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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6988197" data-attributes="member: 42582">Because the fiction doesn't matter to resolution.Now, I'm not getting that understanding of RPGing out of the meaning of "roleplay" - n my view that an arid semantic semanitc exercise that leads to an uninterestinf dead-end.I'm getting that understanding of RPGing from thinking about what actually made classic D&D - the original RPG, which all later ones more-or-less set out to emulate or build on in some fashion or other - different from board games (then and now).Here's a simple illustration of the point: in Wrath of Arshadeloon (sp?), if a player decides s/he want to tunnel through the walls to move from tile A to tile B, s/he can't. The game defines the permissible moves for each "role". (Games like Forbidden Desert, in which each player takes on a particular functionally-identified persona, are similar.)Some wargames are open-ended in a way that board games are not - eg it's likely that the Chainmail rules for sapping had their origins in some player at Gygax's table announcing a sapping attempt - but in a wargame eahc player doesn't occupy some distinct role. Each is manipulating an entire army.A RPG combines the open-endedness, fiction-matters-to-resolution, no-finite-list-of-permissible-moves of a Chainmail-style wargame with taking on the role of an individual persona within the shared fiction. This is as true in a cutting-edge game of (say) Over the Edge or DitV as it is of a grognardian dungeon crawl, or a 2nd ed era railroad.Provided the player is engaging the fiction via his/her action declaratins (eg having regard to the terrain, the location of walls, etc) then I would agree. There can be marginal cases - which were discussed quite a bi in the 4e era - where all the fiction becomes subsumed into the mechanics (eg via concepts like "difficult terrain", "blocking terrain", etc). If the player of the fighter doesn't think about the fiction until it has been "mechanised" in this way, then the sense in which s/he is RPGing is pretty thin.And let me add for the sake of clarity: none of the above means that I agree with  [MENTION=15700]Sacrosanct[/MENTION] as to what RPGing consists in. Based on both the descriptions and the examples provided, Sacrosanct seems to identify RPGing primiarily with "colour", with evocative descriptions and elucidated motivations.Personally, I don't see this sort of stuff as of the essence of RPGing (as I explained in a <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?498572-What-is-the-quot-role-quot-in-roleplaying" target="_blank">relatively recent thread</a>) - I prefer it to emerge out of engaging the ingame situation understood in terms of goals, functions (along the lines of the "required duties of a manager" that you referred to), obstacles, etc.In the case of the ogre, for instance, I'd ask first what it's narrative purpose is - why am I (as GM) placing an ogre in my game at all? If the point of the ogre is to do nothing more than highlight the threat posed by bestial chaos, that gives a reason to have it throw a half-eaten cow at the PCs. But this narrative purpose and logic is what would then inform my descriptions and evocation of colour at the game table; not the other way around.</blockquote>

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