When I was in middle school, I was really into progressive metal and industrial rock. I considered it “alternative”. It was never in the Billboard Top 50 and only played during special shows on the alternative radio stations! My best friend was into Alanis Morissette and Fiona Apple, which also was cool because nobody else I knew listened to them, even though they weren’t cool like my music was cool. But we listened to heartfelt, raw, real music. My other friend choreographed dances in his living room to Destiny’s Child (back when there was a discussion regarding who was the coolest Knowles sister). That wasn’t cool, because pop music was prefabricated and soulless. It wasn’t real music. And I wasn’t shy to tell him so. A quarter century later, I enjoy nostalgia-listening to The Fragile and Lateralus occasionally, but most of the time I’m listening to Sabrina Carpenter and Chappel Roan. Because I was wrong, and I was being a pretentious jackwagon. Of course pop music is real music.

I am not a player of the current, Hasbro-owned edition of Dungeons and Dragons. I don’t enjoy running it; playing it is fine. Hasbro are a dragon sitting on the hoard that is our hobby and we’d be better off without them. But regularly, I hear people saying that Dungeons and Dragons is a bad game, and that people who play Dungeons and Dragons are roleplaying wrong, often with the disclaimer that it’s a tactical combat game, not a roleplaying game. It reminds me of being in middle school again, because it’s just not true: Dungeons and Dragons is real roleplaying, and the people playing it are playing just fine. Pop music is real music. 

The thing I think the people who say this are missing, is that in order to play a role, a roleplaying game generally scaffolds you in doing so; it provides you with a supporting framework. There are lots of ways to scaffold roleplaying, and some ways work better for some people. People who don’t think Dungeons and Dragons is “real” roleplaying or that the people playing it are “roleplaying wrong” or are “doing all the heavy lifting” are just people who benefit from scaffolding in a different way.

One way Dungeons and Dragons scaffolds is through character creation. You get to the end of the admittedly tedious process with “I’m an elf warlock who can cast eldritch blast and sleep who was once an acolyte”. Some people would prefer to be told that their character is gregarious, or well-muscled, or has a tenuous relationship with their ex-wife. But for most people, their elf warlock mirrors how they think about themselves: “I’m a nurse from the northern suburbs who drives a Polo and used to work at the Body Shop”. This is a really familiar scaffold for a lot of people. It also doesn’t work for a lot of people. Another way Dungeons and Dragons scaffolds is through alignment, which, stripped in 2024 of any mechanical effects, is now a framework for considering your character’s personal ethics, but along weirdly universal axes, with an emphasis on relative positioning. Most games, in fact, use multiple or secondary scaffolding approaches like this, which help different people roleplay in the game, if they don’t benefit from the primary approaches.

Every game scaffolds roleplaying in different ways, and none of them scaffold correctly for everyone.

One way Galactic 2nd Edition scaffolds roleplaying is through shared cultural understanding. It uses the shared cultural knowledge of Star Wars so that players implicitly know what their characters would do, how they would do it, when they need to do it. You know how Han Solo would act in this circumstance; you know what the Empire would do; you know how Yoda would act. Stewpot, a game where you play retired adventurers in a fantasy world, leverages instead the shared cultural knowledge of Dungeons and Dragons to scaffold roleplaying, which limits its appeal compared to Star Wars, but really gets its hooks into the fantasy roleplaying crowd in an unrivalled way.

Every game scaffolds roleplaying in different ways, and none of them scaffold correctly for everyone.

One way For the Queen scaffolds roleplaying is through differentiation. All the players begin as effectively the same character, a nameless member of the Queen’s retinue: a knight. But through the prompts, you differentiate yourself from each other, in your relationships with the Queen and in your pasts. It leaves empty space, and invites you to fill it however you want, but you can imagine how this might not work for the very same person who prefers scaffolding through occupational roles, or scaffolding through shared cultural knowledge.

Every game scaffolds roleplaying in different ways, and none of them scaffold correctly for everyone.

We can do this for many games: One way Primetime Adventures scaffolds roleplaying is through defining your characters primary issue, like self-respect, arrogance, or desire for vengeance. When you’re in a scene, you can always bring that primary issue to bear. You always know what to do. One way 10 Candles, Dread and Fiasco all scaffold roleplaying is through through story structure: They all use different ways to describe an inevitable unfolding, which assists you in making decisions about roleplaying that suit the story being told, because you know where in the story you are. One way Heart and Spire scaffold roleplaying is through their worldbuilding. They attach huge, notable and unique pieces of mythology to your characters from the first moment, and drive your characters towards a strange and compelling zenith. One way Yazeba’s Bed and Breakfast scaffolds roleplaying is through bingos and whoopsies, which describe ways in which your character always fully assets who they are, or ways things always go wrong. Another way it scaffolds roleplaying is through its pre-generated characters, each of which has unique mechanics and stay constant (although they of course evolve) despite being played by different players throughout the game. One way Agon scaffolds roleplaying is through building a mythic hero rather than a character. It does this through choosing epithets — you might be silver-tongued or lion-hearted. You’re a hero, and to the extent you’re a one-note melody. Another way it scaffolds roleplaying though, to bring harmony, is through the nature of your relationship to the divine, and which gods you have relationships with — daughter of Poseidon, for example.

Every game scaffolds roleplaying in different ways, and none of them scaffold correctly for everyone.

I stopped playing roleplaying games for about 15 years, and the first game I tried to run as an MC for my friends when I rediscovered them was Apocalypse World in around 2011. Apocalypse World in my opinion remains one of the best roleplaying games written, but it did absolutely nothing to scaffold our roleplaying experience. A primary way Apocalypse World scaffolds your roleplaying is using relationships: Your history with each other, with NPCs, and for some playbooks special moves that give you a biker gang or a holding. And developing these relationships and the world that connects them — done in a special, 0-session — was an absolute failure for our table. We looked at the playbook and thought we were seeing a list of verbs, like Dungeons & Dragons’ proficiencies or the buttons in a videogame, and we had absolutely no fun. We had no idea what to do with ourselves. It was a disaster. Apocalypse World’s scaffolding did not work for us at all, at the time. 

When 2014 came around, though, we all had no trouble playing Dungeons & Dragons (then known as 5th edition) for the first time, though, or roleplaying when we did. We understood the characterization scaffolds, we had cultural understanding because of contemporary cultural touchstones like Community, video game RPGs that grew in Dungeons & Dragons’ shadow, and the Adventure Zone. That anecdote is not, from discussions with other people in the hobby, unique, although plenty of people do have different experiences. My point here is not that D&D 2014 is better than Apocalypse World; it’s that every game scaffolds roleplaying in different ways, and none of them scaffold correctly for everyone. Maybe For The Queen is the right amount and type of scaffolding for you or your table. Maybe what Pathfinder or Ghost Court provides is right for you. 

There’s no right or wrong here. There’s no right way to play, or wrong way to play. There’s no wrong game, or right game, except for your individual table. There are no shoulds. There are no vast swathes of the tabletop gaming population playing their game wrong.  Pick the game that best helps your table play, and let others pick theirs without judgement. Dungeons and Dragons, and solo RPGs, and OSR games, are all real roleplaying games and the players playing them are doing real roleplaying, even if their preferences are different from yours.

If you think someone else is roleplaying wrong, or their game isn’t providing any roleplaying support, you’re missing the point: Different games support roleplaying in different ways, and even though they don’t scaffold correctly for you, they’re probably scaffolding well for someone else. I’d encourage you to think about how that game you love, or that game you don’t love, or this new game that is surprising you, scaffolds roleplaying. Think about what other games approach it similarly. Think about how this changes how people might interact with the game. Think about why it works, or doesn’t work for you, and why it might work for other people if it doesn’t. And if you’ve got any other interesting approaches to scaffolding to share, please drop it in the comments: I’d love to hear how you think Bluebeards Bride or Cairn 2nd Edition or your new, unique game scaffolds roleplaying.

And I hope we see less judgement for people who need different types of support for roleplaying than we do.

Idle Cartulary

P.S. Thanks to Jay Dragon, Amanda P., Dwiz and Sam Dunnewold for their assistance with clarifying my thesis and identifying or describing some of the scaffolds more clearly.

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