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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7483844" data-attributes="member: 42582">Instead of telling you to draw a picture, it tells you to write or speak some words, that is, to produce a linguistic description. (If you're playing classic D&D you have to draw a picture also - the dungeon map.)The game also tends so specify the topic of the description, perhaps expressly, perhaps implicitly. In Traveller, my description should probably include space-y stuff. I could use Traveller to run a pre-industrial tech survival game (Supplement IV has barbarians and rules for bows) but why would I? That's getting into the neighbourhood of using a snakes and ladders board to play chess - at a pinch it could be done (just ignore 2 rows/columns of border squares to go from 10 x 10 to 8 x 8), but I don't think anyone would recommend it.Likewise I could try and use D&D to run a scifi game, but as everyone knows D&D's mechanics don't work superwell without magic items and spells, the whole of the rulebooks are pitched at a certain type of pre-industrial fantasy, hit points are wonky enough with mediaeval ranged combat and shifting to gun combat as the norm only exaggerates that, etc.If you read Moldvay Basic, or Gygax's less-well written advice in his D&D, you get a fairly clear idea of what you should do to play the game if you've never played it before: have one person draw a dungeon, write down what's in it, translate at least some of that into mechanical terms, then tell the (other) players that their PCs have arrived at the entrance and ask them what they do.It's obviously a bit more intricate than Pictionary, but the structural comparison isn't hopeless. Most of the difference is in the detail that is expected in the drawing and in the descriptions that accompany it. Obviously the play is different from pictionary, but that's not in dispute as best I'm following the thread.Prince Valiant has quite different set-up instructions from those classic D&D texts, but it has some. And they also involve coming up with some descriptions, and the range of topics is set out pretty clearly (through a mixture of advice and panels from Prince Valiant comics).This notion of material being created than played out is the key. I've explained several times why that is a narrow framing of what RPGing involves, but you haven't engaged with that at all.I'll have another go, and I'll strengthen my claim to try and provoke a response: I categorically deny that the Prince Valiant session I played on the weekend took the form of first create something, then play it out.The drawings in Pictionary are as permanent as you want them to be - if one is really funny you might stick it on the fridge; if one is really beautiful you can frame it and hang it on the wall.The drawings in Pictionary don't generally do any work for gameplay after the game is done, but that's true for the fiction of a RPG. Since my last Rolemaster campaign finished 9 or 10 years ago, the only work done by that fiction is to be remembered for the bits that were funny, the bits that were exciting, the bits that were surprising, etc.Even while a campaign is still on-foot, individual bits of fiction created for it might cease to be relevant. In a Moldvay Basic game, if the PCs enter a dungeon and have a random encounter with 2 giant rats, it's highly unlikely that particular bit of fiction will ever matter to anything that happens again. That might be true even of a random encounter with 2 hobgoblins! - depending on the approach the GM takes to integrating random encounters into the non-random components of the dungeon setting.Trying to analyse RPGs through the metaphysical status of their fictions is in my view a dead end, as well as being an almost surefire way to make assertions that won't hold true. (Maybe she's not a widow at all but everyone just thought she was . . . that could happen easily enough in my game, and even more easily in a game with time travel, or memory horror, or dimension hopping, or whatever else aspects to it.) [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] is on the right track by focusing on the process of play rather than its product: the fiction produced by playing a RPG isn't inherently different from any other fiction produced in some other way, and if we go more abstract, the "artwork" produced by playing a RPG isn't inherently different from any other "artwork" produced in some other way, including by the play of some other game. His mistake is to generalise a process that is true for most D&D play (both pre-and-post DL), and for quite a bit of play that is pretty similar to D&D, but that isn't true of RPGing in general.</blockquote>

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