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Message: <blockquote data-quote="howandwhy99" data-source="post: 4720659" data-attributes="member: 3192">This is where I think games that try to be GM-free will always fail.  A person cannot play a role successfully and yet determine the success or failure of their roleplaying for themselves.  They can have an inkling based upon how factually a simulated world reacts, but roleplaying requires legitimate social feedback to prove the veracity of behavior in the role.  After all, social roles are defined exterior to ourselves.  They are a matter of conformity and social identification.  So whenever I hear of RPGs where the Players have powers over the world their characters do not I know they are not strictly roleplaying games as all elements of roles that are left out of the performance by the actors are by definition not roleplayed.Is what you are proposing possible for Story Games (a.k.a. theatre games) where people get together to put on an improvisational play? Sure. But actual roleplaying requires one to perform the role and, in the end, as almost all RPGs do, reward the roleplayer for performing the role well.  Role success cannot be had if the measures of success or failure are determined after the fact.  I don't honestly think any kind of success fits that definition.  The goal in goal attainment always comes before attainment.  Setting the measure of success afterward is no success at all.  I grant you what we do is difficult as playing fictional roles means knowing how to roleplay properly in an unknown situation.  The roles in hobby RPGs are just made up.  However, real world roles are also "just made up" - a human made constellation of social mores and cultural expectations upon a society's members.  And while the social roles are chosen by a society as a whole, they are still chosen and not some platonic universal of human behavior.  So our hobby RPGs' fictional roles do qualify as roles in so much as they are similar to real world roles, i.e. ones real people can perform.  While a good deal of what passes for roleplaying isn't acted out in hobby RPGs at all, specifically the impossible to perform fantasy elements, all of what is roleplayed does conform to to the qualifications of a real world role.  So I would suggest thinking of playing hobby RPGs as learning the mores of a foreign culture.  It can certainly be done, but defining role success in that culture could never be done if the roles are continually defined after the fact.</blockquote>

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