Chess is not an RPG: The Illusion of Game Balance

[Umbran]

As far as what the point of categorisation is, well, it provides tools in order to assess issues with a game.

Here's some wood to build the frame of a house. And a pipe wrench. Go!

I have noted, several times, that you need to be more specific about the goal before you figure out what definitions you need. You cannot just define terms, and expect that they'll be useful in general. That's like expecting a tool picked from your toolbox at random to be applicable to a particular home repair job you're trying to do. What issues are you trying to assess? In what games? Or, do you figure somehow your non-purpose-built definitions will be good for all issues in all games? Define yourself a hammer, and every game will look like a nail!

In the world of physics, I might point you to coordinate systems - your choice of system can dramatically simplify, or dramatically complicate, a job you are trying to do. Any flat three dimensional space could be described with spherical coordinates, or rectangular coordinates. Writing down the motion of our local planets in, say, Earth-centered rectangular coordinates is insanely difficult. Doing it in Sol-centered spherical coordinates is far easier. Meanwhile, you'd likely not use spherical coordinates to describe the addition you'd like to build onto your home to the contractor. But it is still just a flat 3D space we are talking about.

Case in point: Forge Theory and the 1999 WotC survey give us two differing perspectives on games and gamers. Different language, defining different things, but both looking at the same phenomena.

Pick the job first, then pick the tools, not the other way around.

 

[Bedrockgames]

But, again, we're back to duelling anecdotes. "Many player", "many tables", "lots of people", who knows how many these actually are? Is the Charops board at the WOTC site indicative of how the mainstream player plays D&D? I don't know and neither do you. Voices of what fans? Fans who post on websites like En World? Good grief, we've seen poll after poll where the average age of respondents on EN World is about a decade or two older than the average D&D player. I mean, the average age of a Paizo Dragon reader was about 22 - at least according to their own magazine poll done a few years back. The average age here is darn near 40.

So, what's the truth here? Are gnomes a beloved element of D&D, or a minor element that got blown out of proportion? I don't know. And, again, neither do you.
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Sure but this is the nature of designing for a niche hobby. Concrete data is not widely available and we have to base much of what we do on things like 1) direct customer feedback, 2) what we see and expect at our own table, 3) what we see online and what we see at other tables, 4) sales, and 5) what little data is out there.

Unless a designer has the pocket book of WOTC, in depth market research is unlikely. And when people do conduct in depth market research they usually keep the useful information to themselves (at least in gaming).

So on the one hand, yes this is all anecdotal based on peoples experience, but on the other hand there isn't much more than that to truly go on.

I keep seeing you talk about having categorizations and analytical tools. Those sound great but to make useful tools you need real data and I don't think many of the models people have proposed have enough of that. And I don't think us constructing a definition of RPG here in this forum based on the arguments you, I or anyone else puts forward, is going to do us much good. So far all I have seen are definitions that narrow the hobby in a bad way. At worst I've seen definitions that try to sneak in one play style over others. think an honest definition simply describes what RPG means to people who play such games and identify as such players. The best way for us to do that is share our different experiences of what RPG means at the tables we play at.

 

[Bedrockgames]

As far as what the point of categorisation is, well, it provides tools in order to assess issues with a game. @Profislaes talks about Vampire, and I'm assuming OWoD here. Now, was original Vampire a story game or a traditional RPG? It billed itself as more of a story game, but, mechanically, it was pretty much stock standard trad RPG. And, IMO, therein lie the problems with the system. As a trad game, it lacked the rigourous math that trad RPG's need. It was ludicrously easy to break VtM during chargen. You almost had to actively try to not break the system, it was so easy to break. But, as a story game, it lacked all the elements that story games need - the devolution of power and authority over the game from the DM (or Storyteller in this case) to the players. It was too much of a traditional game to really work very well as a story game.
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Tools and Categories are just models when it comes to game design and they can blind us to things as well as help us. There are models for all sorts of things in this world and while frameworks of understanding are helpful they usually have a downside too. If you cut the world up in to four groups, you only see things in terms of those four groups. In a hobby made up of highly individual groupings of gamers with 4-7 individual people at each table, that can be a problem. I think this is why for example, highly focused games tend to be niche. Most tables tend to be (in my experience) a sloppy mixture of styles, tastes and motivations. And many individual gamers themselves are a blend of styles, tastes and motivations. When you start establishing categories and definitions in conversations like this one, it can be very difficult to fit them to real people and groups. This is why I have pretty much abandoned the things I've picked up on the internet in terms of how I see gaming. It just never really aligns with the reality.

I think Vampire and the Forge is an example though of how "categories" and "tools" can create blindspots. Sure Vampire billed itself as a storytelling game (though it is important to understand they in no way meant this at all like people at the forge do when they say story game). And yes some people felt the system didn't live up to the hype in the text. On the other hand there are lots and lots of people who love white wolf games and believe fully in the storyteller concept. It might not of worked for you, and it might not have worked for me (probably for different reasons) but I know for a fact there is a huge community of people (probably bigger than the community of people you or I belong to) who think it is the best thing in the world. I think it is odd to hold up vampire as a failure of design when it was the first game to ever truly give D&D a run for its money before Pathfinder (and pathfinder is really just D&D). In hindsight, some of what they did seems a little odd, but at the time it worked and it converted a lot of people from D&D to Vampire.

That said, I don't want to take away from the fact that something productive did come out of that discussion. Vampire did upset some players. Some took this and made things like story games, others took this and thought more in terms of character agency and immersion. But still in my experience, the majority of gamers were not at all concerned with this discussion. If they were I don't think things like adventure paths would be so popular. For all of our complaining about railroading or people complaining about mechanics not producing story, people still very much play games like D&D and Pathfinder the way they've been played for years. A few concepts from both camps have been brought in here or there, but very, very lightly I think. Still I think there is a danger in reading the success of Vampire from our small online enclaves and the gaming philosophies they produce.

So I think more than models and definitions (particularly definitions because SOOOO often I see them used to establish the primacy of one style over others), we would do better to just game and learn from the tables we play at. That is limited. But it is real. It isn't abstract like these discussions. I can be persuaded by a good argument online that GMs should always do X or games should always do Y but 99% of the time, it doesn't pan out at my actual table in my experience. At the end of the day I am there to make sure people at the table have a good time. So I find it much more helpful to listen to the table than well constructed arguments about definitions and models.

 

[prosfilaes]

Are gnomes a beloved element of D&D, or a minor element that got blown out of proportion?

That's not an objective question. It doesn't matter how much data you could have, you could redirect the budget of the NSA, FBI and CIA to surveilling gamers, wiretapping their houses, installing cameras over their gaming tables, and analyzing the data, and you still couldn't answer that question. I suspect it wouldn't be that hard to get some counts of how many people are playing gnomes, even if they're rough and partial, or counts on sales of gnome orientated books versus elf orientated books.

As a trad game, it lacked the rigourous math that trad RPG's need. It was ludicrously easy to break VtM during chargen. You almost had to actively try to not break the system, it was so easy to break.

I don't know what means coming from the text of the game. You have to study how players make characters to know that. You'd have to know what power meant in game. One argument about wizards vs. fighters in D&D I saw here recently said that AD&D 1 was balanced because the hoards of hirelings protected the wizard at low levels and empowered the fighter at high levels. That doesn't mean anything until you study how people played the game, whether they played it with those types of hirelings.

So, you wound up with a game that looked like an R rated Supers game.

I believe that was sometimes true. I also believe it was sometimes not true, and I know that without looking at how people actually play it, you can't tell the difference. It's easy to play D&D as R rated Supers; how many people do? You can't tell without looking at how people play the game.

Having the categorisation and analytical tools that categorisation brings to the table means that you can look at a game and judge it's flaws and good bits much better than if you treat each game as a unique item with no relationship to other games.

What flaws? That's like looking at an airplane engine and talking about judging its flaws while refusing to put it in a windtunnel or on an airplane. And that's something that can theoretically be simulated, unlike human behavior.

 

[Hussar]

Here's some wood to build the frame of a house. And a pipe wrench. Go!

I have noted, several times, that you need to be more specific about the goal before you figure out what definitions you need. You cannot just define terms, and expect that they'll be useful in general. That's like expecting a tool picked from your toolbox at random to be applicable to a particular home repair job you're trying to do. What issues are you trying to assess? In what games? Or, do you figure somehow your non-purpose-built definitions will be good for all issues in all games? Define yourself a hammer, and every game will look like a nail!

In the world of physics, I might point you to coordinate systems - your choice of system can dramatically simplify, or dramatically complicate, a job you are trying to do. Any flat three dimensional space could be described with spherical coordinates, or rectangular coordinates. Writing down the motion of our local planets in, say, Earth-centered rectangular coordinates is insanely difficult. Doing it in Sol-centered spherical coordinates is far easier. Meanwhile, you'd likely not use spherical coordinates to describe the addition you'd like to build onto your home to the contractor. But it is still just a flat 3D space we are talking about.

Case in point: Forge Theory and the 1999 WotC survey give us two differing perspectives on games and gamers. Different language, defining different things, but both looking at the same phenomena.

Pick the job first, then pick the tools, not the other way around.

But your analogy falls flat. Genre classification isn't as specific as a pipe wrench. It would be closer to, "You want to build a house? What kind of house do you want to build?" Without classifications, you can't ask that question. You can't ask, "Do you want a log house, or a split level or a back split or a three storey house or what? "

I can say, "I want to design a game". The obvious question here is, "What kind of game is it?" Without genre classification, all you get are things like, "Well, it's kinda like A, not like B and C is right out the window". Same goes for "I want to play a game". What kind of game do you want to play? What kinds of games do you enjoy? Do you enjoy games like X or games like Y? Which is where your genre conventions come into play.

That's why your physics analogy also falls flat. You are applying a mathematical model to genre. Good grief, genre is never that specific. It's porous and there are all sorts of things bleeding over from one edge to the other. That sort of thing usually doesn't happen in physics until you get into the really wonky stuff.

That's like looking at an airplane engine and talking about judging its flaws while refusing to put it in a windtunnel or on an airplane. And that's something that can theoretically be simulated, unlike human behavior.

Read more: http://www.enworld.org/forum/showth...Illusion-of-Game-Balance/page41#ixzz3HVJrXTXO

And yet, we do that all the time. In the design phase, you can exclude all sorts of designs long before you get to the wind tunnel. You certainly don't need to build a working model to tell that some designs are flawed. A steam engine won't work, for example, to fly an airplane (at least, not easily) and we can reject steam power for airplanes. We can look at the design of an engine and know, fairly well, how much thrust that engine will produce and know, while still in the drawing on paper (or computer screen) that an engine might not be powerful enough or too powerful for a particular air frame.

All of this we know because we have all sorts of theoretical models for how engines work.

After forty years, tens of thousands of hours of play time, hundreds of thousands of players, why can't we start building theoretical models for RPG's? I don't need to sit a group down and play test to know that a game that uses farting for a random generator is likely not going to work. Why can we not look at the body of work that is out there and not create genres for that body of work?

 

[prosfilaes]

After forty years, tens of thousands of hours of play time, hundreds of thousands of players, why can't we start building theoretical models for RPG's? I don't need to sit a group down and play test to know that a game that uses farting for a random generator is likely not going to work. Why can we not look at the body of work that is out there and not create genres for that body of work?

Err...

But, again, we're back to duelling anecdotes. "Many player", "many tables", "lots of people", who knows how many these actually are? Is the Charops board at the WOTC site indicative of how the mainstream player plays D&D? I don't know and neither do you.

If we don't know how the mainstream player plays the most common game on the market, how on Earth are we going to build a theoretical model of how a game acts in play?

 

[Bedrockgames]

After forty years, tens of thousands of hours of play time, hundreds of thousands of players, why can't we start building theoretical models for RPG's? I don't need to sit a group down and play test to know that a game that uses farting for a random generator is likely not going to work. Why can we not look at the body of work that is out there and not create genres for that body of work?

You absolutely can if you want, but people don't have to accept your model or your definitions if they fail to reflect their experience at the table. You yourself point out we know very very little of actual play (we don't know how much char-op boards reflect widespread use at real tables for instance). I don't know what basis there is here for a working model of RPGs (and I personally haven't seen one that I have found useful for design or for play). My concern with models and definitions is they so often seem to be about getting the hobby where folks would like to see it of (don't like min-maxing? make a model of RPGs that excludes that as a valid style of play. don't like story? make a model of roleplaying where story is the antithesis of roleplaying). We can do the same with definitions. Once again this is exactly what Wick is trying to do. Clearly he favors some kind of RP-heavy campaign and is redefining RPG to exclude groups that play differently than him (even though I think most of us know a huge chunk of people play the way he defines as not roleplaying). What is worse, he also clearly doesn't have much love for D&D and so he uses definitions to claim it isn't an RPG---which is an insane claim to make). Stuff like this is exactly why folks are so wary of models and people trying to control definitions in the hobby.

What I do know is players are pretty diverse and to get a game off the ground you need to please 4-7 people at the same time. Give me a model that allows me to do that, to sell lots of books and make lots of gamers happy, and I would happily use it.

 

[Janx]

What do we call Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea today?

I've forked a bit. I think you missed my point though.

In the 21st century, a story written now, about a guy captaining a star ship is Science Fiction

In the 24th century, a story written then, about a guy captaining a star ship is just contemporary fiction.

 

[Hussar]

Err...



If we don't know how the mainstream player plays the most common game on the market, how on Earth are we going to build a theoretical model of how a game acts in play?

Why would you claim we don't know this? Or are you now claiming that players who play entirely in Pawn stance, not assuming any roll at the table are the mainstream of play?

I'd say we have a pretty decent idea how the mainstream of players play. But, even without knowing how the game is being played at a given table, we should still be able to look at the rules themselves and figure out what the game is about.

Again, you are going in a very strange direction here. Why would you insist on including "how we play the game" in a definition of game genre? Why can't we simply look at the game itself?

I don't care how people are playing the game. It's pretty hard to know that. I care about what the game says it's trying to do.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I don't care how people are playing the game. It's pretty hard to know that. I care about what the game says it's trying to do.

That is fine, but it is the opposite of what I am concerned with. I care what people are doing. Certainly what the rules say are important too, but they cannot be looked at separate from how they are being used in my opinion if the goal is to improve design. Looking at just the text can lead you to conclude that something is imbalanced or flawed but then you see how it is used at the table and you realize it isn't a problem for 90% of people, or again looking at the text alone you might conclude a mechanic is perfectly designed for a particular goal, then you realize when you talk to people they have a lot of trouble implementing it.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Why would you claim we don't know this? Or are you now claiming that players who play entirely in Pawn stance, not assuming any roll at the table are the mainstream of play?
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I am not a fan of the term pawn stance, but if I understand what you mean by it, I think they are a bigger chunk than you realize. And I think, while not a majority, not the mainstream, they make up a huge enough portion of how people approach RPGs, we shouldn't leave them out of a definition of the term, of the hobby. The impression I get is some gamers don't much care for people in perpetual "pawn stance" so they don't want that to be considered roleplaying. I have no problem with roleplaying including that. It isn't how I personally play but I've seen it at enough tables to know it is common and the people doing it still regard what they are doing as roleplaying rather than playing a board game. These people used to drive me nuts, until I realized they are doing nothing wrong except having fun playing D&D.

 

[Janx]

I am not a fan of the term pawn stance, but if I understand what you mean by it, I think they are a bigger chunk than you realize. And I think, while not a majority, not the mainstream, they make up a huge enough portion of how people approach RPGs, we shouldn't leave them out of a definition of the term, of the hobby. The impression I get is some gamers don't much care for people in perpetual "pawn stance" so they don't want that to be considered roleplaying. I have no problem with roleplaying including that. It isn't how I personally play but I've seen it at enough tables to know it is common and the people doing it still regard what they are doing as roleplaying rather than playing a board game. These people used to drive me nuts, until I realized they are doing nothing wrong except having fun playing D&D.

In my experience, in a D&D game, players who are "perpetually in pawn stance" are not considered to be "role playing" though they are still playing D&D and still playing a Role Playing Game (RPG).

I think the double-meaning of the world "role playing" in that context is part of the communication problem.

 

[Bedrockgames]

In my experience, in a D&D game, players who are "perpetually in pawn stance" are not considered to be "role playing" though they are still playing D&D and still playing a Role Playing Game (RPG).

I think the double-meaning of the world "role playing" in that context is part of the communication problem.

I think it is true roleplaying has a double meaning and a lot of folks (myself included) use equivocation on that double meaning to prove their style of play is The Style, the right way. Sometimes I say Roleplaying to mean "talking in character and seeing things through your characters eyes". That is certainly a deep point on the roleplaying spectrum but I think someone who is just controlling a character in the setting can also be said to be roleplaying. It is certainly still an RPG in my opinion, even if people are not talking in character or viewing their character as a piece on a board.

To me so long as a world beyond that board exists to be interacted with, your still roleplaying. To me that is the chief difference between an RPG and a board game. All action in a board game needs to be contained within the boundaries of the board...whatever that means for the particular game. Roleplaying games don't limit you to that. One of the reasons the GM exists is to adjudicate actions that were not thought of in advance by the designers. It doesn't have to explicitly say in the rules that you can go to 7/11 and buy coca cola. But if you are in a setting with a 7/11 then the GM will allow you to try. Board Games are not really meant to accommodate that kind of going off the grid, and when they do, it is because they are veering into RPG territory.

I think the term Pawn Stance though really muddles things here, because it isn't incompatible at all with talking in character from what I understand. Pawn Stance is more about how you make your decisions as a character. So my understanding is it means using your motives as a player rather than the character's to arrive a a decision (I could be wrong on that, but that is how it has been explained to me). If that is all Pawn Stance is, then I think it really just means "playing yourself" and playing yourself is totally fine in my opinion. My guy might be called Uloff instead of Brendan, but if I am basically making decisions as Brendan, that is still roleplaying IMO. Most people don't play this way, but many do.

Again though I think this just shows how problematic these kinds of discussion are because they really ultimately do come down to trying to establish some styles as proper RP and some as being outside what an RPG is supposed to be.

 

[prosfilaes]

Why would you claim we don't know this?

Because I quoted you saying that we don't know this.

I'd say we have a pretty decent idea how the mainstream of players play. ... I don't care how people are playing the game. It's pretty hard to know that.

Those are two contradictory statements.

But, even without knowing how the game is being played at a given table, we should still be able to look at the rules themselves and figure out what the game is about.

For the same reason we can't just look at an airplane engine and figure out how it's going to work, as the designers of the 737-400 found when one of there planes crashed on the M1 due to engine problems undiscovered in testing. The proof of the pudding is in the eating.

Why would you insist on including "how we play the game" in a definition of game genre? Why can't we simply look at the game itself?

Because a definition of game genre that doesn't care how we play is like a definition of food types that doesn't worry about who eats it or how it tastes. A game of Pictionary that gets played for classroom credit at an art college is an entirely different game, an entirely different type of game, then one played by drunk people at a party. A Vampire game that's all talk is different from a Vampire game that's all combat.

I care about what the game says it's trying to do.

That's useless. Utterly and incredibly so. And not even terribly consistent with what you've said before; is The Galactos Barrier a science fiction setting because it says so in the preface? Are most storygames roleplaying games because they say they are on the title page? Going back to an example I've used several times before, I suspect despite the high concept intros, at least some White Wolf material was written to be R-rated supers for the R-rated supers fans. What good does a genre division that ignores that do for anyone?

 

[Hussar]

A game of Pictionary that gets played for classroom credit at an art college is an entirely different game, an entirely different type of game, then one played by drunk people at a party.

Read more: http://www.enworld.org/forum/showth...Illusion-of-Game-Balance/page42#ixzz3HaFwqFiM

No, it isn't. It's exactly the same game. Nothing about that game is any different. The rules are the same, the exact same set up is used and the same materials.

The only thing that is different is the idiosyncratic elements that have been added by the players. Which aren't actually part of the game and have nothing to do with the game as it is written. Nothing in Pictionary assumes that you are going to be graded on your art. In fact, that's kinda the point of Pictionary - that your artistic abilities are not the point of the game - the point of the game is, can you communicate non-verbally to a small group of people a specific word or phrase. That's what Pictionary is about.

I can use D&D in my English as a Second Language class to teach English to second language learners. Does that mean D&D is a teaching tool? Not really. I've re-purposed it for that, but, outside of my classroom, my experiences aren't going to help anyone. Unless you want to use D&D as a teaching tool, which means, you have to pretty much copy my experiences if you want to get similar results. Which is the biggest problem I have with the idea that we have to only look at how the game is being used. That's the argument that you see all the time in edition wars - "Well, at my table we do X, so Y is not a problem. If you are having a problem with X it's because you are not doing Y" with the presumption that Y is the right thing for all groups.

As soon as we start dueling anecdotes and stop looking at the actual text of the game, we dive down a rabbit hole that you simply cannot find the end of. Every situation devolves into competing ideas for what is the "right" solution and no one can ever fix anything. Any change is viewed through the lens of "How does this impact my table specifically" and not "Does this make a better game?" Everyone becomes an advocate for their own, specific table, and no one can come to any agreement on methods for resolving issues.

Heck, I've got another thread right now on the 5e boards where this is being claimed:

I'm glad that I'm not the only one who makes that distinction. I guess the difference for me is that I enjoy roleplaying games, and I actively dislike storytelling games. Hence my desire to excise any and all storytelling elements from D&D, in favor of roleplaying.

THIS is why we need to nail down definitions of genre, at least in broad terms. Adding elements like Inspiration or Action Points to D&D hardly makes D&D a Story Telling game. The language that he's using right here doesn't make a whole lot of sense. No story telling elements in D&D? Huh? That's the point of playing D&D - a story. He means, he wants to excise any player authorial control from the game. But, because the language we're using is so imprecise, his meaning gets lost.

And, I will agree, the idea of role playing game should be the umbrella term. This sort of thing is just noxious. Traditional game vs story telling game might be a better comparison.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

THIS is why we need to nail down definitions of genre, at least in broad terms. Adding elements like Inspiration or Action Points to D&D hardly makes D&D a Story Telling game. The language that he's using right here doesn't make a whole lot of sense. No story telling elements in D&D? Huh? That's the point of playing D&D - a story. He means, he wants to excise any player authorial control from the game. But, because the language we're using is so imprecise, his meaning gets lost.

And, I will agree, the idea of role playing game should be the umbrella term. This sort of thing is just noxious. Traditional game vs story telling game might be a better comparison.

The problem is that none of these terms ever gain traction, so we're stuck going back to the old GNS theory just because that's the only thing that everyone has heard of.

Roleplaying vs Storytelling is a spectrum, and it's the same spectrum as Actor vs Author, which is similar to Character vs Player. I suppose you could use 'Roleplaying Game' as the umbrella term, and separate them based on the degree to which they include Storytelling elements; but, I don't see why that's any better than using 'Roleplaying Game' for only pure roleplaying games with no storytelling elements, and 'Storytelling Game' for roleplaying games which include such things.

It's not as though there are any pure Storytelling Games out there, devoid of roleplaying elements. (Are there?)

 

[Mishihari Lord]

It's not as though there are any pure Storytelling Games out there, devoid of roleplaying elements. (Are there?)

I'm pretty sure collaborative writing qualifies, and there are probably more people doing that than RPGs.

 

[Hussar]

The problem is that none of these terms ever gain traction, so we're stuck going back to the old GNS theory just because that's the only thing that everyone has heard of.

Roleplaying vs Storytelling is a spectrum, and it's the same spectrum as Actor vs Author, which is similar to Character vs Player. I suppose you could use 'Roleplaying Game' as the umbrella term, and separate them based on the degree to which they include Storytelling elements; but, I don't see why that's any better than using 'Roleplaying Game' for only pure roleplaying games with no storytelling elements, and 'Storytelling Game' for roleplaying games which include such things.

It's not as though there are any pure Storytelling Games out there, devoid of roleplaying elements. (Are there?)

But, that's not the spectrum. You don't do storytelling games without role playing. At least, not when we're talking about RPG's. Role assumption is fundamental in all role playing games. If you're not taking on a role, you're not playing an RPG. That shouldn't be controversial. The same way as if every single decision point was pre-determined before play started, you wouldn't be playing an RPG, because there's no game there.

A Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book isn't an RPG. Collaborative story telling or improv theater isn't an RPG either. There's no G there. It's no different than what Howandwhy99 was trying to do earlier - break the term apart and pretend that there is no larger meaning when you examine each individual word.

A role playing game needs all three elements - role assumption, some sort of random mechanic for determining outcomes and a narrative that follows causal links. Without any of those three, I'd say you aren't really playing an RPG.

So, no, roleplaying is not the other side of the spectrum from story gaming. There's a reason you still have a character in story games - the presumption is, you are going to act in accordance to the dictates of that character. Granted, in a story game you ALSO have degrees of authority over the game as a whole, but, you still have a character in front of you.

D&D doesn't stop being a role playing game because I use Inspiration (a purely player resource) to affect some change in the game world. That's ridiculous. Nor do I stop roleplaying just because I have inspiration points. Inspiration points are there to promote role play - you gain them by promoting the character that you are playing. AD&D used Training in the same way. If you played your character against type, you were penalized. It took longer and was more expensive to train if your fighter acted cowardly, for example. Paladin's lose their status if they don't behave in a certain way. It's the same thing, just approached from the carrot perspective instead of the stick.

 

[prosfilaes]

Every situation devolves into competing ideas for what is the "right" solution and no one can ever fix anything. Any change is viewed through the lens of "How does this impact my table specifically" and not "Does this make a better game?"

For something like a roleplaying game, "a better game" is one that impacts many tables positively. Far from not needing to worry about the issue of how it works in play, "a better game" means that you need to worry about a broader spectrum of how it works in play.

 

[Bedrockgames]

A Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book isn't an RPG. Collaborative story telling or improv theater isn't an RPG either. There's no G there. It's no different than what Howandwhy99 was trying to do earlier - break the term apart and pretend that there is no larger meaning when you examine each individual word.

I don't think these kinds of definitions are particularly useful. I see them a lot in my circles and find them not to be descriptive of rpgs at all. Words are not defined by their roots. The root words can matter but terms change over time to go beyond the meanings of the compounds. I've seen dozens and dozens of definitions of RPG that take each individual term (Role-Playing-Game) define them and put them together. It doesn't matter what those individual components mean, what matters is what people mean when they say roleplaying game. Others have already pointed this out. English isn't latin and I think it is pretty obvious when the term was adopted it was a term of convenience, one that seemed to describe something fairly new and exotic going on at the table (but the people who first employed that term were not using RP in the full sense of the word as it was used in Psychology circles for example, and we would be foolish to think any working definition of RPG needs to also be therapeutic with the aim of reducing conflict simply because it shares a word with a psychological technique.

In terms of whether you can define it as a game where you take on a role, I think people might not disagree but it really depends on what you mean by that. If you mean, to use your language, that being in pawn stance the whole time makes it not an RPG, I would disagree, because you are still a character in the setting, even if it is being informed by your metagame concerns. I've seen many players over the years play a character as if it was them, freely using player knowledge and desires in place of character knowledge and desires. It may have irked me because it isn't how I like to play, but I would never look at that and say the person isn't roleplaying. It is just one style of RP just like min/max, kick down the door, thespian, etc are all valid approaches to an RPG.