Quote from: Brad;789969They're games and they involve playing a role, hence, roleplaying games. "Meaningful player choice" has fuck-all to do with whether or not your character wants to be a farmer. I played Bard's Tale to save the fucking world, not worry about if my crops were going to get sufficient rain this season. Christ in heaven...

You have player choice in The Walking Dead, but that's just an adventure without the puzzles. I wouldn't call that an RPG.

Quote from: jan paparazzi;789989You have player choice in The Walking Dead, but that's just an adventure without the puzzles. I wouldn't call that an RPG.

The difference between computer rpg's and table top, is the difference between sex and porn. One is obviously better than the other, but there always is going to be porn.

Quote from: Armchair Gamer;789920I find myself in the "Who Cares?" camp more and more on topics like this.

This.

Neither John Wick nor Benoist play at my game table, so I do not care about their opinions. People come to the internet to expound on game theory, people go to the game tables for actual play - and only in rare circumstances do those two circles overlap.

Quote from: jeff37923;789999This.

Neither John Wick nor Benoist play at my game table, so I do not care about their opinions. People come to the internet to expound on game theory, people go to the game tables for actual play - and only in rare circumstances do those two circles overlap.

oh, I think I disagree, to some amount.
I agree that they don't play at your table.  But working the ideas out in terms of process and design can affect the future of the game.

Quote from: jeff37923;789999This.

Neither John Wick nor Benoist play at my game table, so I do not care about their opinions. People come to the internet to expound on game theory, people go to the game tables for actual play - and only in rare circumstances do those two circles overlap.

  I don't mind theory--I've started some notorious theory threads myself--but I'd rather the theory be "what do we want, and what's the best way to achieve that?" instead of "this is/isn't an RPG/storygame/old-school/GNS/badwrongfun."

Quote from: Armchair Gamer;790013I don't mind theory--I've started some notorious theory threads myself--but I'd rather the theory be "what do we want, and what's the best way to achieve that?" instead of "this is/isn't an RPG/storygame/old-school/GNS/badwrongfun."

Right. And what is practical and what isn't.

The label "role-playing" was first applied to D&D, EPT and T&T by critics who saw common elements in these games, a sort of family resemblance. Later, game manufacturers began to apply this label to their own products for commercial reasons, especially when TSR legally challenged the use of the name "Dungeons & Dragons" in the advertisements of competitors. Trying to construct a rigid definition for a term that came into being in such a contingent manner is rarely a good use of our time and energy, though it is the sort of exercise that is popular and fun because it can be debated endlessly and anyone can form an opinion about it. But if you can't first advance an accepted definition for "game" (there is considerable literature on the problems encountered there), trying to define "role-playing games" on top of it is probably beyond our ability.

We can however outline some of elements that grant these games their family resemblance, and put together a rough list of necessary or sufficient conditions. But, as the term "family resemblance" implies, finding any single unifying quality across the games will be impossible: there will just be a handful of traits which will be exhibited by role-playing games in various degrees, but what seems integral to one game may be entirely absent in another.

Arguing that anything we generally call a role-playing game isn't actually a role-playing game - or a game at all - is, to me, pointless without a rigid definition, and I suspect the pursuit of such a definition is futile. Conversely, proposing that anything we don't call a role-playing game actually is (or could be) a role-playing game strikes me as flawed for the same reason.

Quote from: increment;790019The label "role-playing" was first applied to D&D, EPT and T&T by critics who saw common elements in these games, a sort of family resemblance. Later, game manufacturers began to apply this label to their own products for commercial reasons, especially when TSR legally challenged the use of the name "Dungeons & Dragons" in the advertisements of competitors. Trying to construct a rigid definition for a term that came into being in such a contingent manner is rarely a good use of our time and energy, though it is the sort of exercise that is popular and fun because it can be debated endlessly and anyone can form an opinion about it. But if you can't first advance an accepted definition for "game" (there is considerable literature on the problems encountered there), trying to define "role-playing games" on top of it is probably beyond our ability.

We can however outline some of elements that grant these games their family resemblance, and put together a rough list of necessary or sufficient conditions. But, as the term "family resemblance" implies, finding any single unifying quality across the games will be impossible: there will just be a handful of traits which will be exhibited by role-playing games in various degrees, but what seems integral to one game may be entirely absent in another.

Arguing that anything we generally call a role-playing game isn't actually a role-playing game - or a game at all - is, to me, pointless without a rigid definition, and I suspect the pursuit of such a definition is futile. Conversely, proposing that anything we don't call a role-playing game actually is (or could be) a role-playing game strikes me as flawed for the same reason.

Please.
The word existed before the hobby.   The term was ascribed to the rulesets because the term applied to the behaviors exhibited in the playing of said games.  Any idea that the 'Family Resemblance' actually supercedes what Roleplaying really was in the thereputic or acting setting of that time period is ludicrous.
Yes, the term has now been taken to mean other things over the years.  But that does not mean the definition has actually changed much, rather, it has been widely misunderstood.

Using Riddick as an example is really a bit silly, because Riddick is almost literally Vin Diesel's Mary Sue.


Also early on, the term "Fantasy Adventure Game" was used a lot to describe D&D, until I guess they realized the acronym it formed. But adventure gaming was still used a lot.

Quote from: Haffrung;789941So how do you explain the fact that during the peak of the game's popularity in the mid-80s, D&D was not played by most of its 2 million-plus player base as a tactical miniatures combat game?

Yup. I've been playing RPGs since the early 90s, and I knew nothing about minis until 3.5 came out and a miniatures boom occured at all the game and hobby stores. That statement does not include Warhammer 40K of which I was aware of and stared at minis in awe at the shop - I never really considered it to be an RPG. But I didn't know anyone who played any RPG, DnD or otherwise, with minis until the 2000s.

Quote from: everloss;790035Yup. I've been playing RPGs since the early 90s, and I knew nothing about minis until 3.5 came out and a miniatures boom occured at all the game and hobby stores. That statement does not include Warhammer 40K of which I was aware of and stared at minis in awe at the shop - I never really considered it to be an RPG. But I didn't know anyone who played any RPG, DnD or otherwise, with minis until the 2000s.

Wow.  
That never occurred to me as possible, since the game was spawned by Chainmail and the ubiquity of minis in every con, game mag, and hobby shop in the late 70s and 80s.

Quote from: LordVreeg;790030Please.
The word existed before the hobby.   The term was ascribed to the rulesets because the term applied to the behaviors exhibited in the playing of said games.  Any idea that the 'Family Resemblance' actually supercedes what Roleplaying really was in the thereputic or acting setting of that time period is ludicrous.
Yes, the term has now been taken to mean other things over the years.  But that does not mean the definition has actually changed much, rather, it has been widely misunderstood.

The term "role-playing game" existed before our RPG hobby - as far back as 1964, as I reckon it. But applying the term to the hobby is what bestowed the sense of it that we use. The therapeutic use of "role-playing" pioneered by Moreno is a very different thing, and the family resemblance of D&D to EPT and so on detected by early critics was done in complete ignorance of Moreno and his context.

You present no definition here, so I'll agreed it hasn't changed, in the way that something that doesn't exist can't change.

Quote from: increment;790038The term "role-playing game" existed before our RPG hobby - as far back as 1964, as I reckon it. But applying the term to the hobby is what bestowed the sense of it that we use. The therapeutic use of "role-playing" pioneered by Moreno is a very different thing, and the family resemblance of D&D to EPT and so on detected by early critics was done in complete ignorance of Moreno and his context.

You present no definition here, so I'll agreed it hasn't changed, in the way that something that doesn't exist can't change.

The term existed, and then was randomly used for the games mistakenly?

Rogerian, person-centered psychology was all the rage in every college campus across the country.  Every psych 101 class referenced it.  On those same campuses that were the hotbeds of the original game.  

It is not a very different thing.  Roleplay exercises are and were done by students constantly, and the thousands of students engaged in the game were not acting out of ignorance when they ascribed the term t their games early on.  The games and the terms grew together, not out of ignorance.

Quote from: LordVreeg;790039The term existed, and then was randomly used for the games mistakenly?

Rogerian, person-centered psychology was all the rage in every college campus across the country.  Every psych 101 class referenced it.  On those same campuses that were the hotbeds of the original game.  

It is not a very different thing.  Roleplay exercises are and were done by students constantly, and the thousands of students engaged in the game were not acting out of ignorance when they ascribed the term t their games early on.  The games and the terms grew together, not out of ignorance.

The term existed, but the people who used the term "role-playing game" (and I mean that exact term) in the 1960s were in the operations research community, not the psychology community. That usage bled into the periphery of Diplomacy fandom, dark corners where some people believed Diplomacy and serious political science intersected, and from there critics (like Richard Berg) became aware of it. They applied it to D&D and its many imitators.

I don't mean to say their application was mistaken, exactly, but it used "role-playing game" to describe practices that the term previously did not cover. This is normal linguistic drift. It was not a continuation of some previous, established definition that inadvertently happened to apply to D&D. Once Flying Buffalo and Metagaming (let alone TSR) started advertising their titles as "role-playing games," they sure as hell didn't mean anything Rogerian, or derived from Moreno, or from Diplomacy, or the operations research community, or any of those precedents. They meant something new. And that new thing isn't defined by any reference to any of those precedents.

Quote from: increment;790042The term existed, but the people who used the term "role-playing game" (and I mean that exact term) in the 1960s were in the operations research community, not the psychology community. That usage bled into the periphery of Diplomacy fandom, dark corners where some people believed Diplomacy and serious political science intersected, and from there critics (like Richard Berg) became aware of it. They applied it to D&D and its many imitators.

I don't mean to say their application was mistaken, exactly, but it used "role-playing game" to describe practices that the term previously did not cover. This is normal linguistic drift. It was not a continuation of some previous, established definition that inadvertently happened to apply to D&D. Once Flying Buffalo and Metagaming (let alone TSR) started advertising their titles as "role-playing games," they sure as hell didn't mean anything Rogerian, or derived from Moreno, or from Diplomacy, or the operations research community, or any of those precedents. They meant something new. And that new thing isn't defined by any reference to any of those precedents.

By my own history, and by what I have seen and read, I think the drift you mention is real, but occurred by and large much later than your commentary reads.  I really can't see the ignorance and subsequent separation back in the late seventies and early eighties; and certainly, nearly everyone I gamed with back then was fully aware of the proper usage and the way it applied to the games they played.

I'm not saying they were played in any theraputic sense, nor am I saying that the early players were aiming for deep immersion, we know that is not the case.  But the In character viewpoint was, I believe, already an important concept.  And to some degree, reflected in the use of the term.