It is very difficult to get an idea how popular pen & paper roleplaying games are today. Sometimes you can get some limited sales numbers, but nobody knows how many people are still playing with old books or using downloaded pdf files of rulebooks. It is said that Dungeons & Dragons is in decline and that Pathfinder is the new top dog, but given how much longer D&D has been around it is impossible to say how many people are playing some version of it. Anecdotal evidence suggests that game stores selling role-playing material aren't doing as well as they did 20 years ago. And certainly pen & paper roleplaying game lost a substantial part of their potential player-base to computer games over the last three decades.

But I was wondering whether apart from these factors, the decline of pen & paper roleplaying games also has to do with a change in attitudes towards games. Games as a whole have developed from something which was considered to be "for children", over something which was part of geek culture, to something everybody does. The current prime minister of the UK mentioned playing Angry Birds in an interview, and it is hard to imagine Margaret Thatcher talking about playing a game for relaxation. Technology has made computers ubiquitous, and that in turn has made games ubiquitous. Get into a bus or subway today, and you are basically guaranteed to see somebody playing Candy Crush Saga or something similar.

Now computer games have a lot of advantages, primarily that they allow you to play when other players are either not available at all, or available only in distant locations. But computer games also have disadvantages; and when I read some modern comments or blogs on Dungeons & Dragons today, I sometimes wonder whether younger people who grew up with computer games maybe sometimes fail to understand some aspects of pen & paper roleplaying games which are radically different from computer games.

The main limitation of a computer game is that in the game only that is possible that has been foreseen by whoever developed the game. If the devs haven't foreseen you going in some direction, you will hit an invisible wall when you try. And only what is allowed in the rules is possible, the rules are the game. To "cheat" a computer game, you need to change the rules by modifying the code. Or you cheat with a cheat code, at which point you are back to doing only what the devs allow you to do. If you play a lot of computer games, it is easy to think that this could be true for every form of game, that the rules are the game. And approaching pen & paper roleplaying games with that attitude results in a rather inferior game experience.

The rules of a pen & paper roleplaying game cover at most half of the game, and it is the more technical and less creative half. You *can* play a game of Dungeons & Dragons doing only things that are listed in the rules, and I am very much afraid that is what some people do. But then you get series of combat encounters and skill checks, resolving every situation by the rules, which usually call for rolling some dice. Roll-play instead of role-play. I've seen comments on 4E adventures where somebody said "I played it, and it was just a series of combat encounters". And I think that was just a case of inexperienced players and an inexperienced dungeon master trying to play the game completely inside of what is printed in the rule-books and the adventure modules.

For me the combat encounter gameplay, which is the part best described by the rules and thus also the part that differs most from one rule-system to the next, is held together by the "glue" of actual role-playing. And this role-playing is not covered by rules at all. In a printed adventure module the role-playing is covered by text describing for example the motivation of the arch-villain, but there are usually no detailed descriptions on how to translate those motivations into actual game-play.

Contrary to popular belief, 4th edition D&D does not in fact have less instructions on how to role-play, or is otherwise preventing people from role-playing. The "problem" of 4E is having a well-balanced and rather complete set of rules for combat encounters plus some selective non-combat situations (skill challenges). It is thus relatively easy to fall into that trap of believing that the 4E rules are all there is to a game of 4E Dungeons & Dragons. Earlier editions had less complete rules where improvisation was more obviously necessary.

While I would think that the 4E rules would make for a rather good computer role-playing game, my personal experience with 4E is the same as with previous editions: The part not written in the rules is more important and more memorable than the part that is written in the rules. My current adventure in my current campaign is all about how the players over time come to think of the artifact they are collecting piece by piece, and what they will in consequence do with it. It is a grand interactive story with a very open end. The two booklets full of combat and skill encounters set the scene and are fun by themselves, but they aren't what this adventure is about. If we did just the encounters without the role-playing in between, the adventure would be rather boring, and I'd probably rather play a turn-based tactical computer game. But because in Dungeons & Dragons the rules are NOT the game, and there is so much more to it, the game is so much better than that.