You're not being accurate. You're being historically inaccurate.
Citation needed then, because I simply can't take these assertions seriously at this point when I'm up to my nose in what smells like revisionism.
Especially when the only evidence provided thus far is anecdotal evidence about how being exposed to DND was somehow like Moses coming down the mountain, which I
especially cannot take seriously.
Gygax and Arneson's game supports only a rather narrow range of imagined situations - a certain sort of "dungeon crawling", and (perhaps) some wilderness exploration.
Oh so we don't actually disagree. Fascinating.
It is not possible to play D&D without player declaring actions for their PCs.
Then surely you believe the GM to not be a player. That's pretty abrasive for me friendo, and not a philosophy I can get behind. And I'm sure you'll pivot to some new exception to avoid having to own up to that conclusion, so lets just skip to that part.
When those actions are declared, how are they resolved? Here I think is where we will see that Skyrim and D&D are not all that alike.
Not really the point you think it is, given even when Elder Scrolls games were still effectively running on dice, it was a different kind of dice game from DND, given that ES is in the BRP heritage.
That doesn't change much on the pattern itself though.
How does saying the game is limited only by your time and imagination not necessarily imply it includes “improv play”?
Because there's more,
a lot more, to what improv is than just having an imagination.
My position is that the play culture cannot be separated from the game, especially given where D&D originated
And I'd agree, but that culture didn't really exist until after the game was released. I don't consider Arnesons game to constitute a play culture.
Citing “fun facts” in a section meant to educate the reader undermines the effectiveness of the work and raises questions about what else should not be taken seriously.
I think you may be reading too much into the term I used to describe it, which was chosen to emphasize that I don't think the text's veracity is violated by not devoting a disproportionate amount of word count and page space on an example that was worth mentioning.
While a poor (and admittedly contrived) analogy, if Im talking about political assassinations in a general sense, and mention that Lincoln was assassinated, it isn't really obligate that I open up an entire debate on whether it was truly an assassination or just an act of war.
To be clear, I’m suggesting there is an RPG base upon which playing-style reinforcement and other elements can be layered.
I don't consider that to be the case unless one is trying to gatekeep the term RPG.
As ive related between this topic and the other, I believe most if not all TTRPGs are actually hybrids between an RPG and Improv game, and in many cases also with other game types like story games, tactics games, wargames, etc. As such, I also believe what you and others are consistently referencing as being the base layer of these games to be the improv game.
Frankly, at least between you and me I think the only disagreement is in the words we're using. We're not actually describing the relationship between these elements any differently, only their names.
I'm personally not attached to calling the improv game the RPG, and that follows from my thoughts on most these games, not even just DND, either poorly teaching Improv or not even bothering. Id rather be explicit about the improv game so it can be taught and contextualized specifically.
To use my game as an example, of the 4 Core Mechanics, Improvisation is the 4th. I intend to explicitly call Improv a resolution mechanic and will teach it and integrate it into the rules as such.
Using this section as an example, one might posit that an RPG is a game where the player has reasons beyond just optimizing success in a game to perform a particular action. Making a particular choice might allow them to embody a particular conception they have of their avatar. Intent also matters. It’s different if you choose to play a more difficult route for increased challenged versus if you are doing it because the experience says something to you.
That falls under playstyle reinforcement. So here's something I think could bear some clarification. The images I posted earlier are only just examples of how the overall pattern can be implemented, and are certainly not representative of an entire game.
The one in the example, how experience points feed skills/abilities, is just one mechanic. An actual RPG, whether its DND or Skyrim, has dozens of these, if not more, all running concurrently as part of a far larger game diagram.
But more than that, the
narrative of a given character
is a means of "building up" a character. Presumably over a narrative the point is for the character to end up in a different state than they were when they started, right? Their personal abilities don't have to matter to that, but that doesn't not make whats happening not playstyle reinforcement.
If you're playing a character, the actions you choose reflect a preferred playstyle, and the game is structured to respond to this and reinforce it, whether it be positive or negative, so that by the end of the game, whatever thats defined as, the character has become more or less permanently changed.
What makes playstyle reinforcement indicative of RPG's is that they are commonly the most repeated pattern in those genres (as in, a given RPG uses many concurrent forms of PR simultaneously), and that becomes more and more true the more the game enables freeform play, with of course the eventual epitome being the improv game at the heart of most TTRPGs.
And in fact, to get more specific, lets use the games that we're all kinda sorta talking about. Take AW and its heritage. I don't have time to illustrate it (though I can later if interest is there), but the actual diagram for the game would start with its core, which I'd identify as what it would call the fiction first gameplay loop.
What this would look like is as a contiguous vertical line with effectively infinite "Actions" all occuring in sequence. This is the player simply doing things, or the "Fiction" if we prefer. To the left of this line, I'd place the intra-player constraints on the Fiction. The Actions trigger feedback from both the GM and other Players, and they respond back to the center line, modifying the overall state of the Fiction.
This is the basic gameplay loop of Improv games, to be clear, just sans the direct representation of additional feedback loops (yes, and and so on) that are typical to them. But even without them, the GM and (Other)Players in this system are implied to resolve their feedback somehow, but the how can be as arbitrary as we like, so its not necessarily important to model them directly. (that's where I actually disagree pretty vehemently, these should be explicitly integrated parts of the game)
PBTA et al actually do use this space though, for GM Moves (I'm not certain if any of these games have Player Moves that trigger off other Players, but you could easily fill that space there too)
Now, this loop also has a "right" side, which is where the individual Player, the one currently engaging the Fiction, interacts with whatever Moves they trigger.
And from there, the Moves are relatively simple. Random Input > Change in Game State XYZ > Fiction. A simple, but ultimately negative feedback loop where most of the Game State changes either negatively impact the game state (IE, taking Harm) or introduces a "Wash" (basically any sort of "weak hit" or success at a cost). Over time, this changes as stats change, as Successes start to become more common.
This is also where we run into an aesthetic issue. While the math is sound, many players don't perceive it this way. IIRC, I remember for AW at maximum that the rough chance of a success is around 50%? May be higher closer to 60. While that's fine if one starts at that level, until you get there you're at the mercy of a dramatically lower chance of unambigious success.
In AW this may not be a perceptible issue, as AW isn't exactly about being consistently competant heroes. But then shift over to something like Ironsworn (much as I love it) or Dungeon World, where that issue becomes very easy to run into if you're not buying into a premise that isn't actually reinforced anywhere mechanically. (You either buy the premise or you don't)
But ultimately, by engaging this gameplay loop, the specific Actions chosen reflect a preferred playstyle, the GM, Players, and the Moves all provide different forms of feedback. If your Actions overall present a positive change to the Fiction line, GM and Player will generally respond posititively. Ergo, reinforced. Same goes the other way.
The Moves meanwhile are meant to be designed to reinforce genre emulation. Ergo, if you act in accordance for that, the Moves overall trend towards a positive game state (or rather, what the game considers to be positive)
So yeah, as said I can illustrate this later if desired so it can be looked at more clearly, but the overall idea isn't wrong.
I find the use of “improv” particularly problematic because the GM in many games has ultimate authority
If that were true though, most good GMing practices wouldn't allow for players to come up with their own actions. In fact, its generally considered bad form to be so stingy about what you allow that players are forced to read your mind to get anywhere.
That's the pitfall of not embracing the improv game properly, and an inverse problem can be identified in mother may I issues over in 5e. Both can be solved very readily by embracing the Improv game, and this is what the oral tradition for DMing eventually teaches people to do.
However, I don’t think that’s what was meant by “improv play” nor is it what I mean when referring to it euphemistically as “improvised play”.
Improvised means the same thing whether we're talking Improv theater, improv games, or improvised gameplay in video games. You don't have explicit buttons to push, you've got to actually figure out wtf to do with whatever tools you have.
This is what the OSR considers as the peak of their experience, by the by.
