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I can't evaluate the utility of that until I see your definition. I can imagine for any given concept both exclusive and inclusive definitions that are poorly designed because they miss the central character of the thing and thus allow counter-examples to be made that take advantage of the...

So, I think you do agree with me in this example. If the book is 20 pages long, it won't feel like an RPG. The same would be true of a book that is 200 pages long or even one that was 2000 pages long and supported say 50 different endings (44 deaths and 6 different good endings for example)...

Sure, but we certainly mean something by them. When you or I say "RPG" we generally know we don't mean Monopoly and know also that the hearer won't understand us to mean Monopoly. So while an inclusive definition might be useful, a definition that is so inclusive as to be meaningless isn't useful.

I'd have to think about that. For example, in my first clause I think that I'm happy to remove "properly", because an RPG that requires no improvisation, I think would cease to meet my definition of an RPG and become something like a board game. Nethack and most cRPGs don't have any...

I'm happy to take it further. I have played with high-prep GMs that can't GM because they don't really know how to prep for a RPG and they instead prep for a short story or a novel or whatever. But I have never played with a low prep GM that was worth a dime. An RPG can't properly be run...

We are finally beginning to move into an era where I was aware of Dragon and had at least some issues available to me. I liked the coin article. While it's practical impact would seem minimal, it is the sort of thing that I think greatly helps a DM visualize what a pile of coins looks like and...

I loathe director stance GMing, but I think people tend to focus on the wrong aspect of what's wrong with it. What's really wrong isn't that you have a story in mind, but that you are trying to tell players how to play their characters - which is one of the core aspects of being a director...

I think Mongoose has done a fantastic job with the IP and really this great news. I had a cousin that played Traveller back in the 1970s but for some reason I skipped over it, probably because I have never really considered Sci Fi settings to be very gameable. But the fantastic quality of the...

Killed Pirate; Talked to Separatist

D&D Campaign JRR Tolkien - The Lord of the Rings HP Lovecraft Complete Works The Brother's Grimm - Grimm's Fairy Tales Tom De Haven - Walker of Worlds, The End of Everything Man, The Last Human Frances Hardinge - A Face Like Glass Tamora Peirce - Squire Chris Wooding - Retribution Falls, The...

One of the big problems that crunchy systems can run into is attempting to assert rules to govern interactions in the system where those interactions have a lot of edge cases that don't model the assumed reality very well. A good example is the conceptually sound system 3e has for modeling...

Oh, right, sorry. Spelling was always one of my nemeses.

Disabled and Boarded Pirate Spaceship

I mean I played consent based MUSHes back in the early 1990s. And I'd count them pretty much as dysfunctional. I mean, I had some fun on occasion, and maybe at some point it would be worth a long post on the MU* culture and the processes of play that developed within it; but, I do think the...

Rulings are rules. Failing to write down the rules doesn't make the process of play inherently simpler or easier. The process of smithing and applying rulings is part of the complexity of the system. The only thing that makes things lighter is forgoing certain aesthetics. For example, "Make...

Suppose we evolve Celebrim's world's simplest RPG system in which all propositions are resolved by coin flips into something resembling a rules light system. That system would have at its mechanical core something like: If the proposition is deemed by the GM impossible, it fails. If the...

A 'Light RPG' places most of the responsibility on the GM. The rules are generally little more than broad guidelines for pass fail mechanics. The game is almost entirely in the hands of the GM. Fortune mechanics tend to have little granularity. You tend to see a lot of rolls resolved by a...

Well, again, agreed but I was never trying to denigrate RPGs. I was just suggesting that as an interactive social experience they deliver particular themes and settings well and others not so well.

While I generally agree, that is my answer. There are not "genres" that RPGs can't handle but there are cross genre conventions that RPGs cannot handle in the general case of being a social game. Genres are so broad that I don't feel like they are a useful description of the limitations of an...

Those are literally 'cantrips'.