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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pedantic" data-source="post: 9220914" data-attributes="member: 6690965">Yeah, I already did that <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/rpging-and-imagination-a-fundamental-point.701162/post-9220030" target="_blank">5 pages back.</a>You're doing the same thing I mentioned in the last post, where you conflate the board state, and the actions of players on that board state as the same thing. It is obvious that a TTRPG does not have a physical board state we can reference like chess, and instead the board lives in the mind of one player, who must relate it to the other players which can obviously be a hard communication problem. It does not follow that the board state is malleable beyond the rules of the game, any more than it follows in chess that this is the case; the players are still declaring actions that have mechanically mediated results.Or, at least it could be. Negotiation isn't fundamental to the form in the way that obscured board in an imaginary state is. That's the lumping and the obscuring part of this discourse that I'm objecting to. We don't have to do that to still be playing an RPG. You could just write down all the actions available to players, like a conventional board game, and still play on an imaginary board with an unbounded play time/victory assessment and get to TTRPG. The thing where we determine "what happens next" can, like any other game, be a function of the game's mechanics taking the player's actions into account.Rounding the communication problem, the difficulty in knowing a board state that contains more information than a standard board game, and isn't physically embodied up to a negotiation is the bit I don't think follows. It isn't necessary, nor emblematic of the form; you could have an RPG without it that resolves actions in absolute mechanical terms.I feel lumping different things together like here with "negotiation" elides some rather significant differences between different games, and I don't think that is helpful. For example I feel there is way more what I would actually call negotiation in Blades in the Dark than in D&D, but if we just lump attack rolls and actual discussions about the direction of the narrative under the same heading that difference gets lost.</blockquote>

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