>If you take it a stage further, one approach is to almost remove the
>distinction between players and GM, emphasising instead collective
>story-telling.
Surely the collective input is what distinguishes roleplaying from acting?
>This, to my mind, is not role playing. You're not _having_ adventures,
>you're _writing_ them.
You are still playign a role, and you are still playing a game, so I can't see how you can claim it's nolonger roleplaying. The collective storytelling approach is an extreme case. Games such as Amber can tend towards that extreme sometimes. Personaly I think the ideal is to find a ballance between the two.
To take an example from fiction, some episodes of Babylon 5 involve interactions between the command crew (the players) and external threats. These are comparable to strongly refereed game sessions. Other episodes involve personal interactions and conflicts between the main characters. These episodes are comparable to lightly refereed games where most of the running is made by the players. I could imagine runnign a B5 game in which Jakaar and Londo were both players for example. In game sessions where Jakaar and Londo are plotting against each other and trying to win over other players to their cause, the referee takes a back seat.
In what sense is this nolonger roleplaying?
Simon Hibbs
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