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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dr. Strangemonkey" data-source="post: 4307696" data-attributes="member: 6533">Saying you aren't insulted by a critique isn't the same as addressing the critique, but I appreciate your willingness to continue with this dialogue. This is playing fast and loose with the scope of your argument.  The two genres are certainly not completely different with regards to continuity.And even if they were you either have to recognize that Novels don't fit your definition of narrative or that your definition of narrative is lacking in ways that implicate your critique of CRPGs.If tomatoes have a state in which not flying causes them to stop or pause in their function as tomatoes then clearly they must have a flying state.Again, you're being obtuse.  The CRPT and the TRPG are neither likely to keep playing.  The ruling may very well be, that didn't or doesn't happen and then you keep playing, which would violate both your claim that the story continues and your definition of narrative.And a crash is by no means the end of the road.  That's like claiming that a DM saying they're stopping the game and meeting again next week is the end of the road.You just restart the program.Not all limitations are significant.  The only ones that matter to this argument are limitations that would somehow qualify CRPGs as not RPGs.  I would submit that none of the limitations you have mentioned function as good criteria for that decision.  Some for specific reasons, but most because they apply just as well to TRPGs which would seem to invalidate your base sample for determining the genre.Both the CRPG and the TRPG allow you to leave the game and make a new character.  If, as you say, you are intersted in differences this is another example of an insignificant difference.Both types of games are equipped to provide the player with the intentional option, and either type of game can be poorly equipped to provide a mechanical option for resolving this situation.And on a seperate tangent: I have played CRPGs where suicide was a reasonable and well scripted part of the story.   To the point where it's clearly much better handled than it could be in TRPGs where the player would be hard pressed to show how such an action was anything other than a jerk move.This is actually close to a significant argument.I disagree on the face of it, of course, but at least this is a significant movement in the dialogue.  I don't think anyone who's studied literature could possibly argue that genre is anything other than the Mistress of Immersion.The more basic flaw is that once you've disregarded genre you then need to answer what could possibly be your criteria for immersion .This is particularly problematic since your stake in this argument is that CRPGs do not qualify as being in the same genre as TRPGs.  If you really don't care about genre then how do you qualify any difference between the mediums as significant at all?If I have, I offer my apologies.  I was simply trying to deal with an odd significance to your reasoning here.Namely, if I am following you correctly, the differences you are pointing out should invalidate CRPGs as RPGs.But TRPGs frequently fail at either manifesting these differences or at even meeting or caring about the criteria you are using as your starting point.Are you then saying that these TRPGs then fail at being RPGs?If you are, how do you account for the fact that both mediums can fail your criteria at the same rate?  Doesn't that indicate that the genre is somehow transcendant of medium.If you aren't then how do you make this exception?  Do you need to reevaluate or abandon your criteria altogether?Or at least that was the thrust of my argument.This seems like an appropriate answer to my argument.  I think it's still problematic, but what I'd like to focus on how your next argument contradicts this one.  Or rather how given what you say next I don't understand your idea of permissable and how it doesn't apply to CRPGs.But this is the most common resolution of such problems in CRPGs.  If the principle still holds here how can it not hold for CRPGs?Here you're introducing a new facet to your argument, which I think needs clarification.If both a GM and Videogame forbid an action, but if when a GM does it he does not prevent a player from choosing the action then how does a VG prevent the player from choosing the action?  As far as I am concerned there is no functional difference between a player yelling at me in my MilSF game that he turns into a dragon and my yelling at my game of Halo that I want Master Chief to turn into a dragon.  Neither are going to happen in the shared game world.  If I'm still playing an RPG in the first case how am I not playing an RPG in the second?The new facet to the argument is your claim that social metagame problems are both outside the context of the game and can't represent failures of the game.  This seems awfully arbitrary, but that same stroke I could claim that crash enducing bugs are failures of the hardware or code rather than the game.  Solid social metagame dynamics are as important and pivotal to a functional TRPG as good code is to a CRPG.I don't particularly know that this facet is really necessary or relevant, I'm just interested in how you deal with this problem.All right, I can accept this for the moment.  I assume this isn't the only way an RPG can fail to be an RPG by your criteria.  Is this the only way a TRPG can fail to be an RPG?  If so why is it different from CRPGs in this regard.All right.  We can except that argument for the moment.  I don't really know that it's that nebulous, but I am interested to see that you don't have a strong opinion on this concept.I think my issue is that it's actually a problem for you if it does.  To really make your point about CRPGs not being RPGs you need definitions that clearly exclude their limitations from RPGs and none of these criteria seem to, at least not without excluding TRPGs as well.</blockquote>

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