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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9789475" data-attributes="member: 42582">I can't comment on anyone else, but when I think of roleplaying, I think of what is distinctive about the play of a RPG from the perspective of player participants. And that is:*The player's "moves" - both what is permitted, and what will result from it - are shaped by the player's fictional position; *The player's fictional position is centred on a particular imagined character (their PC) in particular imaginary circumstances.The first of these features can be found in some wargames - eg in some free kriegsspiel-type wargames, adjudicating whether my tanks can cross the river will depend, at least in part, on extrapolating from imagined stuff (like the capabilities of the tanks, the depth of the river, etc). This contrasts with purely mechanical resolution (of the sort found in some wargames and most boardgames, for instance).The character-centric aspect of the second feature is quite common in games: many games have the player "inhabit" or identify with/as a character. But in a RPG, the character is an imagined person in imagined circumstances which thereby establish the player's fictional position.It's the combination of these two elements that I think is at the heart of RPGing. The GM in a RPG isn't always roleplaying in this sense (sometimes they might be, such as in some contexts of playing NPCs); but it's at the heart of what the players do.In playing a boardgame which permits character identification, I can make choices that are suboptimal from the point of view of game play, because it's what I imagine "my" character would do. But the stuff I'm imagining about my character doesn't shape my available moves, nor the outcomes of them; those are determined, mechanically, by the rules. (In other words, there is no fictional position.) RPGs are different from this; and that's what I think of, when I think of roleplaying.</blockquote>

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