> Pen/paper RPGs are also unable to handle situations too complex to be kept track of in the minds of the players/game master/etc. If two players wanted to round up a few thousand warriors and face off in battle, there's no way you'd be able to simulate this very well without the aid of a computer.

Strange. I have managed to do exactly that in pen-and-paper RPGS on more than one occasion. Sometimes it's handled as the [GM | storyteller | referee | whatever] simply coming up ith a dramatically suitable outcome, but on one occasion, we resorted to AD&D's Chainmail rules, designed for exactly that situation.

Personally, I prefer the "dramatically suitable" alternative.

> > You can't do anything unexpected.
>
> Well, it depends on what you mean by unexpected. In the point of view of the game designer, you usually can't, since 'unexpected' usually means a gameplay bug. For the player, though, there's no reason to believe that things should be expected (though this gets back to the fact that some themes are overused to the extent that they *can* be predicted). This might not hold for the second time you play through the game, but if that's bothersome, you can just move on to a new game.

What I would mean by "unexpected" is that you can't do anything that the games designer didn't think of first. If you need to get past a dragon, you might decide to buy lots of cows and feed them to the dragon until he gets sleepy; but if the games designer hasn't thought of that, you're going to have to fight.

> Before I had been into computer/video game RPGs, I had played a bit of D&D, but I never afterward thought of it as an RPG. I *did* think of it as "role-playing", but by the time I got used to the acronym "RPG", it had become in my mind exclusively for computer/video games.

To my mind, an RPG is something where you can do whatever the character you are playing would do, and see the consequences. CRPGs and VGRPGs don't fit that criteria.

winter"but in the end, who cares, as long as you have fun?"mute