A lot of games invite players to imagine things while playing them. But not all.
Chess doesn't. Nor does bridge.
The card game Crew, which is a cooperative variant on bridge, has flavour text that bridge lacks. But the invitation to players to imagine things is pretty tenuous: the card play does not particularly invite imagination, and is the overwhelmingly dominant experience of play.
The board game Forbidden Island has flavour text that chess lacks. It invites a bit more imagination than Crew - probably about the same as Monopoly. Characters move around, and suffer tribulations or the occasional triumph. The game, shorn of its flavour, would be less engaging. (This is a difference from Crew.) But the imagination is ancillary to play.
Of course a player of Forbidden Island, or of Monopoly, can build up their imaginings in the course of play, and even invite other players to participate in it: there could even be in-character conversations. But these would be independent of the actual play of the game: the making of moves, the resolution of those moves, the determination of winning or losing.
In a RPG, imagination is not just something you while playing the game. Shared imagining is the core of the play of the game. The other parts of the game - character sheets, stat blocks and maps; making dice rolls and noting their results; mechanics and other rules that explain how to interpret and apply dice rolls, how to make changes to character sheets and maps, and how to change the fiction - are all in service of the shared imagining.
A RPG ruleset which makes imagining purely optional or ancillary, as it is in Monopoly or Forbidden Island - because the procedures of play set out in the ruleset can all be undertaken without needing to imagine anything - is a failed RPG ruleset.
Chess doesn't. Nor does bridge.
The card game Crew, which is a cooperative variant on bridge, has flavour text that bridge lacks. But the invitation to players to imagine things is pretty tenuous: the card play does not particularly invite imagination, and is the overwhelmingly dominant experience of play.
The board game Forbidden Island has flavour text that chess lacks. It invites a bit more imagination than Crew - probably about the same as Monopoly. Characters move around, and suffer tribulations or the occasional triumph. The game, shorn of its flavour, would be less engaging. (This is a difference from Crew.) But the imagination is ancillary to play.
Of course a player of Forbidden Island, or of Monopoly, can build up their imaginings in the course of play, and even invite other players to participate in it: there could even be in-character conversations. But these would be independent of the actual play of the game: the making of moves, the resolution of those moves, the determination of winning or losing.
In a RPG, imagination is not just something you while playing the game. Shared imagining is the core of the play of the game. The other parts of the game - character sheets, stat blocks and maps; making dice rolls and noting their results; mechanics and other rules that explain how to interpret and apply dice rolls, how to make changes to character sheets and maps, and how to change the fiction - are all in service of the shared imagining.
A RPG ruleset which makes imagining purely optional or ancillary, as it is in Monopoly or Forbidden Island - because the procedures of play set out in the ruleset can all be undertaken without needing to imagine anything - is a failed RPG ruleset.