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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ariosto" data-source="post: 4994427" data-attributes="member: 80487">Well, Greg Stafford certainly had something in mind when he insisted that Prince Valiant was not an RPG but a new species called "the story telling game".Before then, without any example, I set out on my own to create a new kind of thing that I called a "dramatic" or "narrative" game. It looks to me as if the distinction I saw was in line with what Stafford and others have seen.The fundamental feature of an RPG is role playing. "You are there; what will you do?" The perspective is effectively first-person. One's role is Conan the Barbarian, or at least oneself in Conan's sandals. Playing that role is not an optional "artistic flourish" with no concrete relevance; it is in fact the essential means of playing the game.Now, playing Bugs Bunny is a bit different because Bugs seems to know he's a cartoon character. All sorts of wacky stuff can happen because the "world" is a Loony Toon, and Bugs and company can make things happen for comical and absurd reasons because that's about as consistently "in character" as anything.Getting back to Conan, the normal RPG expectation is that he does not see himself as a fictional figure any more than we so see ourselves. Further, he is not delusional when he imagines that fire burns, water drowns, and so on. If he lets a T. Rex chomp on him enough, then he'll end up on a journey through the saurian intestinal tract rather than to the intrigues of a lost city. Unlike Bugs, he won't miraculously reconstitute as good as new after coming out the back end.Actually playing Conan, in the Hyborian Age as Conan would see it, with failure and even death real possibilities, takes us a long way from ensuring any semblance of a story as carefully crafted as Robert E. Howard's.But what if we step back? What if one's role in essence is that of R.E. Howard? What if the rules that govern outcomes are not even superficially those of verisimilitude -- but rather those of dramatic necessity?Well, the formalization of actual rules of drama fell by the wayside and I actually ended up with a more or less abstract game of getting (or not) "authorial control" over what happens next. That's more or less still the standard, from what I've seen.</blockquote>

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