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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 4515820" data-attributes="member: 42582">Obviously we disagree. I think it is possible to have a functional RPGing playstyle in which players can also narrate/determine the state of the world.Well, if the east river is already known to have a certain geography in the gameworld, then neither player nor GM can simply deem it to be different. Whether the player or the GM is permitted to narrate the actions of a river dragon that change the flow of the river will depend on the details of the game rules (and other factors as well). In my view this wouldn't necessarily be absurd for a high-level Epic character resolving a skill challenge.WelI was focussing more on "would" than "could". In a certain sort of educative roleplaying activity (which I think HowandWhy takes to be the paradigm) the focus is on doing what one's character would do.An RPG can take a similar approach - the character is (more or less) predetermined and the challenge to the player is acting out that character. But an RPG can also be about the player using the character as a vehicle to make some other (aesthetically interesting) point. So the question the player asks him/herself is not "What would my character do here?" but rather "What should I have my character do here, given where I want this story to go?"Are you agreeing here (at least roughly) with Just A Nobody? That is, are you thinking of the player primarily as a describer of a predetermined character rather than as an author of a character whose nature isn't (fully) known until the course of play brings it out? If so, then I think that this is one way of RPGing but not the only way. I also think there can be "authorial" RPGing. (Is this a pre-modernist/modernist thing? Or am I wrong to deploy categories from literary criticism here? I'm sure there could be post-modernist RPGing as well, in which the fourth wall is constantly broken, but I don't think I'd enjoy it.)I guess I have a more liberal notion of what is involved in "staying in character". It need not be role exploration/description in Just A Nobody's sense. But even when RPGing in an authorial fashion,  the PC is still, in some sense, the locus of the player's participation in the game (eg in the monastic order example upthread, the player is not just arbitrarily stipulating the world, but is doing it in terms of the relationship of various gameworld elements to his/her PC).I think we're defining it different. I don't agree that any kind of make-believe is role-playing. I don't think that all RPGing is storytelling. I do think that some RPGing is storytelling. I don't know that I can give necessary and sufficient conditions for a gaming activity to count as RPGing - but a certain richness of story, combined with the notion of a particular PC as the locus of a player's participation in the game, even if not the limit of the player's participation in the game, might be sufficient conditions.</blockquote>

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