Quote from: CRKrueger;677442So for this to be a valid argument you must then be advocating on every forum you frequent that they simply have one forum where all topics go.  You have a link anywhere in the internet where you have made that claim on other forums?  No?  Ok, so we're back to you're just butthurt.

What the fuck are you even on about? Valid argument? Talking about my own preferences? Here's a valid argument for you, cupcake: therpgsite is the only one non-system-specific RPG-centric forum I can think of that doesn't allow discussion of TBZ in general RPG-oriented space. I dunno what kind of gotcha you were trying to pull out of your ass but I think you'll need some more straw for this man.

QuoteThank you for verifying you see this as a political struggle.

It's political though I wish it wasn't, and I'm not the one who made it this way.

QuoteMake your case for the "Don't die box" not qualifying the game as a non-traditional rpg.  Noone can say Pundit will never change his mind.

For me to do that, someone else should have presented a definition of storygames first, and showed that having a don't die box violates it. Then we could have a reasonable discussion. That was never done, so I don't feel it's productive of me to start proving negatives to windmills.

QuoteIf you were going to place a dividing line between games with mechanics I engage as a character and games with mechanics I engage as a player and a character, having a "Player says the character can't die box", would pretty much be the definition of the dividing line.

So every RPG that has a "Player says the character can't die box" is a storygame and every one that doesn't have it is a real RPG? That would be better than the lack of a definition we have, I agree, though it's still pretty arbitrary (as very few games seem to satisfy it).

Quote from: CRKrueger;677429[A]ny game where ... the character absolutely positively cannot die unless the player checks a box that says "I choose to risk death and gain the corresponding mechanical benefit." isn't going to get quantified as an RPG here.

I wouldn't be sure. Isn't it really dependent on whether that's an in-character reality?

Consider:

Quote from: TristamEvans;676020[T]hey could however, if they were in a doctor's office ask " can I find a spare lab coat to wear as a disguise?" the GM may say yes, if the player is willing to spend a story point.

An Amberite might be able to decide that the magazine rack in a doctor's office should include a particular 1962 issue of Galaxy Magazine -- and make it so!

James Bond can't do that; he's stuck with a magazine selection arranged by forces beyond his control. Ditto Superman, although he could go out and bring back a magazine with astounding quickness.

If a character were indeed immortal but by choice, then the choice would be no less role-playing than a D&D magician's choice of whether to become invisible or teleport.

What's worth dying for? That would be the key question!

I've said before that I would prefer different criteria than used here for storygame (SG) and role-playing game (RPG).

I would call AD&D Dragonlance Saga both SG (per the GM's job in that scenario) and RPG (from the player's perspective, at least as I recall).

It's a convenient metaphor to call an out-of-character perspective "authorial," but it is not necessarily the case that the player's objective is to tell a story. There is a common correlation nowadays, but it's not inherent.

My elementary school friends and I created a game that I would call neither SG nor RPG. There was an aspect in which we proposed universe-defining postulates to the GM, but we were not trying to tell a story. There was an aspect in which we played character roles, but that was not the primary focus. For any grognards out there, it was sort of like SPI's Outreach, but with a free-form approach similar to early D&D.

Based on the primary interest, I would call it a Grand Strategy Game with the "what if" elements not all pre-packaged but rather coming in part from the players' input.

Even excluding the intersecting axis -- from roles, but not RPG, to OOC but not SG -- there's a spectrum between the two extremes of RPG and SG.

It would be plain false advertising nowadays to represent an article at one extreme as just the thing for fans of the other. It would be like calling D&D a "tank game" or "Barsoom game" just because those subjects have occasionally featured. It's certainly not a "mecha game" in any sense that would satisfy Battletech fans!

In the middle, there's a frontier of what might as well be called "hybrid games."