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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Balesir" data-source="post: 5812337" data-attributes="member: 27160">Whew - a lot of very good food for thought, here! I'll add a few more of my own thoughts:The content of the dream! Roleplaying alone is a subset of daydreaming, for sure - but I'm talking about roleplaying, here, as opposed to talking about a roleplaying game. I regard these as distinct but very much related concepts.Nice definition of a roleplaying game - but, as I said just above, I think that is not identical to 'roleplaying', the activity.Far from semantics, I think this is a critical conceptual point: the GM making stuff up or using his or her own skill to manipulate the view a player has of the imagined space is absolutely a resolution system. Systems don't need to involve dice (or any other explicit randomiser), tables or written rules in order to be "systems". Any mechanism used to resolve the outcome of an event in the game world is a game system - to claim otherwise really is semantics. The game world does not exist, ergo any resolution that is made and shared about what happens in that game world must use procedures or mechanisms in the real world to make that happen. Just because that mechanism does not use dice or other real-world tools as determinants does not make it any less a "system".I can see, from a visceral viewpoint, what [MENTION=85555]Bedrockgames[/MENTION] is getting at, in that it's tempting to think of negotiation as nothing more than a sequence of decisions (and, as I said in the first post, I think making decisions for the character from their point of view is the very core of roleplaying). But there are things going on with a "bluff" that are not simply "decisions" - if there were not, the very concept of a "bluff" would not exist. If negotiations were simply a matter of the two parties to the negotiation making decisions, there would be no such thing as "great negotiators" - any pair of people would do (picked, presumably, for the way their personalities affected the non-rational decisions they make).On the "system is part of the roleplaying" angle, I think [MENTION=10479]Mark CMG[/MENTION] put it well; it's like the blend of singing and acting that makes opera. Or the fact that I concentrate when I'm reading. The fact that the reading and the concentrating, or the singing and the acting, are tightly bound together in the same act does not mean they are not separate things. In intense, dramatic scenes I will often be both roleplaying and rolling dice (or, more generally, invoking and using systems to make resolutions) - the two activities bound tightly one to the other - but I would still see them as separate. Just as the acts of envisioning the character's situation as the character understands it and making decisions based on that is not part of the "system", the die rolling and/or whatever else are not part of the "roleplaying".Where I think I disagree with Mark CMG is that he sees the 'roleplaying' element as being very bound up with imagining the sensory experience of the character (I think? Correct me if I'm wrong). I don't think an immersive pseudo-sensory experience is at all necessary - although it is optional. Edit to be clearer (I hope): there is a first-person element required, in order to envision the character's situation as s/he sees it, but that "picture" can be conceptual, rather than imagined-sensory.</blockquote>

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