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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5461119" data-attributes="member: 42582">What exactly "role playing" is is of course a vexed and contested issue.I agree with Hussar that RPGs and MMOs are different. It's hard to capture the difference in a simple description, but if I had to I'd try it this way: in an RPG the fiction matters - not just in that it provides an emotional "in" (this is important even to a game like M:TG - who would still be interested if it was just numbers ad categories without the fantasy flavour?), but that in it matters to the play of the game.This is obviously true of AD&D (think White Plume Mountain). It is true of any purist-for-system simulationist engine, where the fiction provides the touchstone for interpreting and applying the rules (think RQ, RM or even 3E). It is true of good non-simulationist games too. One reason 4e gets hammered is because the rule books don't make it as clear as they could how and why the fiction matters to play - they leave it too much as an exercise for the reader. This leads some to conclude that in 4e the fiction doesn't matter, and hence that it is at heart just a minis game.</blockquote>