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Message: <blockquote data-quote="SweeneyTodd" data-source="post: 2420426" data-attributes="member: 9391">mythusmage, you have a couple of these one-line threadstarters floating around. They're certainly provocative, but I think sometimes they "zoom in" a bit too much. I mean it's good to separate out one variable to discuss in a thread, but the rest of the variables still exist.I don't want to get all philosophical here, but what does "all about the roleplaying" mean? Does it mean that the players try to inhabit their character's headspace all the time, or does it mean we all tell a story together? It it trying to get rid of the rules and just imagine, or is it using the rules to try to simulate an imaginary world?D&D tries to handle multiple creative agendas. Sometimes those agendas conflict, and the group social contract has to answer questions that the rules can't. But that's a lot more nuanced than just "wargaming or roleplaying". From where I sit, systems that meticulously describe the physics of an imagined world are all pretty similar, battlemat or no. Let's take metagaming, for example. Lots of people are against metagaming as a rule, because they've seen it used solely for the purpose of "let's win". If the goal of a game is to have the characters defeat a conflict using only the knowledge obtained in game, then some things discussed at the table between players are off limits. But metagaming is a tool, and it doesn't have an agenda of its own. What if you take player knowledge and use it to set up a situation for your character that reveals something about their personality, or lets you explore a situation you're interested in? Some people would say you're violating the "let's just roleplay" idea, and some wouldn't. Roleplaying is a hobby that contains a lot of variety, and that's a good thing. But there hasn't really been a lot of work done in figuring out how the different varieties interrelate. I tend to think that breaking it down between agendas, goals and expectations is more useful than between rulesets. Different rules support different agendas, but very often you'll have one group with one ruleset that contains multiple agendas. Some people want to wargame. Some want to live in their character's heads. Some want to create a shared story. Those are just simplifications. And I think it's much more useful to discuss those agendas and how they differ than to say "Here's my agenda. The end."</blockquote>

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