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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Composer99" data-source="post: 9201569" data-attributes="member: 7030042">I don't really perceive [USER=42582]@pemerton[/USER]'s original post privileging any particular style of playing a roleplaying game.Indeed, it mostly seems (to me at any rate) to assert the rather non-controversial point that what distinguishes tabletop RPGs from other kinds of game (most notably board games or card games) is that part of the game state exists only in the imagination of the participants through the shared fiction established during gameplay, possibly with input from "unshared" fiction previously established by the GM.Contrast this with chess, Axis Empires, Last Night on Earth, Jenga [*], Unstable Unicorns (etc. etc.) where the entirety of the game state exists, more or less, in the disposition of the playing pieces, without any requirement for an imagined game state at all.I'm not familiar with the Kriegsspiel-style games from whence D&D is derived, but my impression is that they inhabit a sort of middle space. For instance, the Wikipedia entry for Kriegsspiel notes that playing pieces were often kept off the map until they were spotted by the enemy, meaning that at least in principle there was an imagined game state, even if it wasn't necessarily shared - it may well be that in classic KS play only the referee is obliged to construct a game state existing in the imagination. (I will leave it to those familiar with Kriegsspiel to elaborate.)It seems to me that if nothing else, the effectively unbounded set of actions that characters may undertake or relationships they may have with NPCs aren't going to be fulsomely represented by a concrete game state - making it very difficult for me to imagine that it's possible to, say, play an RPG without at least a very minimal imagined game state established via shared fiction [**]. By way of example, even OD&D suggested miniatures were optional, in a game that was a follow on from a miniatures wargame - see page 5 of Book I Men & Magic. Without miniatures, the action exists almost entirely in the shared imagination of the participants.[HR][/HR]Notes[*] An amusing contrast to Dread, which happens to use a Jenga tower as its expression of game mechanics.[**] Note that how this shared fiction and imagined game state are established can and will vary considerably from game to game. I would expect that how the imagined game state comes to be in, say, OD&D, with its expectation of "pawn-stance" player character gameplay and map-and-key referee setup will look very different from how it comes to be in, say, Blades in the Dark or Dread. All well and good![HR][/HR]I daresay that it's more the core tropes of other editions of D&D that 4e doesn't share that make it feel "not enough" like D&D for those players as don't care for it.</blockquote>

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