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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Shaman" data-source="post: 4994652" data-attributes="member: 26473">And in my experience, they are quite different: in fact, that difference is one of the fundamental appeals for me of roleplaying games vis-à-vis movies, novels. comic books, et cetera.I have zero say in how a story or a movie or a comic book plays out. I have no control over the choices of any of the characters; I can only discover what the author has in mind for them.Playing a roleplaying game is nothing like that experience. I control one or more of the characters, and I decide how they react to the situations that unfold in the course of play. My skill as a player and the luck of the dice determine what happens when that character attempts to do something in the game-world.For me, that experience is nothing like reading a story or watching a film.But you can play roleplaying games in such a way that the presumption of the protagonists prevailing is removed, eliminating the need for suspension of disbelief and further distancing the experience of playing a roleplaying game from reading stories et al.That "real possibility of defeat," as opposed to the "perceived possibility," is one of those fundamental appeals of roleplaying games that I alluded to in the beginning of my post. It's one of the elements that separates gaming from reading a book or watching a film.We may know the outcome of the battle, but with a couple of exceptions we don't know the outcome of the battle on the characters on the screen. We can surmise that Toms Hanks and Sizemore are going to get off the beach, but the decision to cast relative unknowns in the supporting roles means that when we see faces in the LCVP as the landing craft races for the beach, we don't know who lives and who dies when the ramp drops. Part of my investment in that initial scene in the theatre, aside from the very visceral reaction of considering my grandfather landing on Palau and Saipan, comes from not knowing the fates of the many soldiers introduced in that scene.But again, however engrossing or intense or horrifying that scene may be, the experience of it is very different than having the ability to say in the context of playing a game, "Okay, I'm tossing a smoke grenade to cover my dash from the hedgehog to the sand embankment, and once I get there, I'll prep a rifle grenade to drop on that machinegun nest."Two very different experiences.When you know that your character can fail and fail epically, then how will this end? really matters because there may not be a what's going to happen next? for that character.Why do you play RPGs? There are much better media for creating shared fiction.As for me, I enjoy the game part of "roleplaying game" as much as I do the "roleplaying" part. There are rules to master, tactics and strategies to test, skill to be gained.</blockquote>

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