A Taxonomy of Roleplaying Utterances v0.1

There are lots of ways that gamers characterize play styles, many of which focus on the intentions of the play group. I won't recap those here—this post is about a different lens for looking at play style, namely, what are people talking about?

I Describe Fireball At Them

A few years ago I watched a YouTube video where the players spent an incredible amount of time describing how the actions of their characters would be experienced by others. One player spends upwards of sixty seconds describing how his character sits down, unpacks a little flute, and plays it.

In another campaign, a different player would have said, "I cast Sleep."

This got me thinking about a lens to examine play focused on the type of statements that people are making, based on classifying the statements uttered at the table. With such a classification scheme, you could look at any of the thousands of hours of actual play available on the internet and annotate it.

Taxonomy of Roleplaying Utterances

So, without further ado, here's a draft. This is a bit of a mess; it's a list of things that I've seen happen, sliced into groups based on what I thought was interesting. I present it here mostly so you could either:

1. try to use it
2. come up with a different taxonomy
3. publish and link to transcripts of actual play so that others can do 1) or 2)

I've put it in a hierarchy not because things down on the leaves are far apart, just to make it easier to label things "100", "200" and move on, and perhaps come back and tag it with more precision later.

A few definitions:

Fiction: the qualitative description of the game world and everything in it: the environment, events, the characters and their feelings. 

Quantity: a characterization of the world originating in the rules that uses a number, a tag, an enumerated state of some kind.

A 6' tall ranger is a fictional element; if the ranger is Medium, that's a mechanical quantity.

A Taxonomy of Roleplaying Utterances v0.1

• 100 Fiction
• 110 (GM) General descriptions
• 111 Environmental description
• 112 Events
• 113 NPC actions/behavior/visible emotions
• 120 Clarifying (e.g. asking for more information, resolving ambiguity)
• 121 Clarifying the fiction
• 122 Clarifying feasibility/consequences of action (e.g. "is it too far to jump across?")
• 130 (Player) Stating a PC action (e.g. "I grab the chalice from the altar.")
• 131 Descriptions of PC actions (e.g. "My cloak blows in the wind as I leap onto the stone table, I'm like.. silhouetted against the sky."
• 140 GM Describing PC Action or its results (e.g. "Okay, you leap forward and shove the door—it swings open and bangs against the far door frame..")
• 150 Fictionalizing a quantity or mechanical outcome (e.g. [Having rolled 2 damage]" The dagger leaves a long, ragged scratch on your arm.")
• 160 Dialogue
• 161 IC Dialogue (e.g. "The merchant says, 'My horse is the fastest in the land!'")
• 162 Description of dialogue (e.g. "The merchant prattles on about his horse and how it's the fastest in the land." e.g. "I tell the King the whole story about the orcs at the mine.")
• 170 Inner experiences
• 171 Reactions/emotions of your character (e.g. "My guy is totally taken aback, like.. I thought the Queen was an ally!")
• 172 Reactions/emotions of someone else's character (e.g. GM: "You feel your hands trembling as you step out onto the ledge." "Haha, you're totally hot for me.")
• 173 Intentions (e.g. "GM: The monster isn't trying to flee." e.g. "PC: I need to find a way to get out of this damned sewer.")
• 174 (GM) PC inferences (e.g "You get the impression he's just trying to end the conversation.")
• 175 Rationale for choices (e.g. "Well, I'm chaotic evil, after all. [I'm going to untie that rope.]")
• 180 Exposition (e.g. background information, contextualizing what PCs would know about what they see)
• 200 Engaging with Mechanics
• 210 Rules
• 212 Rules explanation
• 211 Rules query (e.g. "Can I do a follow-up charge against flying enemies?")
• 213 Rules debate/discussion/disagreement
• 214 Choosing rules, procedures, resolution approach (e.g. "Let's use the one-roll system for this fight.")
• 215 Lobbying for a particular mechanical interpretation (e.g. "I'm prone, but I'm prone on a giant table, shouldn't that offset the disadvantage?")
• 220 Resolving
• 221 Mechanical preamble to actions ("because of my instinct, I'm going to..")
• 224 (GM) Stating consequences (e.g. if you fail the save, you fall off the cliff)
• 225 Rolling dice/using a randomizer (e.g. "I rolled a four.")
• 226 Applying rules/procedures (e.g. "A roll of four is a severe wound, but also I mark xp. Hey, that means my skill goes up!" e.g. "Everyone roll initiative.")
• 227 Choosing mechanical options (e.g. "I rolled a 3; I need to either flee or surrender. I guess I'll surrender.")
• 230 Discussing quantities (e.g. "I have four hit points." "My sword is +2 against golems." "I only need another 200 xp to go up a level.")
• 231 Asking about a quantity (e.g. "How many hit points do you have left?" "Do you have the Leap ability?")
• 300 Out of Character (or ambiguously IC/OCC)
• 301 Approach/tactics discussion (e.g. "Dude, what? Use the Fireball, why are you saving it?" "Can we just ride around these guys and not fight them at all?")
• 302 Prior events of the campaign (e.g. summaries of last session, reminders)
• 222 Clarifying intent of a player (e.g. "Are you really just trying to push the orc back a square?")
• 303 Cheering/lamenting an outcome, pretend IC shit-talking (e.g. "You totally smoked that orc! he's just a crater! lol")
• 304 Opining (e.g. "We're totally getting double-crossed here, right?")
• 305 Safety tools (e.g. "Let's X-card that.")
• 306 Discussing play (e.g. "I loved it when you," "My favorite moment was when..")
• 400 Off topic
• 404 Discussing a missing player

If you do actually annotate a transcript with this or any other taxonomy, please indicate what taxonomy you used and its version! (e.g. by linking to it).

Some problems and caveats

1. Any taxonomy will all sorts of assumptions baked into it. For example, there are GMless games! I have no idea if this would look applied to a Microscope or Quiet Year session. All those are problems for v0.2!
2. Any classification scheme will have lots of edge cases where statements are hard to classify.

An Example

Ara Winter kindly provided me this transcript of play from a game of his, for this purpose. It's been sitting on my hard drive for years. Here's the raw transcript, without my annotations:

DM: And there is the pond, here.

G: I care most about the area under the planks and the pond.

DM: Well, uh. The only thing you see under the planks is stale fetid water, and inside the pond, you see a giant floating frog corpse about five feet in length.

R: Is in intact?

DM: Fairly intact, yes. It's in the water? So you would have to, I don't know, either get in the water or pull it towards you in some way.

R: How far into the water?

DM: Well, the whole pond thing is maybe 25, 30 feet across, So 10-12 feet?

R: I bet we could throw, what do you call them? One of our grappling hooks.

G: Do we want. . . a frog corpse?

R: Well we might be able to figure out how the frog died.

J: Did the frog corpse have anything on his person? Or is he just a naked frog.

DM: Well, all you see is just the belly of a frog that's about five feet long. And only just parts of it, because it is kind of floating in the water.

J: And it's obviously dead?

DM: Well it doesn't look alive no. You don't normally see frogs like that, lying like that, upside down and not moving.

J: Ok, Can I use my quarterstaff?

DM: Not your quarterstaff, it's about 7' long.

R: All right, I take my grappling hook, with a rope and try and throw it out there.

DM: Ok, you can grapple the frog. It makes a thicking *plctch* sound as it hits the water and your rope goes into it. I mean it's standing water because it's separate from the river and you can hook the frog and pull it towards the shore which you do. You now have a frog corpse near the shore.

J: Is there anything on the frog corpse.

Here it is, annotated by me with Taxonomy of Roleplaying Utterances v1:

DM: [110 - description] And there is the pond, here.

G: [120 - clarity] I care most about the area under the planks and the pond.

DM: [110 - description] Well, uh. The only thing you see under the planks is stale fetid water, and inside the pond, you see a giant floating frog corpse about five feet in length.

R: [120 - clarity] Is in intact?

DM: [110 - description] Fairly intact, yes. It's in the water? [122 - feasibility] So you would have to, I don't know, either get in the water or pull it towards you in some way.

R: [120 - clarity] How far into the water?

DM: [110 - description] Well, the whole pond thing is maybe 25, 30 feet across, So 10-12 feet?

R: [301 - approach] I bet we could throw, what do you call them? One of our grappling hooks.

G: [301 - approach] Do we want. . . a frog corpse?

R: [301 - approach] Well we might be able to figure out how the frog died.

J: [120 - clarity] Did the frog corpse have anything on his person? Or is he just a naked frog.

DM: [110 - description] Well, all you see is just the belly of a frog that's about five feet long. And only just parts of it, because it is kind of floating in the water.

J: [120 - clarity] And it's obviously dead?

DM: [110 - description] Well it doesn't look alive no. [180 - exposition] You don't normally see frogs like that, lying like that, upside down and not moving.

J: [122 - feasibility] Ok, Can I use my quarterstaff?

DM: [122 - feasibility] Not your quarterstaff, it's about 7' long.

R: [130 - player action] All right, I take my grappling hook, with a rope and try and throw it out there.

DM: [140 - describe outcome] Ok, you can grapple the frog. It makes a thicking *plctch* sound as it hits the water and your rope goes into it. I mean it's standing water because it's separate from the river and you can hook the frog and pull it towards the shore which you do. You now have a frog corpse near the shore.

J: [120 - clarity] Is there anything on the frog corpse.