What still makes a role-playing game?

GM. Dice. Character sheet. Spoken conversation. Individual character. Prepared scenario. Campaign.

All of these belong deeply to the history of role-playing games.

That does not mean each is a necessary condition.

One way to understand what a component does is to remove, move, or replace it.

What happens without a central GM? Without randomness? Without an individual character? When writing becomes the primary medium? When the table is replaced by asynchronous play? When the Situation itself produces part of what a scenario used to provide?

These experiments interest me less as a way to push a boundary for its own sake than as a way to discover the hidden functions behind familiar forms.

La Voie Lunaire and the work on Situation have already started dismantling some GM functions.

The historical cases ask the question in the other direction: which conventions were already present at the birth of role-playing, and which stabilized later?

The boundary itself interests me less than what we learn by crossing it.