hypothetically, we could settle combat in a role-playing game just as we settle picking flowers. Each character has a "Combat" skill and when two people get in a fight, then roll their skill and compare. The character with the better result wins, simple as that. Now, instead of the entire party rushing off to engage in a fight, why not just send the guy who has Combat-22? If everyone else has Combat-10, their roll is not going to matter as much considering it only takes a single high roll to end the combat and win the battle.

Combat has other things going for it as well, beyond just getting everyone involved. Failing it comes with risk, this increases the tension of the scene. Plus some people have a taste for violent power fantasies and enjoy the sort of flavor that combat has. But the above example could still have a high risk from failing a Combat roll and could still easily be described in bloody detail. It just becomes less interesting and less collective from the abstraction.

Other activities that tend to dominate sessions are things like planning and conversations between player characters. And both of these work well because they are collective activities. Planning how to approach a particular problem gets different players involved as they may have an opinion on how to approach the problem and can present, discuss and collectively decide how to proceed. The conflict resolution is one of coming to a compromise or collective decision. Interactions between player characters of other sorts often dominates sessions as well, as such situations can get all the players involved and into role-playing their shticks.

Hypothetically, there are also activities that could have their abstraction removed and that could be exciting and collective. Take for example the case of a baseball game. If you break the game down into different rolls for batting and pitching and catching and stealing bases, etc. playing through a game might very well be an interesting activity in-game (particularly if there's some high risk stakes involved on the game).

But let me come full circle. There's a innate conflict at the core of RPGs. And that conflict is in how sovereignty is broken up in the game. For example, playing an RPG is a collective activity, but character creation is often treated as an individualistic activity. Just as character actions in the game may have an affect on every other character, the character creation choices made for the game may have an affect on every other player character. This is one reason I attempt to make character creation somewhat collective through a collective character creation session.

But player sovereignty in game is broken up along individualistic grounds as a whole. With a few rare exceptions, each player has single character they decide the actions of and "play". In essence, each player has their own individual agent that is part of the collective and is part of the collective activity only when their character is. While being intuitively simple, this may not be the optimal way to approach the breakdown of player sovereignty in order to maximize players' participation in game.