My position is from someone who started with videogames and went to RPGs only years later. I wonder how this will turn out... Sorry if looks like a rant or something.
I see it as RPGs being a type of game. Just a game. (Though I didn't expect that could be pejorative!) That makes it participants active, as opposed to passive. So RPGs can't possibly be movies or literature or so on. To put it bluntly: "RPG" is not a medium. Similar to how basketball or chess are not media. They can certainly be represented and turned into media and they can feature media, but it isn't media while you are using it. This is enough to permanently distinct RPGs from novels or movies or anything else which only hold ideas and data, at least.
They certainly can't be videogames! It might not a board game, but I am not sure what isn't a board game quite exactly. I'll assume you mean something not like a wargame, since you also said card games.
Now Dungeon and Dragons has a wargame battle system ingrained in it. I'll get to rule 0(and games not like DnD) in a moment, but let us assume the DM doesn't just throw that away. So that means like Chainmail or Warhammer plays, we play it similar to strategic wargame which deals with things like position, movement, inventories, stats, etc things of strategic importance. If DnD stopped there then it would be a wargame, BUT we all certainly know that isn't the case. DnD seems to have some other element which sets it apart. We call this the "role-playing".
What exactly is role-playing? Well I've always tried to answer question in context with videogames("What is a videogame RPG?" "Why are these VERY different games(genre-wise) all labeled as RPGs?"). This had me distilling elements of tabletop games like DnD and unlike DnD for some common quality that can be used universally. For wargames and Real-Time-Strategy(and Turn-Based-Strategy) computer games which are based on their tabletop predecessors they both share(and their essence is made up of) that strategic battle system. I narrowed it down:
-It was not the fact the game had a story. After all almost(even the arcade games) videogames put enough detail to create a narrative of some kind. This can be applied with many board games and some card games. The stories in these tabletop games are going to be as simplistic as "Don't wake up dad while trying to sneak up to the fridge". This is kind of similar to early videogames and a few arcade games actually, if you can see a connection.
-It was not that the player talked to NPCs or talked with each other. This could be added to every type of videogame and it barely changed how the game is played. There are also versions of this which include "contains towns" or "shops". But again, these are not key factors in any type of game except games where you, like, run a shop or run a town!
-It was not the stats/levels/equipment or wargame strategy elements(This is what most people mean why they say "RPG elements" in videogame lexicon, btw). As I said those portions, "the crunch" as we would say here on enworld, come from DnD's wargame roots. (Videogame RPGs are certainly inspired by DnD. The early "dungeon-crawlers" were and "WRPGs" and "JRPGs" are two different evolutions on that concept.) We go out of our way to separate it from the "fluff" or the role-playing. And it should be said that DnD isn't the only RPG and not every RPG has a battle system inspired by Chainmail. Also "stats" are found in every videogame, period. They can change and progress in so many games even if those games do not call this "equipment" or "levels". e.g. Megaman, Devil May Cry, and Gradius. Not very good for making a distinction is it?
What stood out was the story, but not that it had a story... it was the way players interacted with the story. To talk about the "plot of a RPG" seems quite difficult. At the start of a game or session it hasn't even been written yet! At best the DM has a setting and he has non-playing characters who will react in certain ways. Someone might say "it is an interactive story", but that phrase is kind of silly. Stories can never be interactive. There is the storyteller and there are the listeners who completely passive. Rather than think of what a player does in terms of stories, I think of it in terms of them taking actions like any human does in real-life. Players act and the events which transpires only become stories if you look back at them. Only then is there a story. (Or a story-hour
) If you really want to use the word story, then I imagine it as collective story-writing... only that story often has no intention of being told.
Though this little reverse engineering I found DnD(I hope I don't bother anyone by constantly using this example... DnDe3-4 and Iron Heroes are my games!) to be a RPG because it contains this scenario-playground for players interact with. It is a hybrid game as it has a wargame to be the "rules" of the world(kind of like the laws of physics). I've never personally played them but from what I hear there are games without this type of battle system, they are RPGs for the same reason. Rule 0 can change everything about DnD(creating hundreds of versions of DnD just like there hundreds of different mods for videogames, some of which so drastic the videogame hardly looks similar), but the role-playing is there.
Now a DM might make the role-playing aspect as simple as possible. Restrict the players' freedom by railroading like crazy. Even if there is choices being made and "acting" being done, the DM might limit things to 2-3 possibilities as if he is reading from a simplified module. From this I gathered that there is a range of depth between each DMs' games. Some of them have deeper role-playing.(where choices have a more elaborate effect on the "plot" and where choices are more available). This is parallel to a game's reflexive(action videogames, sports) or strategic(strategy videogames, board games (eg Chess) range of depth.
This is why you should never think for a moment that videogames are overtaking the role of RPGs. No videogame has EVER gotten close to even some of the most simple DnD games concerning role-playing depth. If you see the WRPGs or WRPG-like games as steps ahead of other games, then you must admit that they are MILES behind the average DnD game. That is not even considering the real master GM/DMs we have here on enworld! I imagine it would require sentient AIs for videogames to catch up.
Of course this doesn't change how many people appreciate this and the fact more people play videogames as a whole. (It was certainly enough to get me, who has played an uncountable amount of videogames of every kind, to take notice.)
Hopefully I am not off-topic by this point.
