Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9197905" data-attributes="member: 42582">Not really. I don't think that's a very interesting description of RPGing at all.By its own admission it doesn't capture classic D&D, which is (paradigmatically) a RPG. It doesn't capture Classic Traveller either. Nor Call of Cthulhu one-shots. And that's just to give a few examples. What you've posted seems to be a description of one particular mechanism for developing certain elements of character build in a game that is intended to encourage long-term, skilled play via permitting the player to adopt and improve a strategy. This is a very narrow range, and aspect, of RPG design.I don't know what it means to say a game is not strictly just an RPG. Apocalypse World is a RPG. So is classic D&D. The features they have in common, in virtue of which they are both RPGs, are in my view pretty evident: shared fiction that matters to resolution; most participants engage via the "player" role, which means developing the fiction primarily by declaring actions for a particular character; and central to the game rules are processes for establishing, if an action is declared, what happens next in the shared fictionI hoped it is clear, given the forum that I am posting on, that I am talking about "TT" RPGs - ie the family of games that begins with D&D. I am not talking about cRPGs, which obviously don't have shared imagination at their core at all, but fit within my category of non-RPGs that invite imagination on the part of the player.D&D called itself a wargame because the vocabulary of RPG was not yet available.But it is not a miniatures wargame, and (based on accounts that I have read) =that was obvious to Gygax as soon as Arneson demonstrated it to him. From the outset, in D&D the field of possible moves for a player was limited only by what everyone together would imagine was possible for the character that player was controlling. This combination of fiction matters to resolution and each player engages and changes the fiction by declaring actions for a particular character is at the core of RPGs, and was there from the start.That the field of player action declarations was unlimited, except by what the character can be imagined to be doing, was understood from the start. This is the core of the game! The fact that the rules don't spell it out just shows they're not very well written.The first version of D&D I read and played was Moldvay Basic. For the purposes of your "playstyle reinforcement" criterion, Moldvay Basic is no different from the original game: characters advance on a fixed table and players do not have their "playstyle" reinforced via play. But it was obvious to me, from the outset, that any action was possible. This was the difference from a Fighting Fantasy Gamebook (which I was very familiar with). And chapter 8 comes out and says as much (Moldvay wrote much clearer rules than Gygax).</blockquote>

Verification