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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7471803" data-attributes="member: 42582">By this measure, my daughter's Monopoly set is a "game creation engine" because it has an optional rule ("speed dice").I don't undestand on what basis you are saying X is a different game from Y, and why you think it matters to draw this distinciton in the way you're drawing it.Well, I've posted an answer to this two or three times already in the thread. It's not an answer I made up myself but is influenced by (what I regard as) the best writing on this topic - Robin Laws, Vincent Baker, Ron Edwards, Gary Gygax.I'll try and dot point it:* An RPG involves establishing and progressively authoring a shared fiction. * Most of the participants have game pieces which correlate to particular characters in that shared fiction. * Those players' moves typically correlate, in some fashion, to things done by those fictional characters and take the fictional circumstances of those characters as an input into resolution. * Unlike in a shared storytelling game, the authorship of the fiction, especially around the playing pieces, is circumscribed by mechanics. * Unlike in a boardgame/wargame, players' moves are permitted to directly engage the fiction.Given that none of those points is true of Risk (unless you think of the play of Risk as creating a shared fiction - I don't play Risk that way, but I guess others might), it's clear that Risk is not a RPG.Given that all those points are true of Traveller, it's clear that Traveller is a RPG.There is some RPGing - eg Gygax-type dungeoneering - where a further point is important - key elements of the fiction, like location of the playing pieces, is represented on a physical "board" taking the form of a map - but that's not true of RPGing in general. Likewise different RPGs take very different approaches to who authors relevant parts of the shared fiction, and when they do this in relation to the players' declaration of moves for their pieces, but you can't further specify that stuff in a general definition of RPGs.I'm sure there are borderline cases, especially in the area of avant-garde game design, that violate my dot points, but nevertheless I think my dot points go most of the way to identifying what makes a game a RPG.</blockquote>

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