Soft Roleplaying

The art of "soft" roleplaying (RP) has always been a strange, unspoken mirror image to "hard" RP like that found in roleplaying games (RPGs) like Dungeons and Dragons. It is a variation that has settled organically between playing pretend and solving conflicts with some random number generator like dice.

Let's start with a summary of each of these types of RP.

Playing pretend: This is the basis of all RP, and by no means just for children! It is acting, it is lying, it is story telling. However, it is the most unstructured form of it. It's obvious to see that, as soon as a conflict arises where one person wants to pretend one thing, and another wants to pretend something different, there is no real way to choose. Conflict resolution gets in the way of the story.

Hard RP: This is the wonderful world of RPGs, started off by the granddaddy of them all, Dungeons and Dragons. In an RPG, guided by a Dungeon Master, each person in the game can announce that they do an action, then roll a die to see whether they succeeded. Conflicts are settled easily and conclusively, though their outcomes are sometimes not what the players wish for.

Soft RP: Soft RP is playing pretend with an eye toward conflicts, using some rules of thumb to determine the outcome of conflicts in a way that does not rely on randomness.

The rules of thumb in a Soft RP that need to be followed in order for it to work are:

1. You cannot dictate another person's actions or things that effect them. You cannot say, "I swing my sword and hit you in the arm" or "You are dazzled by my beauty". This is sometimes called "powergaming" or "god-moding".

2. The victim of the potentially bad action gets to determine whether or not the action affects them, and how much. The person who the sword is being swung at gets to describe dodging it, or having it nick them, or having it deal a fatal blow.

That's it. There are variations and rules created for specific scenarios, but those two rules are the basis of all soft RP. But! you might think. This is no better than playing pretend! How does anyone get anything done? Soft RP can evoke questions of how anyone can have a powerful or dangerous character in the face of an inability to do anything.

 If that's the type of RP you want to do, then you are in a competitive mindset; there's nothing wrong with that! Soft RP takes cooperation, between those in conflict and everyone in the game altogether. You - all of you - are writing a story together. So you have to collaborate with other people, even beforehand if you wish.

What are you (and the other people in the scene) trying to get out of this scene? If it's just 'to win', then you're not thinking of the whole story. You're not thinking like a writer. In a story-driven game with multiple people, why does your character have to win (or lose)? What story-related goal are you trying to fulfill with this character's actions?

Obviously, there are exception to these rules. If one character in a roleplay is surrounded by everyone else, ready to kill the one person, he or she unable to escape, it is reasonable to expect a little powergaming in order to keep the scene realistic. People can still die in Soft RP, but it is usually an obvious situation.

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Anyone who wishes to link to this essay to help explain soft roleplaying to people is welcome to do so! If you wish to use this text in some other way, please credit me. Thanks.