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Message: <blockquote data-quote="kenada" data-source="post: 9214583" data-attributes="member: 70468">I do disagree. I don’t accept that RPGing is just improvisational theater. Improvisational theater is a performing art. It does not have a monopoly on improvisation (or is jazz also improv?) nor it a fact of nature. Some RPG discourse has adopted the language of improv, but it doesn’t follow that RPGs are therefore improv. That “player” needs to be defined in such an unintuitive way to protect the improv aspect from the rules of the game should suggest something isn’t right.Take the example I quoted in my reply: “Because there's an apparent refusal, or at least general ignorance, of the idea of the Rules being a Player, these games very often run into a problem of blocking, and people understandably bounce off of them when it happens. In service of making a narrative occur, the Rules don't respect the mechanisms involved in the improv game, and so if you follow the improv game as those mechanisms provide for, you're eventually going to run into the loop breaking when the Rules deny you those mechanisms.”There are two ideas being proposed:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The designers are ignorant of or hostile to (through apparent refusal) the what RPGs are, which is that they are a form of improvisational theater and bound to the rules of such (and their mistake as designers was in failing to understand how their own rules sit in relation to that); or</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The designers intend a different set of social interaction mechanics.</li> </ul>The latter seems more instrumentally useful to me, specifically looking at different play loops and distributions of authority as different social interaction mechanics. What it doesn’t do is allow the impugnment of designers nor establish a right or wrong way to design games, but those should be non-goals. It’s not about establishing a categorical model of putting games into various buckets or insisting they conform in some way.When I look at design and theory, I want tools that help me solve problems and understand the game I’m making. There are a lot of ideas out there. Some are more useful than others. These discussions have also been useful in helping me explore ideas and gain exposure to new resources (such as the book by Adams you introduced). However, if we’re at an impasse, maybe there’s not more fruitful discussion of this topic to be had.</blockquote>

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