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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8937608" data-attributes="member: 42582">[USER=71699]@clearstream[/USER] You quote Vincent Baker referring to roleplaying as pretending to be someone. You also mention "common fiction".A person writing down their imagined facts about imagined times and places is not pretending to be anyone. And there is no shared fiction.The same goes for solitaire PC gen. There is no pretending. There is no shared fiction.I have a copy of Ironsworn but haven't looked at it's solo rules. I don't know much about how they work. Perhaps it's a non-paradigm case (although clearly there is no shared fiction in solitaire play). An obvious difference between solo Ironsworn and what you're describing is that the point of solo Ironsworn is not to prepare material for later use in RPGing, whereas that is what GM prep, or player PC building, is ostensibly all about.In the past, I and other posters have suggested that one feature of railroad-y play is that the players are essentially an appendix to the GM's authorship, a type of chorus adding a bit of colour and a few suggestions to what the GM has written. I've always regarded this as part of the diagnosis of why railroading is not the best that RPGing can aspire to be. You seem to be agreeing with the analysis but endorsing it as "just another type of RPGing".But if someone invited me to come and watch their RPGing, and I turned up and got to watch them silently imagining and writing notes, I'd be a bit non-plussed. And if I was asked to join in a RPG and learned that my job was to have someone bounce ideas off me while they write down what they're imagining about their solitaire fiction, again I'd be pretty non-plussed. Where's the shared fiction, the negotiated imagination?</blockquote>

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