While listening to a Patreon-subscriber extra on my favorite Podcast, Weird Studies, it dawned on me why I love tabletop roleplaying games in a way that I don't love miniature wargames or boardgames. Now, don't get me wrong. I love miniature wargames and many boardgames, but they have a "low ceiling" when it comes to fulfillment for me. There's something that rings in my soul when playing or running TTRPGs that isn't present with the others.
I've thought a lot about why TTRPGs are my main hobby of choice. What do I get out of it? It's not mere nostalgia for having played the games as a kid. I have nostalgia for other things (the past ubiquity of used bookstores, the freedom of being a more-or-less free-range child, video game arcades, and so forth), but, whereas those things are nostalgic explicitly because I can't go back to them, tabletop games are still around and I feel like they've grown with me. But that's not the reason I love them.
Here's the secret: I'm a competitor. In fact, I'm very competitive. My wife and I used to play Risk a lot when we were first married and had no money (but we had a beat up copy of Risk), but we discovered that we simply could not play the game together because we are (gasp!) both competitive. That competitiveness has served us well when we're facing the rest of the world, but we have learned to compromise, to give, forgive, and work around our competitive streaks.
Back to the present (more or less): Not long ago, I was playing a miniatures game. I knew the person running the game and I knew two other players. Three of the other players were strangers to me. One of these seemed to know the game master or had had some past interaction with them. As we progressed along, I got a sort of irritated vibe from this particular player, especially when the game wasn't moving at the pace he wanted it to. Truth be told only two people at the table had played the game before, and one of them was him (I was not the other - this was a brand new mini game to me). He became increasingly curt with . . . well, everyone who wasn't him, if I'm being honest. He was extremely rules-lawyerly, which I can understand in a mini's game where measurements matter, but this guy was borderline belligerent. I admit, I pushed back a bit, and he finally backed down, but, to be frank, it felt yucky. I realized, upon stopping to think about the man's behavior for a bit, that he was really, REALLY competitive.
Now, I've known some people to be overly competitive while playing TTRPGs. In games and people that I normally play with, those players are looked upon as anathema. I've seen people acting like jerks being jettisoned from a table by a DM and I'm glad it was done. It was ugly, but necessary for the enjoyment of the rest of us. I've been lucky in that I've never had to eject someone for being a jerk. But I would, in a heartbeat, because I believe that TTRPGs are a cooperative venture, even, at times, when there is some "player versus player" element present or, more properly, "character versus character".
It is this cooperative aspect, unbounded by proscriptive rules, that I think draws me to TTRPGs above other genres of game. I've played cooperative boardgames and rather enjoyed them, but these are bounded by the rules as written. The cooperation in TTRPGs is of a different hemisphere, or another order of magnitude, where an individual's creativity can transcend the bounds of the game by creating something with other players that the writers of the game could have never anticipated. It is a meeting of the imaginations of the players, rather than a forced constraint provided by the machinations of the game designer. Perhaps this is why the proverbial "rules lawyer" is universally despised by all but himself? TTRPG players, for the most part, want freedom to choose and the freedom to interact within a set of agreed upon rules. The "rules lawyer" breaks this assumed social contract.
This is also why I am not opposed to character versus character interactions, so long as allowing such interactions was agreed upon before the start of the game. Of course, there must be full consensus here, so players must ask themselves what do they really want out of the game? Are they willing to sacrifice some comfort for the sake of the communal game? And what is "too far"? All of these questions (and I'm certain I'm missing some) need to be considered in this instance.
What do you think? Do you also find more freedom of expression in TTRPGs than in boardgames? Are there exceptions? If so, I'd love to hear about specific boardgames that allow the same degree of freedom and creativity among players.
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