Quote Originally Posted by Max_Killjoy View Post
That's part of the point, actually.

When playing, is the player treating the character as a person-who-could-be-real and from a close/tight POV, or are they treating the character as a story element from an authorial POV?

For those who do the former, the "all RPGs are storytelling" position, especially as expressed by some in this thread, comes across very much as "You can't do that, and if you think you are doing that, then you're wrong".
The character is a fictional element being played by a real player. There's no way around that, and that's all it takes to qualify by the definition that's generally being used here. A close/tight POV (actor stance in Forge jargon) doesn't change that, and neither does a deliberately distant POV (author stance in Forge jargon).

Also as someone who would class all RPGs as storytelling (with the possible exception of something that is literally just a series of subsystem interactions where the character is just a stat block) I'd consider that close POV to be pretty much the default, especially for players.