OK, all this react/respond stuff, fine, good, but I’ve gotta step in as a linguist and as a linguist whose area of study was Conversation Analysis and defend this claim that RPGs are a conversation, and reject this notion that only “response” is conversation.

First off, conversations, especially that prototypical face-to-face kind, tend to have a lot of reacting. Even if it’s agreement-reacting, the typical amount of time between one person signalling a turn-break and the other person starting to speak is negative some ten or hundred milliseconds. If you wait even until the other person has stopped before you start talking, you sound like you’re being slow and deliberate. Which sometimes is what you want to do, or at least communicate that you’re doing. But point is, people engage in a lot of knee-jerk responding, and usually say things that are predictable enough for their interlocutor that they don’t actually have to finish them.[1]

Second off, the medium of an RPG is a conversation. A conversation with reference to some physical props, sure, but a conversation. The things you say, whether they come from reactions or responses, are the thing that the RPG happens in. There’s middle ground between “only responses, not reactions, are conversation” and “all human interaction is conversation” (though, again, linguist, all those other things in the interaction can **inform** the conversation, I mean a large part of CA is looking at timings in turn-taking). But, like, you can play chess without using any words. The medium of chess is the pieces and the board, not the conversation. And it’s a kind of human interaction, sure, but not a prototypical conversation, only a metaphorical conversation. An RPG, contrariwise, does not exist without us using our words.

THERE I defended the honor of Goffman, Sacks, Schegloff, Jefferson.

[1] Yet, if they don’t, maaaaan that screws with conversations and the repair strategies come out. It’s weird.