Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6414802" data-attributes="member: 4937">I rather dislike all your definitions.  They are meaningless, tautologies, and I can easily imagine an RPG that is not a story game that plays to an end and is only be designed to run for a single scenario.  Likewise, I can imagine a story game that is meant to play on and on and on in multiple episodes until the players become tired of it.   So the fact that Amber is meant to generate long running scenarios and has no defined end point doesn't to me seem to matter all that much.  It just would fall then into a general class of "open ended games" which many RPGs belong to, but which many things we'd agree are not RPGs (but often have RPG elements, such as game pieces that persist between sessions of play) would also belong to.  For example, neither Bloodbowl (a board game) nor Necromunda (a tactical wargame) is an RPG, but both are intended to support open ended play.Which as I said only means Amber is an open ended game, but I disagree that being open ended is an inherent attribute of RPGs or that not being open ended is an inherent attribute of story games.  I think given the loose definition of RPGs floating around that you are used to thinking of it as an RPG, but I'm rather unconvinced.   I think Hillfolk is better represented as an example of an open-ended story game.Maybe.  To me this relates back to the notion that there exists a fiction.  I didn't want to get into this because it raises the problem of associated mechanics.  I think all RPGs have at least some associated mechanics (or there wouldn't exist a fiction), but I'm not sure how to phrase things in such a way that it doesn't look like I'm saying "If you have dissociated mechanics, you aren't an RPG." - something I don't believe.  For one thing, dissociation itself is going to be hard to precisely define as all mechanics tend to be abstract (and thus dissociated) on some level.   I do absolutely agree that (it would seem) RPGs are defined by having open ended rules, and I think I'd add that up as a 4th entry on the list I'm making so far, though I think that it will be controversial with some because often people who play say D&D believe that they have a closed rules set (when I'm inclined to think that they don't).  However, the reason I'm adding it is that the creation of open ended rules, the inspiration of which was reputedly "What happens if I fire a star trek phaser in a medieval battle?", is pretty much inextricable from the invention of the notion that you were playing the role of a single character within a fictional space in that moment when wargames became RPGs.Still, this is fuzzy.  It's quite conceivable to play an RPG with a closed rules set and setting.  You could play D&D in a way that you rigorously adhered to the maxim, "No proposition without a predefined set of stakes is a valid proposition."   In fact, I can think of one case where that is actually done, but it doesn't involve dice or paper.Here I have to agree at least a little with Hussar.  RPGs aren't merely games that have some roleplaying in them.   If we go that far, then it must be true that "Whose Line is it Anyway?" is also an RPG - at which point RPG has morphed from being something rather specific into an umbrella term that covers almost everything.  What then happens is that we've left ourselves with no specific term for the thing we used to call an RPG.  Since we already have terms like Story Game and Theater Game for things that share many traits with RPGs but which aren't RPGs, I see no need to make RPG the umbrella term.   That said, I do agree that part of the problem here is that I'm getting a bit late to the party.  In common usage, RPG has already morphed to mean both the specific thing I know as an RPG and also the umbrella term for all games that feature some sort of dramatic play.Anyway, from my perspective, Montsegur 1244 is pretty much definitively a story game.  Montsegur 1244 is really nothing more than a slightly structured theater game.  With the exception of the formalization of the playing peices, it could well be a theater game.  It's pretty much entirely an exercise in improvisational theater.  Even if you only narrated, mistaking M1244 for an RPG would be like mistaking the act of outlining a module when playing "Iron DM" for the act of playing an RPG.  If Montsegur 1244 is an RPG, then we must concede that "Whose Line is it Anyway?" is also an RPG.  Possibly.  However, I don't think I'm including games like Warhammer Fantasy, since even if you have a leader, the focus of play is on the manipulation of the whole army.  You can play Necomunda, but the 'you' in that scenario is the gang, not really the gang leader.  On the other hand, I can see Necromunda being played as an RPG quite easily with only a slight shift in perspective.  (Remember, how you think about the game and how you prepare to play it is as important or more important than the system.)  I might be including a game like Battletech if each player was limited to a single mech and single pilot and played in an ongoing campaign, but at that point we'd be shading off into MechWarrior and the game would probably start becoming recognizably an RPG. Mentioning fog of war was a mistake.  I didn't mean to imply that fog of war was necessary for creating a fiction.  I was just reaching for examples of the sort of things that are done with table top games to support the idea that the game board represents a concrete and imaginable fictional space in which the activities are taking place.  The notion of fiction as it exists in RPGs is almost certainly a development of how wargames had developed more and more detailed fictions in which the battle was to take place.  Putting terrain on the chessboard - hills, ravines, ponds, etc. - would also serve to create a fiction.   That said, it is a distinctive feature of RPGs that the fiction tends to be open ended in the same way that the rules are open ended.  Playing a wargame, no aspect of the fiction not covered by the rules has any actual importance to play.  The play isn't actually taking place in the shared imaginary space.  The visible board is itself the shared space in a wargame or board game.  I would suggest this departure from traditional closed system games is something that RPGs share with story games, and probably the entire 'dramatic game' family.  That said, this leaves me with a problem and suggests a way that cRPGs are different than 'true' RPGs and an area I feel somewhat sympathetic to Wick's observation that WOW is not an RPG.  Computers created closed game worlds and game systems.  Only to the extent that this is ignored and the computer is used as a minigame interface for certain kinds of proposition resolution, are you actually playing a 'true' RPG on a computer.   So either I'm going to have to abandon the closed/open system/setting divide, or else either story games or cRPGs are going to have to drop out of the definition.   Hmmmm.Types of Dramatic PlayRPGs: ???Story Games: RPGs without procedural fortune mechanics. (??)Theater Games: Story Games that don't implement the Fundamental Law except by social contract.  (Fairly sure on that one)Improvisational Theater: A theater game played before an audience.Traditional Drama: Theater Games that don't allow the players agency</blockquote>

Verification