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Message: <blockquote data-quote="howandwhy99" data-source="post: 4575442" data-attributes="member: 3192">Honestly, any good book on acting will help sort out the difference between acting and roleplaying.  To my understanding it was Psychology that came up with roleplaying and having an instructor teach a role.  <a href="http://www.agilean.com/role_playing_article.htm" target="_blank">Here</a>'s a good online version of what roleplaying is without the hobby BS of "playing a PC with a personality".  The author of that article suggests more of a skill-based (he uses the word "sphere") rather than a task-based approach to defining roles.  But the key point here is ROLE is defined outside of the roleplayer.  Just as an actor plays with his role to determine how he will portray the written, scripted character, a RPG roleplayer plays within his or her role to determine how to best succeed in the predetermined Class role in the fictional world.  As RPGs do not include scripts to follow, roles refer to the sociological definition of roles for roleplaying.  In business roleplaying scenarios, these roles are typically your occupation.  In RPG games, it is your class.  (Though this can be confusing as "Class" is sometimes reinterpreted by the game designers as occupation and not the role one takes within the game. For example, all Call of Cthulhu players play Investigators regardless of their class title.  They are all doing the same thing - investigating Cthuloid activity.  No one is learning how to be a antiquarian in that game.)Not knowingly at least. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />  (not that I have a problem agreeing with you)  What I think you are referring to is fictional narrative, which is only one kind of fiction.  I am saying ANY simulation is a fiction in that it is never the thing in and of itself.  As a side note, I consider any perfect duplicate not a simulation.Of course, it's a fiction.  It's a simulation.  It isn't the thing itself.  It is a representation.  I think there is a confusion here with non-fictional narrative.  D&D games are not narratives in the same way most any game is not a narrative.Yes.  But we are not authoring a story when roleplaying. The world exists independently as a simulated environment beyond the scope of authorship for the roleplaying individuals.  If it did not, then they could not play with their roles and characterize them.  It's the difference between roleplaying and improvisational acting without a script.Again, anything existing is story creating.  If you mean we are purposefully creating a fictional narrative, then you're suggesting an activity that isn't roleplaying.Story-like qualities only exist in RPGs in the same manner story-like qualities are possessed by any actually existing things.  D&D, Monopoly, Baseball, and normal life (non-game playing) are all story-like because stories are told to represent them.  That there is a fictional (simulation) element to both D&D and Monopoly does not mean either requires the players to be authors.  There is no authorship of fictional narrative of those four.  (to stave off the inevitable objection: yes, of course non-game playing real life can include being a novelist)Dice rolls are numerical description.  They are the determiners of the results of your action.  You "see" the results in your head the same way you would see them on a screen in a computer RPG.  You don't get to control the dice rolls in the same way the DM doesn't get to.  They are the functioning of the rule-based simulation in the same way programming scripts and randomizers function in computer roleplaying.  I'm talking about roleplaying that is referred to by actors, business trainers, teachers, TTRPGers, and CRPGers.  That is the only kind I have ever heard of.  The only real difference of usage between any of those groups is whether they refer to the role as a character in a script (actors) or a sociological role (everyone else) roleplayers' test their characterizations against.  You don't have to see it as practice to have it be practice.  Pretty much any computer or console game is training.  You test yourself against the system to see if you can win.And roleplaying will always be training (or specifically termed rehearsal for actors) whether any one wants to try and create a new definition of it or not.</blockquote>

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