A little while back I played Disco Elysium for the first time. I think I don’t need to explain to the cohost userbase that Hey That Game’s Pretty Good. I was baffled, though, when I started looking at other people’s responses and analyses of the game online and saw multiple people say that part of what they like about it is how well it captures the role-playing experience of a tabletop RPG.
As someone who didn’t/doesn’t play all that many video games but has spent the last several years steeping in discussions of how TTRPGs work, the differences between these things, rather than their similarities, was what stood out to me. A lot of what Disco is and how it operates is deeply tied to its video-game-y-ness. A tabletop game, even a pre-written adventure, has theoretically infinite room for player creativity, while Disco Elysium, for all its winding branches, is a defined narrative with hard boundaries. And the game knows this! It does a lot of clever storytelling through the structure of its dialogue trees, the places where the player hits a hard edge and has no easy way out.
But this did get me thinking: is there meaningful overlap in what we call “roleplaying” in these situations? To be clear, I’m not asking “Why do we call both these things RPGs?” which is just a question of history, but rather “What do people mean when they say these things are similar?” Because I’ve seen this idea expressed independently by so many people, and the more I think about the more I agree it’s getting at something.
(I will add up top here that some of this post may have turned out to be me over-intellectualizing to get to conclusions that seem to have been intuitively clear to others. But I still enjoyed the process of chewing on these ideas, so maybe someone else will find them interesting too.)
My initial confusion was this: one of the core mechanics of Disco is the stat checks. But the fact that the game talks about the mechanic in those terms doesn’t actually mean it has much in common with stat checks in TTRPGs. While there are the skill checks that the player chooses to make, I’d argue that far more central to the way Disco tells stories is the passive checks—and the thing those do is semi-randomly insert or remove little bits of prose into a larger body of text. The similarity between that and how “passive checks” work in TTRPGs that have them is tenuous. Passing one of those checks is just as (if not more) likely to reframe a scene’s tone, emphasis a theme, or tell a joke, as it is to give the player character a diegetic advantage, which is generally what you’d expect from a traditional “skill check.”
Okay, what about the white and red checks you choose within the dialogue tree? I still think the dice play a different role in a game like Disco than they do in tabletop story games. There’s this idea I’ve often seen expressed by others, and definitely internalized in how I think about my own design, that the reason we turn to dice rolls or card draws or prompt lists is because they provide external input that keeps the conversation moving. But in Disco, that isn’t the case. The developers have to write both paths through the pass/fail branch. It's not making a decision for them. But neither do I think dice rolls in Disco serve a purely simulationist function. Instead, they are another tool through which tone is communicated in any given scene. They heighten tension. They put you in the POV character’s headspace, in the same way that things like word choice and sentence structure can be used to do in traditional prose.
Similarly, granular bonuses to dice rolls can easily become meaningless math, but often in Disco the non-stat-based bonuses aren’t important for the way they effect the roll itself, but rather for how they highlight a narrative element’s relevance to the current situation. I was trying to think of an example to help make this point when this Tumblr post collating some of the more evocatively-phrased roll bonuses happened to cross my feed. Thanks Tumblr!
Dice do these kinds of thing in tabletop too, of course. The process of rolling dice and thinking through what bonuses apply does carry particular story content. The difference is that in this case much of the work to set these moments up falls on the GM, rather than the developers. Rolling dice can only add so much tension to a scene that doesn't already have clear stakes. That said, my favorite PbtA systems, for example, give you a framework for the kinds of things that are interesting to pull in for a roll. The conditions mechanic in Masks, for instance, gives a penalty to certain rolls based on your character's emotional state, which means that emotions are often foregrounded at moments of drama.
Dice aside, there is also an overlap in the most basic sense of what the term “roleplaying” is getting at. They’re games that encourage the player to make decisions based on the fiction rather than (only) on mechanical systems. That also describes plenty of other narrative video games and interactive fiction—which is fine! There is interesting overlap there. But there’s also a more particular element to Disco’s RPG-ness that I’m trying to hone in on here. I don’t know, maybe it’s just the game existing outside the text box that makes it hit my brain differently. The visually-impressive environments certainly don’t hurt.
But the thing is, it’s not just that Disco Elysium creates emotionally resonant narrative/s that happen to be interactive. Something about the combination of its structure, writing quality, and sheer scale allows it to feel in play like an emotionally resonant narrative that I had a hand in crafting. Something beautiful is going to happen, and in an instant, it can become the thematic core of your story. Or you can never touch that wall at all. It doesn’t """matter""" except emotionally; and, vitally, it does matter emotionally. Very few options feel devoid of meaning, even if that meaning doesn't come in the form of a tangible effect later.
This, to me, is the thing that does overlap with my favorite moments of tabletop play. When a tabletop RPG is really working, when the pieces of the story you've been telling come together just right, there's a kind of magic to it. Disco gets to this same feeling, through different means. The individual bits of prose are a set of tools to allow you to create narrative in the same way that table conversation and dice rolls are in a TTRPG. It's this magic that sets TTRPGs apart from a similar moment in a more conventional narrative, because there’s the feeling that we did that. Even if sometimes that’s a bit of an illusion, and it’s the game that brought us there.