I love the question, “What is a roleplaying game?” I loathe the same question. We all contain multitudes.

Apparently, I’ve recently taken to talking about roleplaying games and story games with one of my weekly gaming groups in a particular way. What way? I don’t know, exactly. I was just blathering something about how I thought this or that was “more of a story game than an outright RPG” (sic) and one of my players—who has played a lot of RPGs and storytelling games but doesn’t participate in online debates about their territory and definitions and badges of honor—asked me to clarify. What did I mean by “story game,” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “That’s a good question.” Do I even know? If I did, I don’t know now. If I do know now, I probably won’t know tomorrow.

Fortunately, Mike Sugarbaker approaches the question with more poise and smarts than I have, lately. Thanks to a thread on Story-Games, I found this post by Sugarbaker: “What is a roleplaying game?”

An excerpt:

What Gygax and Arneson did that made their game the hit it was, and the classic it remains, was to open the loop. They deliberately put a place in their rules for wandering out of the loop and making stuff up, and the stuff you made up could come back into the loop of the rules, and determine in part how the rules created new states and conditions.

(Sugarbaker’s post even cites our book, Hamlet’s Hit Points, by Robin D. Laws, which is a treat.)

Now, although I feel I do have a dog in the field, hunting for these elusive definitions, I have a lot of appreciation and sympathy for hunters in different fields. In that Story-Games thread, the terrific Jason Morningstar questions whether a label like story game informs a potential customer more than the word game alone. Good question. What does story game actually communicate—to the gamer, to the roleplayer, to the newcomer?

What do we gain by separating story game from roleplaying game? What do we get if we put one box inside the other? What do we gain by bottling the waters at all? Brace yourself: I don’t know. More to the point, I’m not sure anymore. The more I play, the more I want to relate to and talk about individual games and the less I want to imagine some kind of invisible armature on which they must hang.

I’m going to write more about this. I can hear it coming like a distant train. In the meantime, though: What do you think?

We hope you’ll join us for two Gameplaywright events at GenCon this week:

Robin Laws will be talking about Hamlet’s Hit Points, presenting the system of analysis behind his ENnie-nominated book and taking questions about its theory and application. (Friday, 10:00 am, Marriott Santa Fe)

What do Dr. No, Casablanca, and Shakespeare have to teach us about making the stories in our RPGs awesome? Roleplaying design authority and virtuoso Robin D. Laws (Gumshoe, Feng Shui) has written all about it in Gameplaywright book Hamlet’s Hit Points. In this seminar, he presents the nuts and bolts of his approach for analyzing stories in order to improve your RPG narrative. Bring your questions!

Will and I will be hosting Things You Think About Games, a laid-back thinking gamer’s roundtable. (Thursday, 10:00 am, Marriott Indiana Ballroom F)

The Gameplaywright book Things We Think About Games makes more than 100 assertions about games from the obvious-but-overlooked (‘In an RPG, all the characters are wearing pants’) to the deeply zen (‘Be aware that the other players are not necessarily playing for the same reasons you are’). Bring your own cunning, brilliant, or mad assertions to discuss and defend at this thinking gamer’s roundtable, back for its second year.

Last week, the Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts and Design announced their list of nominees for the 37th annual Origins Awards. Hamlet’s Hit Points is among four other titles nominated for best game-related publication, and we think that’s pretty damn great.

As Robin expressed in his LiveJournal post, we’re quite grateful to the retailers and jurors responsible for shortlisting HHP for this honor.

The Origins Awards winners are determined by a popular vote of attendees at the Origins Game Fair, leading up to the awards ceremony that’s held the evening of June 25th, the Saturday of the convention. The ceremony’s fun, and open to the public. You should come if you’ll be at the show; it usually lasts about an hour.

An award or nomination can mean lots of different things. Today, this one means we’re celebrating at Gameplaywright.

Sarah Darkmagic has written a great post at Critical Hits, “Hope and Fear,” about how to use Hamlet’s Hit Points story beats inside an unfolding combat. She talks about specific mechanical elements of Dungeons & Dragons, but her thinking is more than sound for any roleplaying game.

Check it out.

Hamlet’s Hit Points uses Dr. No as one of three working examples that demonstrate the book’s taxonomy of dramatic beats. A recent post on Clothes on Film uses Dr. No to go into mind-boggling depth on lounge suits and their variations. It’s a film, it seems, with the capacity to illuminate just about anything worth knowing.

Check out “Sean Connery in Dr. No: The Template For 007,” fascinating even to those of us whose all-purpose uniform is the jeans-and-t-shirt ensemble.