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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6847952" data-attributes="member: 4937">I think the board game direction fails on multiple fronts, not the least of which is the missing sense of control you are talking about.  RPGs are not and have never been board games.  Anyone that has been playing them since the beginning (and I go back to the early '80s), or who has researched them in the slightest knows that they aren't mere refereed competitive games with neutral arbiters running the rules engine.  That is and always has been inevitably only part of the job because any true RPG is defined by its open ended nature.  While the GM often wears a referee hat, the GM is also the one with the responsibility to create and introduce the challenges, completely eliminating any possibilities of neutrality.  I agree, though I would argue equally that pure 100% unadulterated "narrativists" who don't really want to engage RPGs on anything other than a framework for collaborative story telling would be better shifting their attention to pure theater games and dispensing with any connection to the wargaming roots of an RPG.  RPGs never have been pure story telling games either, but rather something that stories can evolve out of if you have that as one of your goals of play.I feel the same thing about going to far toward the story game side.   The more you pare off any mechanics that aren't narrative meta-mechanics, the more it feels to me like you'd be better off going without mechanics at all and just do improv theater.   Certainly, much of the deep character developing RP that I've been involved in never referenced mechanics at all.  It was just play.  In that sense, the old game Toon captures the core of a narrative focused mechanic with it's "If it's funny, it works." meta rule.  One game I played quite a bit and admired quite a bit in its presentation is the flash game Cardhunter.  Cardhunter is a wonderfully deep tactical game draped in the trappings of 1e AD&D that you can play for free and which anyone who has been playing since the 1e era should play just for the story and inside jokes.  It's a beautiful tribute game that gets 'RPGs' so very well and has a lot of fun with their tropes, but it isn't actually an RPG itself, even though it is supposed to be in the game world.I would bet, based on my theory of what an RPG actually is, that this relationship holds true between RPGs and all other games of all other types.  That is to say, that if you enjoy RPGs, you probably likely to enjoy games of all sorts, but the reverse - enjoying a particular sort of game - doesn't necessarily imply you would enjoy RPGs.</blockquote>

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