Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5172702" data-attributes="member: 4937">I think analogies should just be off the table on the internet.  Not because RPGs are special, but because analogies are seldom illustrative even in real life and the internet is this special place where understanding is almost unknown and even tiny things can hinder otherwise normal understanding.  I'd say that its similar to the problem with sarcasm, except that it isn't (false analogy).  The problems stem from entirely different sources I think.What RPGs are like is a group of friends setting out to play an imagination game under some sort of structure by which conflicts will be systematically resolved.  And after that, very few firm assertions can be made and some one is bound to say that even that goes too far.  In many cases, one player takes the role of secret keeper and assumes narrative authority over the setting and the antagonists, while the rest of the players assume narrative authority over one or more of the protagonists in the story.  But this isn't always the case.  In many cases, the game can be described as a form of collaborative story-telling, but games and groups differ over how important the actual act of story-telling is to the game.  Because its imaginative play, and particularly because one player is often a secret keeper and antagonist, story telling can take a back stage to finding out secrets and overcoming challenges.And that is what RPG's are like.  They are games and they are usually a form of literary art, but they aren't movies any more than movies are books.  You can adopt some narrative techniques from other narrative art forms into RPGs, but before analogy would be really useful there has to be some one to one and onto relationship between the things in another narrative art form and RPGs and there just isn't.  The closest thing IMO RPGs resemble is childhood imaginative play as undertaken usually between age 3 and the onset of puberty.  But even there analogies are of little obvious use.It's just usually better to actually talk about the thing you want to talk about than to construct analogies.</blockquote>

Verification