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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mallus" data-source="post: 4573875" data-attributes="member: 3887">Not among the people I've played with. But the course of play in an RPG more closely resembles what occurs in fiction than the course of play in traditional boardgames such as Monopoly or Chess, which I'm sure you were about to bring up..They're are similarities between RPG's and fiction; in RPG's we talk abou "characters" with proper names, not playing pieces, we refer to the "setting and the "world" in the same way we'd discuss Tolkien's Middle Earth (or Joyce's Dublin for that matter), not the game board, we talk about sequence of in-game events as the "plot", because they're often most easily recognized as fictional plots. The similarities between RPG's and fiction are numerous, hence the use of words like "story" when referring to the course of in-game events.  The fact that you can tell a story about virtually any game doesn't alter that.Only if you ignore the common definitions/connotations of "story" so as to strip it of any usefulness. Any term can be generalized into meaninglessness with enough effort. We've been through this before. If a game ceases to be an RPG the minute a player is granted narrative control outside the direct control of his character, then there are no role-playing games. The simple act of a player saying "I bought a flask of lamp oil" without playing out the scene would disqualify a campaign from RPG status. This assumes RPG's have a very narrow set of goals --and that they're best viewed as training exercises, which is silly given that the most popular RPG on the market is about pretending to be a dragon-slaying elf.</blockquote>

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