Next, the key proposition: at the heart of RPGing is shared imagination. Imaginary people do imagined things in imagined places.
Some boardgames also involve imagined things. But in a boardgame the imagination is optional and epiphenomenal. When I play Mystic Wood, for instance, and my knight fights the troll, I can imagine a fight going on. But all that matters to game play is the numbers on the playing pieces, and the numbers on the rolled dice. The flavour text makes the game more fun, but doesn't actually affect the game play. In a RPG, this is not the case. The fiction matters.
As you call out (at the bottom of your OP, but not quoted here) this restates a position VB stated or restated pretty well. In more recent discussion on his blog, he argues that
TTRPGs are no more fundamentally alike than video games, sports, or any other arbitrary game category. Take three ttrpgs and in principle they might be as different from one another as triathlon is from baseball is from hacky sack. Or as different from one another as Mario Kart is from The Wolf Among Us is from Minesweeper.
The act of roleplaying — like, pretending to be someone — is widespread in games, not special to ttrpgs. It’s a technique that games can include, each game for its own purposes, just the same as it might include skill, endurance, memory, pattern recognition, storytelling, randomization, sorting, patience, or anything else.
Roleplaying games are interesting and surprising games in a lot of ways, but they aren’t all fundamentally like each other or fundamentally unlike other games. They’re just, yknow, some games, with all the same kinds of fads, schools of thought, cross-influences, innovations, compromises, and iterations that other games have.
(Emphasis mine.) Vincent then clarifies in comments that
Fictional positioning is a technical feature that some games have and other games don’t, just like shuffling and dealing cards, moving pieces on a board, or using a screen and a controller.
I’m perfectly comfy with the idea that rpgs are games that include fictional positioning, sure. Some games do, some games don’t, and there’s no problem giving the ones that do, a name. RPGs, card games, video games, playground games, party games, social deduction games — no problem.
So take games that include shuffling and dealing cards and games that use a screen and controller. You’d never say that they were fundamentally unlike each other, categorically different activities, just because of this technical difference. Same thing with fictional positioning.
Fictional positioning doesn’t alienate rpgs from other games. It’s just a fun, cool, interesting, unique, challenging feature they have.
My current feeling on this matter is that fiction is a complex term, or perhaps that is better said as - it's a term that unpacks into some markedly different components. The relationship many folk have historically had with fiction is as a relating or retelling. I read about real or imagined events that have occurred to real or imagined people. Retold fiction has typically been the product of the workings of an author's mind. Today, it can also be a product of the workings of an AI. Something we have discussed in the past and drawn differing conclusions about, is a retelling of game play - a retelling of a chess game, for instance. When I read the "story of a game of chess" and "story by chatgpt", I might call both of those mechanically generated fictions. I could be drawn to say that the chess "fiction" is in truth non-fiction - a series of facts about the play, but then what of chatgpt? Is its fiction anything but a series of facts about (collected from) the play of its mechanisms?
There is a sense, anyway, of fiction as a
product of a process. Viewed that way, boardgames and TTRPGs both produce "fiction", and this is not what I think you are talking about. I think you are talking about something closer to VBs "fictional positioning" which is fiction that will be continuously addressed during play. It is the distinctive and compelling purpose of RPG play to address that fiction.
In boardgames and TTRPGs, players continually form intents and - mediated by rules or agreements around the table - say what they are and see them enacted. In play of boardgames, such intents address the physical game state. To say it is physical is to give it independence from its authors. X and Y can play five plies into a chess game, and then hand the board to Q and R, who can perfectly well continue addressing it. (The forming of intents is not interchangeable among players, but the physical game states are.) In TTRPG, the game state is mental as well as physical. Being mental, it is not perfectly known or reified among the players and must be addressed in a sense that VB has described as retroactive. I believe it is this mental component that you are calling "
the heart of RPGing".
There is something recognisable as fiction that emerges in both boardgames and TTRPGs. Player intents are common to all games. That those intents should shape the fiction that emerges is in turn common to most or all games. Again, this is
not the "fiction" at the heart of RPG that I believe your OP contemplates, but the boundaries are blurred: there is a complex entanglement between emergent fiction and shared imagination. That plays out in - for one example - debates about resolution types.
I find these difficult ideas, so will leave it here not because I feel I've been entirely successful in stating my point, but - as you did - to make space for commentary before attempting to get at something more successful. EDIT, a quote from VB that I want to say should not derail or devalue your OP, but perhaps speaks to some of my feelings of caution...
Either way, I return to the ideas of rpg essentialism and rpg exceptionalism in my thinking a lot. They’re signposts for me: danger bridge out ahead. I want to lay them out here because, knowing this, when you encounter some of my other rpg ideas, you might see better where I’m coming from.
