D&D General What is D&D?

[Charlaquin]

Embrace the power of "and".

Like, my players can walk AND chew gum at the same time. They can play a game AND engage in improv performance.

Fair enough

 

[Charlaquin]

Let's just do an end-run around any doubt: we all get it. You are partaking in experimental pedantry because it seemed interesting and the group as a whole was on board for it. It has been an fruitful tangent. Thumbs up.

This is fundamentally different from OP's positions and insistences.

Sorry, no. It’s not experimental and it’s not pedantry. I believe the difference to be categorical and meaningful, and this is an opinion I have held for a long time.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Embrace the power of "and".

Like, my players can walk AND chew gum at the same time. They can play a game AND engage in improv performance.

But surely this cuts both ways.

Hence why I say that when I play a "roleplaying game", I want to game by roleplaying, and I want to roleplay by gaming. The two should be inseparable. Far too many designs ignore this and treat the game portion as a nasty problem to be minimized as much as humanly possible.

 

[Toe Knee Nose]

Sorry, no. It’s not experimental and it’s not pedantry. I believe the difference to be categorical and meaningful, and this is an opinion I have held for a long time.

I fully agree with this. I do think it's a really important distinction because it's something that has long plagued discussions about RPG's. Trying to nail down what an RPG is, and how it differs from games is necessary before you can have any real meaningful discussion about RPG's because it normalizes the language between the participants. Otherwise, you have people insisting that D&D (or various RPG's) is a game and we should approach mechanics as if they were the mechanics of a game.

Where that bogs down is that so many of the problems aren't solved at that level. That's one of the issues of 4e - that it treated D&D as a full on game. You would sit down, regardless of campaign, players or anything else, and "play D&D". That's why so many people bounced off 4e so hard. It treated D&D as a game. The issues that 4e was trying to resolve simply didn't exist at many tables because those tables had resolved those issues, not at the higher level of the mechanics but through so many of the actual game rules that only pertained to that table.

It's why you have these perennial issues like HP=Meat. If D&D is a game, that needs to be resolved because that means that every table would treat HP as the same. But, if D&D is a game creation engine, then that issue gets resolved at the game level with each table resolving the issue to their own satisfaction.

This very much isn't pedantry.

 

[Dessert Nomad]

The argument Role-Playing Games like D&D are not games is certainly an amazing one. I wouldn't say that someone arguing that Role-Playing Games aren't games is engaged in pedantry, I'd call what they're doing definitional games, however that would probably just lead them to argue that I can't call definitional games that as they aren't actually games under some specific idiosyncratic definition.

 

[Charlaquin]

The argument Role-Playing Games like D&D are not games is certainly an amazing one. I wouldn't say that someone arguing that Role-Playing Games aren't games is engaged in pedantry, I'd call what they're doing definitional games, however that would probably just lead them to argue that I can't call definitional games that as they aren't actually games under some specific idiosyncratic definition.

Things can in fact be misnamed.

 

[VashVet]

Every table I’ve ever played Uno at seems to play it differently too but I don’t see people rushing to say it’s not a game.

I’m not sure why trying to pigeonhole things into unique, non-overlapping categories is in any way revelatory or helpful.

 

[Dessert Nomad]

Things can in fact be misnamed.

However, if people make up weird, nonsensical definitions that don't fit actual usage and lead to weird results when applied, that doesn't mean that things are misnamed, that means that people are, in fact playing definitional games. When things like Poker, Monopoly, Axis and Allies, Scrabble, Uno, Go Fish, Tabletop Role-Playing Games, Computer Games and a host of other things that people normally call 'games' don't appear to qualify as games by a definition, I'm going to say the weird definition is the problem, not the people using the word in a rather ordinary manner.

 

[Charlaquin]

Poker, Monopoly, Axis and Allies, Scrabble, Uno, Go Fish, Tabletop Role-Playing Games, Computer Games

One of these things is not like the others. And I think most people here would agree that is true, even if they don’t agree with my take on why they’re different.

 

[Dessert Nomad]

One of these things is not like the others. And I think most people here would agree that is true, even if they don’t agree with my take on why they’re different.

Vague but smug comments like this are pretty unlikely to convince anyone of the rightness of your position. And I think most people here would agree that Role-Playing Games are games, but they probably lost interest in this thread loooong ago.