Okay, so we’re talking about procedures, I’m cool with that. Good points re: different ways to play (though it should be noted that of course you can’t trade with someone if it’s not either your turn or theirs in Catan, clearly against the rules *grin*).

Also, your “significant details are produced by X” distinction is really interesting. I realize that you probably haven’t given it much thought yet, but consider this to be me saying “Hey, I wanna hear more about that!”

Thomas

In Monopoly, if you land on an unowned property and don’t buy it, what happens to the property? Does it: (a) wait for somebody else to buy it, (b) get auctioned off to one of the other players, or (c) get auctioned off to any player (including yourself)?

In Uno, if it’s your turn and you don’t have a card to play, do you: (a) skip your turn, (b) draw one card, and if it can play, play it, (c) draw one card and don’t play it, or (d) draw cards until you find one that you can play?

In Catan, are players allowed to trade with each other when it’s not their turn? Are players allowed to initiate trades with the person whose turn it is?

And actually, I think it might be accurate to say that the distinction between card-and-board-games and roleplaying games is the locus of significance — if the significant details are all produced by the rules, it’s a card-n-board; if significant details are produced by the players, it’s roleplaying. That’s got potential. Must ponder.

(My feeds are totally screwy. Eventually, I’ll get tired of their craziness and re-install WordPress. Eventually. Although if I go to that trouble, I may just install a full CMS.)

When you say that we play Monopoly differently (or whatever other board game),. do you mean that we use different procedures to decide what happens, or different trappings. Procedures would be “roll dice, move pieces around the board” while trappings would be things like “the dice must be rolled in the middle of the board”.

While you’re right about house rules, those are definitely different procedures, I think a lot of people play a lot of games as-written. There’s a sort of universality to playing (say) Settlers of Catan.

Maybe it’s tied to the “significant details” thing. I’m tempted to say that in a board game all points of significance are bounded by written procedures, while in roleplaying games that is not the case. But that strikes me as a dangerous generalization…

(On an unrelated note, my aggregator does not seem to think your comment feed updates unless your post feed does too. That means that whenever you post I get a massiv influx of comments from old discussions, and that I can’t use my aggregator to keep up with current discussions. I don’t know if it’s a problem with your feeds or a problem with my aggregator, but I figured I’d bring it to your attention.)

Thomas

What I’m saying is that you could have a game where, effectively, everybody takes turns around the board, with limited and tightly defined mechanical options. But the association of those options with a fictional reality, combined with the fact that it’s up to the players to decide what to do with the tools presented, might still provide an RPG-like thing.

I once mentioned how people who’ve completely mastered videogames go back and figure out how to screw around with them not with the goal of winning but of simply doing cool stuff. This wouldn’t be much different. In fact I think many of the Maxis videogames, from Sim City culminating in The Sims, is along these lines. (Pretty much skipping the win/lose part and going straight to the screwing around part.) Pointing to actual implementation in board/card games is hard, but as I also mentioned, Magic Realm is very close–even more so if you were to just play it without the victory conditions.

You’d have GURPS. So, yeah, agreement over here!

Well, the good part of that is, I can get right to the point. Which is, defining RPGs is difficult, but I think most people see an RPG as a “game” (whatever that is) whose procedures represent an imagined reality, which has substantial elements of freeform or nonformal procedure, and which has no prescribed motivation (like win/lose) to guide the players’ input. Hit only one of these, and you may have a wargame or a toy or maybe just people talking. Hit two of them and you might have an RPG.

So this is more of a reply to your reply to Thomas. I think you can have a game with very tightly formalized procedures and an associated imagined world, but which lacks clearcut guidelines about “what you’re supposed to do”. And I think that such a game could be seen as an RPG. My Life with Master is very close to that, except that the scope of possible action is a bit narrow and the game won’t work unless one of the players understands that they’re supposed to hate and resist the Master. The early MUDs that I played in (circa 1990) were much closer.

Yes, as was discussed over on Mo’s blog, Drama Resolution gets used a thousand times around a single instance of Fortune Resolution, and often not only contextualizes the Fortune but also sets it up and manipulates the sides to players’ advantages. Now I will admit an ambient distrust of Drama, if only because it’s so difficult to quantify and therefore control. I’ve suffered at the hands of people who used “Drama” along with a healthy dose of dysfunctional social pressure, to get what they wanted. But I am looking at my play with a scrutinizing eye, now, watching for how the contextual Drama stuff works…

That’s what I’m saying, Judd. Those games aren’t the ‘rattling machines that do one thing’. Each of them calls for significant player input both before and during play in the form of Issues, traits, Humanity, Keys, BITs, and so on. Those games are what I’m talking about — you should leave one corner open on the cube so the players can fill it in.

Also, for reference, boardgamitis is closely related to parlor narration — the game provides everything, the players are just there to roll dice and look up results.

On the subject of boardgames, Thomas, I guarantee you that you and I play Monopoly differently. Uno is also a big nexus of house rules. I don’t think there’s actually a big distinction between how ‘open’ either kind of game is. However, the big difference that I see between roleplaying and board games is that roleplaying games have signfiicant details — very literally, details that are personally significant to the players — whereas boardgames generally do not. It’s a rare boardgame where I have an emotional connection to what’s happening on the board; it’s a rare roleplaying game where I don’t. This is pertinent because the input that roleplaying games can open up is to affect that significant game content. Roleplaying games allow me to explore women’s rights in a patriarchal society; a boardgame doesn’t.

It all also seems to tie together with a thread I recently read (here, with an illuminating reference to a brief piece on “diceless” play by Erick Wujcik). Briefly, what’s discussed there is how, in a great deal of RPing (in fact pretty typical in my experience), it’s very normal to use “social mediation” either to resolve important questions or to frame any use of the formal mechanics in such a way as to gain maximal advantage. In my opinion this isn’t quite the same as “say yes” or “alternate resolution”: in this style of play, everyone generally expects the mechanics to be invoked in response to various triggers, and they also expect to abide by whatever the mechanics spit out. But a great deal of leeway exists with regard to whether and how the triggers occur. So, e.g., while it might take a successful Disarm Traps roll to completely neutralize a trap without springing it, a player might deduce through roleplay and description that a known trap is no threat to bystanders if it’s sprung, say, by an animated skeleton that you can conjure up.