OK, so, I gotta chime in as a linguist and particularly as a linguist who’s not, like, a phonetician or whatever, but a Conversation Analysis person.

I’m kinda straight-up fascinated by your description of what “the conversation” means to you here, after struggle, because I have no idea what an alternative would be. This is all “the conversation” ever could have meant to me about any RPG; all the stuff about to do it, do it and roll or say yes and picking up the dice to push back against the GM’s fiat or whatever are just specifics of how we turn a conversation into a game, but the Conversation still looms over all that. Am I off the mark, Paul Beakley? Am I off in my own world of linguistics jargon, and failing to read normal English?