"Role Playing" in a board game.

The elements of roll-playing games that translates well into board games are not the elements that are unique to rpgs. A good rpg session involves mostly talking with little dice rolling to to keep things uncertain. The focus is in the imagination not with the bits and pieces involved in most other types of games. The one thing you see that works well is combat simulation based on the given theme be it swords & spell or guns and grenades. This is true weather it is personal combat or a military campaign. It would be an interesting experiment to make a board game that involved some sort of open ended decision making that you find in rpgs. It might be a haggling/trading system were the players work out the sale price of an item like you might do in monopoly. "I'll trade you a horse and an elixir of mightiness for that sword of fire."

As my good friend Joe used to say " I break through the wall of force with me vorpal sword and slay the purple worm" every single week. :roll:

Functionally, the way you bring role-playing into board games is by gving each player a specific character to play.
Sometimes this can be done with generalised roles (I've seen some very animated games of Modern Art and Princes of Florence) but it is only when players are given clear guidance that the role-playing aspect comes into its own.

This is, of course, a very difficult trick to pull off, since the characters need to have some semblence of balance without being so similar that they might as well not exist. This is one of the issues that is holding up development of Heist as I try to keep the powers roughtly balanced.

Junta is a good example of a game in which players adopt certain characters - even though the "roles" they get to play change throughout the game, the fact that certain options are only open to certain characters encourages a little more role-playing than is usual in that sort of game.

IOW I think that if the game is designed around players adopting specific characters (rather than generalised ones) then the role-playing aspect is more likely to become visible.

For example, this Pirate game that started out in the Collaborative Design Project has the potential to turn into many things. One direction it could go is almost like an RPG where the players each control an aspiring seaman who, over the coarse of the game developes into either a hardened Pirate in command of a band of cutthroats, or perhaps a morally righteous vigilante in command of a small fleet of "pirates"...

This seems to me to lend itself to an RPG system. is there any way to representt hat within a board game, in order to keep it more concise and structured?

- Seth

Ahh now this is something I can sink my teeth into. A lot of adventure games have accomplished this task (successfully? Not sure) such as Talisman, Blackbeard, Arkham Horror, Dungeonquest, etc. This is done with a sort of subset of a 'full RPG' rules, I.E. three or four stats, limited equipment, and a rigid set of actions that the players can attempt.

So I assume by RPG mixed with Board Game you mean a game where a player takes on the role of a character (or multiple characters) and develops him/her over the course of the game, adding equipment, skills, etc. over the course of the game?

I've always loved games like this but as I grow older, I find them harder and harder to play because of the average (usually circa 3 hours) length involved in completing a game.

I can't really address your question as I haven't actually sat down and done a game this way, but I have thought a lot about it. The dilemna is creating a game system that is as open ended as possible all the while restricting as much as possible (quite a balancing act). Basically define what you will allow your players to do, define it well, and then leave it as open ended as possible, and hope for the best.

Here's some questions you need to ask yourself:
What is the goal (or possible goals) of the game?
What actions should the players be allowed to attempt to accomplish this goal, be it directly or indirectly?
How do the characters differentiate themselves from other characters?

The previous question is pretty much the most important question when dealing with a RPG style board game. If all the characters are the same, then what's the point?

For instance, say you are making a game about standard pirating. Characters might have different skills (sword fighting, seamanship, cheating), different equipment (rapier, musketgun, parrot, eyepatch, etc), followers (Davey Jones, Big John, etc), a ship (the Jolly Roger of course).

Each one of these things will serve to differentiate one character from the next. and I think that character development is the defining factor in such a game.

I'd love to develop a RPG subset board game system; anyone care to collaborate on such a beast?

-Darke

I guess it depends on how you difine what roll playing is. Given the above list of role-playing mechanics, I could easily argue that Peurto Rico has role-playing mechanics, since throughout the game your player's stats" increase (the ability to produce stuff), and get modified through various "weapons" (buildings) that you collect. I think a lot of board games can be abstracted like this. Therefore, I think it is very easy to incorporate those type of things into a board game.

However, to me, the unique mechanics that define an RPG versus other games is the ability for the players to do whatever they want to do, whereas as their stats are a reflection of their chance of success. Also, things like definite turns orders don't apply. In this regard, I think of RPG's as being generally structure-less in terms of how a 'turn' is performed, whereas as all other type of games have a pretty rigid structure to follow.