Essay 1: Chess Supports Roleplay

This essay is the first in a series of essays about repurposing board games for RPGs. I wrote it as part of the design process for Violent Delights: A chess-based RPG about Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet. Does Chess Support Roleplay?In recent months, Seraphina Garcia Ramirez's blog post “What do we mean when we say a game supports play?” revisited some old tabletop RPG discourse. The original discourse, as I remember it, was about whether D&D supports roleplay: D&D presents highly structured rules around combat but few around roleplaying and socializing. And yet, much of what players do in their D&D games is not enabled or bound by rules.Sera shifted this discussion, arguing that the game text is insufficient to explain certain acts of play — that we bring ourselves and our culture to bear on our play. Among other things, she points to the trend of players importing their coffeeshop alternate universe (AU) into D&D 5e. The term “support,” she says, brushes past "the complexity and…