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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 9015564" data-attributes="member: 82106">I'm no expert on the 'magic circle', the Wikipedia 'lusory_attitude' article linked to a "Magic Circle" article, and I did skim it earlier. They don't appear to be the same thing at all, IMHO. I mean, if you are playing an RPG, there is presumably a shared imagined world, and then it has a 'boundary' in some sense which is the 'magic circle' as I understand it. So 'crossing the magic circle' is a way of saying "participating in the shared imagined world" with a kind of notion of some degree of consistency, structure, and extended duration to that world (or at least those which lack those traits are not really analyzable).SureI can see that the points "players agree to a set of rules which they treat as binding on them when they join a game" and "games have rules and processes which define them as such" as being kind of fundamental building blocks of ideas about games. I agree though, they're so basic that they are not going to tell us much in general. Your use of these concepts to question the 'gameness' of RPGs with omnipotent (unbound by the rules) GMs was kind of amusing. It made sense as an argument and seems like a useful observation, but it was hardly necessary to get so technical to arrive at what is a common observation in many circles.Right. And obviously that simply brings us to a matter of taste really, is an informally defined game sufficient? I think I'm personally willing to allow it the label of 'game' (or else my gaming activity only started many years after I thought it did!). Taste is another matter... I think, frankly, being old and not wanting to memorize and process extensive rule sets anymore, I really appreciate the elegance of highly efficient/elegant statements of game structure, like Dungeon World, which spends basically about 20 pages explaining its rules (and those pages are probably equal to maybe 10 pages laid out like 5e is). I gotta read 500 pages of 5e to try to suss out the same thing, and then burn brain cells assembling it all in my head into a coherent whole, and fill in the (maybe small) inevitable gaps myself. Well, I guess I could just run red box Basic, it is probably equally simple, but it seems like DW is still a stronger general construct.</blockquote>

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