Bringing it All Together

This is the third and final of my Player Type articles.

Timmy, Johnny, Spike.

Diamond, Spade, Heart, Club.

Real Men, Role-players, Loonies, Munchkins.

All of these thing boil down to a few key motivations for why people play role-playing games. While these are, of course, not very detailed, to encompass the reasons we play as inclusively as possible, they can’t be. The way I figure it, role-playing has the following things to offer:

It’s a game: Gamers are playing to play the fucking game. They want to roll dice and make strategic choices. They like the intellectual challenge of the game, and want to beat it.

It’s a story: Storytellers are here to tell a story that is completely, ridiculously awesome. They want to advance the plot, engage with the non-player characters, involve themselves deeply with the game world and make choices based on what will produce the best story.

It’s a simulation: Simulators want our game worlds to adhere as closely to the real world (or what the real world would be with the speculative fiction elements included) as possible. They want to come up with solutions to their problems that are founded in common sense, and they want to engage in worlds as detailed and nuanced as our own.

It’s a way to socialize: Socializers want to get together with their friends and hang out. And role-playing games provide a context for doing just that. A lot of people, especially the wall-flowers and the table-talkers, are just there to chill out and eat snacks.

It’s an outlet for fantasies: Fantasists have things that they would love to be able to do in real life, but can’t. They want to swing swords and sling spells and fight crime and fly blimps. Role-playing games provide a framework that is safe, interactive and fun in which they can do just that.

This Ain’t no GNS, Kids

Some people may look at the top three tiers of this categorization and find similarities to Ron Edwards’ GNS Theory. Personally, I’ve always taken exception to the idea that GNS applies to players. I don’t think you can really be a “Gamist.” I think that a particular situation in a particular role-playing game session can be gamist, but that a person who plays the game for the sake of playing the game is a gamer. The difference is subtle, but the implications are pretty intense.

A gamer is no more likely to respond positively to a gamist situation than any other player. The particular situation may or may not appeal to the gamer’s specific motivations for play, and he or she may space out when certain gamist situations arise, or perk up and pay special attention for others.

See, none of these motivations occur without some overlap. If I play a game because I a) like to play games and b) have some pretty intense power fantasies in which I am a hulking brute of man-strength, then gamist situations involving diplomacy and stealth aren’t going to appeal to me as much as gamist situations involving combat.

I’ve been talking about gamism a lot, though. Let’s look at narrativism, for a moment, just for some variety. It’s possible for a player whose key motivation is storytelling to have no interest in the above-mentioned diplomacy/stealth situation, too. If that player is telling a Shonen-esque story of growing-in-power-to-defeat-great-evil, well then shit, she’s probably got some power fantasies in the mix. Or, if the situation in which the diplomacy is held doesn’t mesh with the internal consistency of the game world (“Why would the captain of a starship be engaged in negotiations with a hostile alien force? She should be on the ship, where she’s needed. This makes no sense…), we may have a simulator on our hands.

So each of these reasons for play happen in different amounts for each of us. I think we can build a relatively universal system of player archetyping if we assume that each of us resonates with two of the five motivations listed above more than the others. Myself, I would say I’m most inclined towards storytelling and gaming, with my focus being much more solidly on storytelling. I’m a 70% Storyteller, 30% Gamer. Everything else informs the way I play to some degree, and if I wanted to get deeply involved in it, I could.

Kris Hansen’s Stats:
Storyteller 50, Gamer 20, Socializer 15, Fantasist 10 Simulator 5.

What the above does (something I’ve never seen another player archetype system do) is provide us a way to talk about player tendencies, actions and motivations while addressing the individuality of the player. Not everyone is going to value Storytelling as much as I do, and not everyone is going to focus on Fantasies as little as I do.

Moreover, it gives us the opportunity to shift and change and grow without needing to shoehorn ourselves into a specific player archetype. We don’t need to worry about whether or not we’re a Real Man or a Munchkin; we can admit that we’re 60% Gamer and 40% Fantasist, and be done with it.

Another thing this system does is makes space for a group of players that are often seen as peripherals to the game. Socializers are there to have fun and hang out with their friends. Sometimes, they’ll do the crazy, just to get a rise out of people. Sometimes, they’ll annoy other players just for the reaction they get, but the real motivation behind these behaviors is the desire for socialization within the context of the game. This is where we get our “Loonies.” This is where the “Casual Gamers” come from. They’re not here to play the game, at least, they’re not here for that as much as for the social outing.

So How do the Other Systems Fit?

Rosewater’s Archetypes

What Rosewater’s built as far as player archetypes goes is amazing for Magic: The Gathering, and the driving goals behind his psychographic writings is part of what inspired me to do this in the first place.

Timmy is here to experience something. He wants to feel something. He’s probably going to identify most closely as a Fantasist and Storyteller.

Johnny is here as a form of self-expression. He wants to show you something you’ve never seen before. He’s mostly going to be a Gamer and Storyteller.

Spike wants to win. He doesn’t care how he does it, he just wants to win and make sure everyone knows he did. He’s most closely associatied with Gamers and Fantasists.

The Munchkin File

Sadly, it’s a little impossible to take the Munchkin File seriously in regards to modern gaming. I don’t remember gaming in the 90’s being that much different than today, so I can’t even be sure it was a valid discourse on gaming “back in the day.” Still, it’s interesting to see them as extreme examples of other archetypes.

Real Men are manly men, the sort that jump in front of buses to save babies. Fantasist and Gamer.

Role-players are here to tell a kick-ass story, and to step into the role of their character. Storyteller, maybe as high as 90%, with any subtheme, really.

Loonies are here to do the wacky, and do it often. They’re trying to get a rise out of people. Socializer, maybe as high as 90%, with any subtheme, really.

Munchkins are extreme fantasists, but they achieve their fantasy goals through manipulation of the rules, putting them firmly into the Gamer category, too.

Bartle’s Archetypes

The interesting thing about Bartle’s archetypes is that most of his observations apply equally to my own archetypes. The biggest difference between his archetypes and my own is the inclusion of self-expression desires and fantasy. It’s also interesting to note that there are two types of Socializer in Bartle’s breakdown.

Spades want to explore, want to delve into the core of the game world. Simulators are analogous.

Diamonds want to win the game. They push to achieve the game’s set goals, which makes them analogous to Gamers.

Clubs are extreme Socializers, using the social aspect of the game to annoy other players. On the opposite end of that scale, Hearts play to enjoy the company of other players, which means that they are _also_ sozializers, but express it in a very different way. I believe that the focus on socializing and the lack of storytelling or fantasist behavior may have something to do with the nature of MUDs as a role-playing platform.

Laws’ Archetypes

Laws talks about a lot of archetypes in his book, but most of them are covered elsewhere. The ones we’re looking at specifically helped inform the archetype scheme I’ve developed here.

Storytellers and Casual Gamers as archetypes were both integral in building the breakdown we have here. Casual Gamers, especially, are difficult for die-hards to understand, but when I looked at the similarities between Casual Gamers and Bartle’s Hearts, it sort of clicked in my head.

Specialists are a type of Fantasist. Their fantasy involves playing a very specific type of character, over and over again. The character they play is likely a manifestation of something they wish they had in real life, hence its repetition around the table. Specialists are intriguing to me, from a psychological perspective, but I don’t really have the time or expertise to go into it too deeply here. I’ll leave that for people with some of that there book learnin’.

Munchkins, Laws and a Bartle

This is the second part of my essays dissecting the “Player Types” that circulate in gaming circles. Today, I’ll be taking a look at the infamous Munchkin Files, Robin Laws’ additions to those files, and Richard Bartle’s suit-based ideas on player motivations.

The Munchkin File

The Munchkin File breaks players down into four key archetypes. Whether this is to be taken seriously or not is up to some debate, as the archetypes are as ridden with holes as Rosewater’s psychographics when it comes to RPGs. The archetypes are: The Real Man, the Real Roleplayer, the Loonie, and the Munchkin. Players are supposed to fall into a range of these character types as described thus:

The Real Man

The tough macho type who walks up to the attacking dragon and orders it to leave before he gets hurt.

The Real Roleplayer

The intelligent cunning guy who tricks the constable into letting you all out of prison.

The Loonie

The guy who will do anything for a cheap laugh, including casting a fireball at ground zero.

The Munchkin

Need we say more?

Well yes, actually, we do. Munchkins get a bit of a bad rap in the role-playing community. They are, to go back to Rosewater’s terms, Spikes. They play to win, and are willing to use whatever resources are available to them to do so. If that means twinking a character to hit for 600 damage at a range of 50ft at-will for the rest of the game, well… Okay, let’s do that.

For those unfamiliar with the term (I’m sure there are at least a few), a Munchkin is a player who derives entertainment or a sense of self-worth from creating powerful characters in a role-playing game. The more powerful the character, the better. It’s usually a term of derision, but we won’t be using it as such in this article, because the object of the article is to understand the motivations behind play.

The problem with the above archetype distinctions is that they are pretty exclusive of other kinds of play. Where would a player who likes to build twinked-out Charisma machines fit in – especially if that player uses the high Charisma to power some intense role-playing scenarios? More to the point, where would the average player fit in?

Still, from this, we can garner some interesting ideas as to why each of the above archetypes wants to play a role-playing game. The Real Man has something to prove, wants to get into the thick of it, and loves combat encounters. The Real Roleplayer’s wants to act, wants to create interesting stories through word and action. The Loonie is looking to get a reaction from the other players. The Munchkin is looking for a power-fantasy outlet. All of these drives exist, and I’ve seen players who exibit these traits to one degree or another, but I hardly believe it to be a comprehensive list of player motivations. Even the Five Gamers only picks up for those looking for an intellectual challenge.

Robin D. Laws

Robin Laws knows a lot about games, and he knows a lot about Game Mastery. He wrote a really good book on how to not suck as a Game Master, and if you’re serious about becoming a more adept GM, it’s something I would highly recommend you pick up. It’s worth every fucking penny.

Mr. Laws adds a few archetypes to the mix, in particular the Specialist, the Storytellers and the Casual Gamers. A specialist is the type of player who plays the same character type over and over again, regardless of game type, sometimes with the same name as in other games. The personality rarely changes, the general abilities stay roughly the same, the set-dressing never differs. Storytellers are in it for the plot, and they’re willing to put their characters through hell to get it (these are, for the record, my favorite types of players to Game Master for). Casual Gamers show up to play once in a while, like the game and like he people playing it, and when it’s done, they put it away.

The thing I like the most about Mr. Laws’ archetypes is that so few other writers touch on them. To bring it back to Mr. Rosewater’s archetypes, a Specialist is a sort of Timmy who is in the game to experience one particular thing. They like being the assassin or the brawler, and will be that character in every game they play forever. A storyteller is very Vorthosian, in that the flavor is all that really matters for them, and experiencing that flavor is important.

The casual gamer… Well, she’s a harder creature to pin down. What motivates a casual player can be difficult to understand for those of us so deeply immersed in the hobby that we plan games, play in them on a regular basis or, gods forbid, read blogs about it. What brings her out to the table every third session to eat nachos and swill Mountain Dew with the rest of the group?

I think the next set of archetypes will answer that a little more clearly.

Richard Bartle

In 1996, Richard Bartle put together a lengthy article on the types of players who play in Multi-User Domains, or MUDs. This article summarized a huge debate on his own MUD’s forums on the topic of “What do people want out of a MUD?” While that may seem a bit removed from table-top role-playing, I think that the archetype work he put together can, like the archetype work on Magic: The Gathering, be used to shed light on our hobby in a way we haven’t really looked at previously.

The things that he posits a game-player wants are:

1. Achievement within the game context
2. Exploration of the game
3. Socializing with others
4. Imposition upon others

Each player is going to have these drives to one degree or another. Everyone has goals they want to achieve within the game, and everyone sits down to play a role-playing game to socialize. The amount of each that a player desires from a game creates an interesting scale on which one can place oneself.

Personally, I rate myself thus: achievement, socialization, exploration, imposition, with achievement being the highest and imposition the lowest. You will likely rate yourself differently.

When you throw percentages into the mix (I’m 34% achievement oriented, for instance), you get a much more accurate idea of what sort of gamer you are.

Bartle’s essay has graphs, and examples of the style of play you might see in a MUD from a particular type of player. We aren’t going to do that here. What is more interesting is his association of player types with suits of cards.

Diamonds: Go for the goals of the game, whatever those are.

Spades: Explore the game world.

Hearts: Hang out with other players.

Clubs: Play to have an effect on other players.

I think part of what I like about this delineation is that it’s easy to grok. In many ways, that’s what drew me to Mr. Rosewater’s archetypes in the first place, was the idea that you could easily describe the tendencies of a group of players with a single word. If the player you are speaking about wants to win, and will do everything in his or her power to do so, that player is a Spike. Awesome, that’s easy to figure out. He or she is also a Diamond. Or, depending on your definition of the goals of the game, a Munchkin.

Part of what role-playing games need is a unifying language that describes underlying player motivations. Some published products have attempted to make that happen (see: the Game Master’s Guides), but the definitions they give for player motivations are surprisingly limited and inflexible. What I aim to create here is a language through which we can better understand why our players do the things they do.

Psychographics in Role-playing Games

This is the first of three articles I’m writing on the topic of Player Types. This first will be a look at Mark Rosewater’s Magic: The Gathering psychographics, and how they apply to Dungeons & Dragons (and, perhaps, any other game).

When you’re trying to sell games for a living, it’s pretty important to try and figure out why people play games. That’s part of the reason I love reading Mark Rosewater’s articles over at Wizards of the Coast; he talks at length about why people play games, and how we can get people to play them more. A lot of that comes from a design perspective, which I appreciate, because it gives me a bit of an inside look at the motivations of the person in charge of making Magic lack suck. 

But Magic is not a role-playing game. It really should be a role-playing game which is a thing I’ll talk about in a future post, I’m sure, but it’s not actually a role-playing game. It’s a card game, and the reasons people play card games are pretty different from the reasons we play role-playing games.

Or are they?

Timmy, Johnny, Spike

Rosewater posits that there are three key psychological demographics (“psychographics” to marketing and buzzword folks) that play Magic: The Gathering. He has named these psychographics Timmy, Johnny and Spike.

Timmy plays the game because he wants to experience something. In the world of Magic: The Gathering, that means he wants the rush of throwing down a huge creature and beating face with it. He wants to take one look at a card and go “HOLY CARP I CAN’T LIVE WITHOUT THIS!!!” He’s looking for the Wow Factor of a card or a deck or whatever.

In Dungeons & Dragons, the idea of “experiencing something” opens up in a huge way. Each situation in a role-playing game has the opportunity to evoke emotion. And, honestly, that’s always been one of the biggest draws to the game. The idea that a game can affect you in the same way that a novel or a television show might is a powerful motivating factor in playing it. I have seen people cry during sad moments in a role-playing game. I’ve never seen that happen at a Magic tournament.

(Well, that’s not strictly true, but it had nothing to do with a sad moment in the fictional game world and was instead the result of having lost a game to that person’s significant other during a tournament…)

Johnny plays the game as a form of self-expression. In Magic, this is through creativity in deck design. He puts the pieces of the puzzle together in a way no one else has, and even if the deck doesn’t win, as long as it pulls off that one amazing trick once it still pulls it off and gives him a story to tell later.

In Dungeons and Dragons, we have the opportunity to tell stories as part of the game. And a lot of players take a special sort of delight in doing so. Personally, as a GM, I love crafting elaborate plots through which my player characters navigate. I love creating fleshed out, interesting worlds in which to play. I especially love giving my players interesting non-player characters with whom to interact. I am, in nearly every way possible, a D&D Johnny.

Another incarnation of this would be the person who has tried out every crazy build for every character class and race combination with a billion different feat choices. Sometimes that’s the domain of a Spike (trying to build the character that wins), but a lot of the time, the combinations aren’t great. Sometimes you build a goliath earthsong warden with optimized everything. Sometimes you build a drow paladin airship captain with a boomerang (+1 Dex! Woo!). But if a Johnny gets to tell great stories with the character (or about the character later), then it’s all good.

Spike plays to win. In Magic, this means finding the best decks, playing them against the best decks, finding ways to beat the decks that beat your decks and learning to optimize your own play to the point that you never, ever fail at Magic. For Dungeons and Dragons, this falls a little more into the category of the power-gamer. They trawl online boards looking for character optimization options that will help them live longer, fight harder, kill faster and rake in the experience points.

But as in all things D&D, there is more than one way to “win.” You win if you do your job better than anyone else could. You win if you did the coolest thing anyone had done that night. You win if you’re the guy who gets all the spotlight time. You win if you got the most loot. There are a lot of ways to win at Dungeons & Dragons, and a lot of ways to consider yourself successful.

Also, because D&D is a cooperative sport (most of the time), it can be difficult to actually say you’ve won the game. Honestly, I think of all the Magic psychographics currently catered to in Dungeons & Dragons, Spikes are the ones left in the dust. That’s part of the reason I’ve established Warp One’s first D&D tournament, a three-on-three contest of skill and brute strength. It should be a blast.

Melvin/Vorthos

The two newer pseudo-psychographics, Melvin and Vorthos, also have a place in the Dungeons & Dragons equivalence discussion. Melvin, for those who haven’t read the Magic: The Gathering articles (linked at the bottom of the post), is a player who likes the crunchy number bits of a card, the rules, the interactions and turn sequences and the like. Vorthos is all about the flavor of a card, what the card feels like and looks like, how it interacts with their idea of the fictional world in which the card interacts.

Melvin exists in Dungeons & Dragons. We call him a rules-lawyer at his most extreme, but to be fair, it’s a major motivating factor in why he’s playing the game. He isn’t being a dick about the rules to be a dick. He’s being a dick about the rules because he really, genuinely cares about the rules. This is the sort of player who loves when a new edition comes out, or a new game, the sort of guy who will rummage through Savage Worlds or Mouse Guard and steal rules from them to use in a D&D game, or vice versa. Melvin loves rules, loves systems, and loves playing with them until they do exactly what he wants them to do.

Vorthos, too, exists in Dungeons & Dragons. He’s read every Forgotten Realms novel, and is prepared for any eventuality, knowing who to talk to and where to go to get things done. He can be hell on a plot sometimes, or he can be an amazing boon to your campaign, a driving force that brings your party where they need to be as often as possible.

Or, he’s the guy who has pored over every map in every world book ever produced for every edition of the game. He knows the GDP of Zilargo, their major exports, their major imports, and how many gnomes it takes to build an airship. Again, this guy can be both a boon and a detractor from your game, depending on how much you want your players to know before hand.

The problem with labelling these guys as psychographics in terms of a role-playing game is that flavor and mechanics, while motivating factors in playing, are not the core reasons people will play. I will not play a game of… well, anything, if the only reason to play it is to experience the flavor of that game. I could just read a book and get the same experience. And I certainly won’t play a game just because the rules look pretty kick-ass. There has to be some other draw for me.

I am, however, both a Vorthos and a Melvin. I love rules, I love tinkering with them and making them up on the spot, I love house ruling things that I don’t have rules for, I love stealing rules from other games to use later, or hijacking a rules system to play a game that I think that system would be better for than the one it’s using. But I also love flavor. I pore over Eberron books, not because I need a new feat for my drow paladin airship captain, but because I want to. I love the history of the world, the nations, the people who move and shake within it. It’s lonely fun at its best.

Your Psychograph Can’t Hold Me!

The problem with these psychographics is that they aren’t completely inclusive of role-playing game motivations. For instance, I can’t figure out where a player who wants to annoy other players (or the GM) fits into the psychographics. Or the guy who only wants to watch and will roll dice when needed. While Mr. Rosewater’s psychographics give us a good launching-off point from which to explore the profiles of role-playing gamers, they don’t cover quite enough ground to be wholly useful in figuring out our players’ motivations.

So in my next post, we’ll be looking at the profiles other folks in the games industry have put out for role-playing gamers. In particular, I hope to be dissecting The Munchkin File, Robin Laws’ archetypes, and Richard Bartle’s exploration of MUD players.

Join me next time, when I won’t be biting Mark Rosewater’s style!

Until then, may your graphics be as far from the psychos as possible.