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<blockquote data-quote="Jackelope King" data-source="post: 2804506" data-attributes="member: 31454">Actually, you live in an environment. You said you wanted something along the lines of a scientific theory, and that is the language I am using. A world is not necessary for a roleplaying game, as you yourself have said. All that is necessary is an environment. A world can indeed enhance the experience, but it is not necessary by any stretch of the imagination.But it does not include facilitating and resolving conflict explicitly. It leaves the idea of system vague as you fail to identify the mechanism behind the activity. Every good scientific theory either identifies the mechanism or admits that the mechanism is not known. We know the mechanism which is necessary for a game to be an RPG: a system for facilitating and resolving conflict. Describing the natural and social laws of a game is a wonderful addition, but it is not necessary for a game to be considered a roleplaying game. Describing how travel works, or how politics work, or how research works, is not necessary for all games. All that is necessary for a system is for a conflict to be made manifest and for a method to exist to resolve that conflict. Anything else can simply be narrated over.More generally, all of what you describe can be called either facilitating conflict (rules for travel, for example, carrying players from one conflict to the next) or resolving conflict (rules for politics to resolve who becomes the next mayor).That's not a problem. I included activity because you didn't include pastime in your definition at all. Replacing activity with pastime is not a problem.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Jackelope King, post: 2804506, member: 31454"] Actually, you live in an environment. You said you wanted something along the lines of a scientific theory, and that is the language I am using. A world is not necessary for a roleplaying game, as you yourself have said. All that is necessary is an environment. A world can indeed enhance the experience, but it is not necessary by any stretch of the imagination. But it does not include facilitating and resolving conflict explicitly. It leaves the idea of system vague as you fail to identify the mechanism behind the activity. Every good scientific theory either identifies the mechanism or admits that the mechanism is not known. We know the mechanism which is necessary for a game to be an RPG: a system for facilitating and resolving conflict. Describing the natural and social laws of a game is a wonderful addition, but it is not [i]necessary[/i] for a game to be considered a roleplaying game. Describing how travel works, or how politics work, or how research works, is not necessary for all games. All that is necessary for a system is for a conflict to be made manifest and for a method to exist to resolve that conflict. Anything else can simply be narrated over. More generally, all of what you describe can be called either facilitating conflict (rules for travel, for example, carrying players from one conflict to the next) or resolving conflict (rules for politics to resolve who becomes the next mayor). That's not a problem. I included activity because you didn't include pastime in your definition at all. Replacing activity with pastime is not a problem. [/QUOTE]

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