Dr. Strangemonkey said:
Sticks and stones, Dr.
If you are as a player are going back to the park that's no different from you as a reader going back to the beginning of the chapter.
Not true. Chapter Three of a book always has the same outcome, no matter how many times I visit Chapter Two. The media are completely different in regards totheir continuity. An ongoing RPG is, by its nature, unfinished, whereas a novel is, by its nature, complete.
You're proving my point here. The fact that you have a non-collaborative state for CRPGs indicates there must have been a collaborative state in the first place.
Why? The fact that tomatoes have no wings and cannot fly does not mean they had a flying state in the first place.
This is extraordinarily pie in the sky and simply not true. By the same token a human player in a CRPG can recover from any error by simply not repeating it. This is a common solution in both mediums.
No, it's not the same. In a TRPG, you keep playing. Some ruling is made and the story continues. In a CRPG, the game crashes, end of the road.
Again, this argument is obtuse:
A.) No one is arguing they are the same or that they aren't differences in tolerance (AFAIK), but you are arguing they aren't the same genre. Making an argument that there are differences in tolerance while acknowledging that they still have similar limitations doesn't seem to help your point unless you can prove some element of content significance.
We could go on all day about limitations they have in common, but that's not the point. We want to discuss differences. There are some limitations CRPGs have that TRPGs simply don't.
B.) There's no general resolution for this in TRPGs, either. The player either leaves the game and makes another character, which is fair and common to both genres. Or the GM or DM or Rules assigns a damage value and hopes that's enough to satisfy the player.
That sounds like a resolution to me. Perhaps you can explain yourself again, since I have no idea what you are talking about. I see the words, but I do not see in them an argument against anything I am saying. I agree that the player can make a new character or the GM assigns some kind of damage. How does this contradict what I said?
C.) This example generally ignores the question of how well this fits within immersion. No protagonist character in a MilSF story is going to shoot himself in the head. Given your acknowledgment that Immersion and Storytelling are key all you've proven is that TRPGs are the inferior RPG product since they are better able to tolerate horrible story tellers.
I never said anything about genre. Genre is the kitchen maid in RPGs. Immersion is the queen. Genre concerns the game designer, and concerns an immersive roleplayer to the extent they view their character as belonging in genre, but it does not restrict the possible range of actions. How a game system reacts to out-of-genre decisions tells you a lot about its design.
D.) This argument also ignores the general question of scope within the genre. If you are playing a TRPG where the rules/GM make no allowances for shooting yourself in the head, put the character on rails, or limit the character to actions that that the immersive context describe as significant - all of which are things we all acknowledge CRPGs do but you claim are evidence that they are not RPGs - are you then somehow not playing in an RPG by virtue of the fact that you and your group are not playing an RPG according to the scope of the freedom principle allowed by Pawsplay's Iron Law of PRGs?
Your sentence reads "If you are playing a TRPG.... are you ... not playing in an RPG?" I am forced to conclude the answer is "no" or "This question has no logical answer." It seems to me you have phrased the question strangely.
If the game makes no allowances for the action... you are still playing a RPG, if the action is nonetheless still permissible. This is not a legal move in Monopoly, but is in an RPG.
If you limit the character to certain actions... who is limiting the character? If the game forbids it, then the action is resolved (it doesn't work) and the principle still holds. Though the GM can forbid an action, he cannot prevent a player from choosing the forbidden action, so unless the rules change, they are still playing an RPG. They may reach an impasse, but that's a social metagame problem, not a failure of the game to provide a resolution.
If the GM has the right to narrate the action, within the rules, and in fact, no player can dictate the actions of any character within the choices provided by the rules, then it is in fact not a role-playing game, by my definition. I call that kind of game a storytelling game or interactive fiction game. RPGs don't allow this kind of action, but then, neither do CRPGs; the computer can't make you press any particular macro key or whatever.
"Putting someone on rails" is too nebulous a concept to argue for or against.
Short answer: my definition covers all these situations and more without strain.