Post originally by Dan Davenport at 2004-06-11 12:40:35
Converted from Phorums BB System

Eero Tuovinen wrote:
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<b><i>However, IMO the decision here has cultural consequences. By limiting roleplaying to mean specifically games where players take a role we implicitly say that storytelling games are "other" in some fundamental way. Take RPGnet, as example: if roleplaying means only games where you play a role, storytelling games have a little smaller claim to bandwidth here, in par with board games and such. The simple act of defining the word has then made changes in the fundamentals of the conversation here.

Now, some people evidently think that this consequence of the idiom is a good thing. Lord knows, in Finland it's a main argument in all kinds of roleplaying debates that any inconvenient storytelling games, dungeon crawls and such are not actually roleplaying games at all, and thus can be disregarded in the discussion. Definitions have power, especially with such central words as roleplaying is. Whatever ends up included is what our community is about, in a sense.

Based on the above I for one have no intention whatsoever to relinquish the storytelling game's claim to the umbrella term of "roleplaying". The action is fundamentally similar, and the kind of game where character play is really central can rather be called character play, if one wants to differentiate between it and the multitude of other kinds of roleplaying games.</i></b>
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I don't think that access to bandwidth is sufficient justification for keeping storytelling games under the roleplaying game umbrella. If it were, then CCG players might have a claim that their games are RPGs -- after all, you play the "role" of a wizard in M:tG.

I'm not arguing that the activities are unrelated, mind you, because I certainly agree that they are. But I do think a distinction between them is valuable for the sake of clarity. You don't ask someone if they want to see a play and then take them to a movie.

Let me ask you this: Would you call a game in which two guys tell a round-robin story, flipping a coin every 15 minutes to see who gets to continue telling the story, a roleplaying game?

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Dan Davenport