This conversation is super-pedantic. I love it. The phrase "I'll bet you're a riot at parties" totally comes into play here. I won't say with who, but you know who you are.
Its really not. I don't know who you're referring to here, but it's always a bad sign when you start a premise with an ad-hominin attack, particularly one that's unreasoned and deliberately malicious.
It's simply: A pure RPG should be party-based. Yes or no. If that's too pedantic for you... well, what isn't pedantic for you?
As a linguistics scholar, I can tell you this, period: A term has the meaning a collective assigns to it. That is all. Language is simply a shared way of expressing meaning, and it changes collectively all the time. Linguistics professors will tell you the *only* meaning of a word that matters is what people collectively agree upon. I'm not sure what professions you all come from, but I can speak a bit to the nature of the meaning of words.
Now, for me, what is the best "What is an RPG" answer? The Supreme Court in the USA answered this succinctly, but it was about porn. When asked how a Justice would categorize porn (as opposed to medical photographs, art, and many other uses of the naked body) the Justice simply answered, "I know pornography when I see it."
That is perhaps the best, least-pedantic, least likely to get you ignored at parties answer. What is an RPG? I can only tell you that I know it when I see it.
I'm not sure that any kind of debate tends to arise at parties, so I'm not sure where partying comes into the topic, but you seem to be talking about parties a lot? Are you perhaps deliberately trying to make a joke about how the word 'party' also has two very distinct meanings?
Otherwise, what you have said has already been said in the thread. The pertinent question is whether you think it matters whether we understand why we need a bedrock concept for what an RPG is, the undeniably RPG. If you prefer to philosophise then that leads to a loosening of the definition, if you prefer to just say "it should at least have XYZ basic function" then you tighten the definition.
Some people seem to have a rigid definition of RPGs as "I get to select character attributes" - I'd say that's more a *D&D* style of roleplaying. And, by the way, even in the tabletop gaming world there's a lively debate of what a RPG is vs. a "storytelling" game, and it's all in good fun but really it's arguing over the definitions of words.
But we're not discussing the difference between RPG and storytlling, and the defining feature of tabletop roleplaying, D&D or otherwise, is that the general point of them is as a social team event. Something you can do with a group of people. That the whole point of the exercise is to encourage people to work together as a team. Each player is encouraged to select a different character so that they are 'forced' to work as a team to solve the problems the game presents.
While its possible to play a tabletop RPG on your own, I can assure you it's not what the games are designed for and that the experience will not be what people refer to when they describe what a tabletop game is.
Yes, you could have one dungeon master (or equivalent) and one player and say that this is still an RPG experience, but it's still a '
lesser' experience than the
intended experience.
This isn't pedantics, this is just describing the fundamental feature of what is meant by the term Role in RPG.