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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8935242" data-attributes="member: 82106">I'm going to split hairs with you a little bit, and say that IMHO a game like chess does not PRODUCE fiction at all. It may be possible to write some sort of fiction ABOUT the game states, imagining the battle of two kingdoms and assigning character traits, plans, etc. to the various pieces, something like that. You could as well do that long after, so I could take a game of the great 19th Century master, Paul Morphy and write a 'story' of that game just as easily as I could a game I'm playing right now with [USER=42582]@pemerton[/USER]! This is because there are no "leftward arrows" in chess which reach back from the mechanics to fiction. Thus the fiction doesn't really belong to the game, they are entirely disconnected things. I would argue, and I think this follows with Vincent Baker's statements and others, that WITHOUT such 'arrows' there is no RPG. There may be a game, and there may be role play, but the two are not one activity standing together, and thus do not constitute the activity of playing an RPG. It is in this sense that RPGs are unique amongst games, and to be honest, I don't think the fact that some idle person can write a story about a chess game is even relevant to discussions of RPGs at all. Note that by this definition such things as CRPGs generally don't fall within the definition of RPG. I think its reasonable to consider them to occupy a sort of grey area, in that the fiction has no bearing on the actual play, you need not construct any fiction to play them (though they generally supply some fictional 'gloss' of the activities in the game) HOWEVER it is generally understood that one of the agendas of play may be to take game actions based on fictional motives as opposed to ones which are purely utilitarian in terms of the game mechanics. Your motivations will not however feed back into the game, there are still no leftward arrows.Another feature of RPGs, which I believe is pretty much ubiquitous and defining is their open-endedness. In all RPGs of which I am aware, and of which I can conceive in fact, the possible situations and applications of game process cannot be enumerated. In fact, I believe that this is inextricably tied to the first part, the interplay between fiction and game state/mechanics (leftward arrows). It is this interplay which CREATES the infinite possibility space, and without that interplay such would not exist. If there is interplay between fiction and game state, process, or rules, then inevitably the game will have to deal with whatever fiction the participants have generated, which is impossible to catalog or enumerate. This is also why games like the 4e-inspired board games that WotC published are still not RPGs, even if you EXPECTED to role play, because effectively you could take a history of any of those games and simply go back and write the fiction after the fact, as it doesn't change what happens next. Now, how is that different from 'traditional' RPGs, like early editions of D&D? The difference is in terms of open-ended interactions between fiction and rules. At some point, early on, some player picked up a flask of oil and tossed it at a monster, and there was NO RULE for that. The GM (I expect it was Dave Arneson) came up with some sort of game mechanical effect resulting from this fiction, and then that fed back into the next piece of fiction (IE "the orc, now burning like a torch, shrieks and runs off down the corridor before disappearing around a corner about 40' down."). That makes it an RPG, and I would argue the original D&D game is pretty close to the most basic form such a game can take.</blockquote>

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