The Non-Euclidian Staircase

Of course, it all comes down to how you define a game and a role-playing game.

A few days back, we had the odd claim that it wasn't a game if it wasn't mechanical and random. Now we have the even odder claim that it isn't a game if it doesn't contain a complete and pre-defined story.

Nonsense, of course. We can see this by looking at the clear conclusion this leads to... How To Host A Murder and Pokemon Adventure Game are, by this claim, superior RPGs to nearly every other RPG title published because they're "complete". As this is patently false (as nice as I think some of what this question would call "complete RPGs", such as the overlooked Sandman, are), we have to review the assumption from which it derives and find its flaw.

And that flaw is the assumption that containing a single narrative is necessary or even desirable to a game.

Anyone can go read what Greg Costikyan has written on the topic (and you should read what Greg says, if you're interesting in game design and game structure, even if his primary focus is networked computer games these days). A narrative is not a prerequisite of a game. Chess, for example, has no preset narrative, just a structure from which you build a unique narrative each game. And this is the model all open-ended RPGs follow. They tell you how to set up the pieces and how the pieces move, but what you do with them is up to you.

An RPG gives you a structure in which to describe characters ("set up the pieces") and then resolve the conflicts those characters find themselves in ("how they move"). If you have those two aspects, you are a complete RPG. That's all an RPG needs, though most also come with setting details and story seeds (you could see these as "the board" on which the pieces are set... but as games like Icehouse or Cheapass's Diceland show us, boards aren't strictly necessary even for board games). But those can be stripped off (and are usually left off in the "generic" RPG systems), leaving the central structure (character description and conflict resolution). A well-designed game matches aspects of its structure to its default setting or style (or leaves levers for customization), while a poorly designed game (and there are far more of these than the former) just tosses out stuff and hopes the players will make it work anyway.

Story is something the players bring to the game. And yes, you must realize that the GM is a player (albeit on with a unique role). "Complete" RPGs try to pre-complete the story-shaping portion of the GM's role, which is all well and good, but not what most RPG players are looking for. In fact, many seem to want even more of that power to devolve to the whole playing group (see the Narrativist movement in recent RPGs, such as Hero Quest, Trollbabe, Dust Devils, and Dogs in the Vineyard, to name only a small sample).

So it isn't "Complete" that these RPGs are... it's "closed-ended". They tell one story (or, perhaps, one small set of variations within one story), and then they're done. You can play them multiple times if they're well created (say, some of the chapters of Robin Law's Pantheon), but usually they're over once their surprise is gone. And while a great closed-ended game can be very, very good (and can be a nice way to get non-RPGers to play an RPG, as the "Host a Murder" games do), most RPG players want the freedom open-ended games offer them to create their own stories rather than dabble within someone else's.

Rules for how to create and run your own game are a complete game. They're just a complete open-ended game rather than a complete closed-ended game.

(I'll come back later and turn all those underlined titles into links... filtering prevents me from accessing most just now.)