Jason–fun link! I’ll have to peruse it in some detail; my only real context for Tolkien and RPGs together was a Dork Tower (comic) reference to how Tolkien had obviously “ripped off” of D&D’s classes for the Lord of the Rings, from the voice of one of the characters who read Tolkien after years of gaming. (The other characters, of course, had to explain the historical context…)

To answer your question, I don’t think books and dice are purely necessary, but they give a set of shared parameters to the story. Two of the games I mentioned in the article were actually pure storytelling games–the Grail Quest and the demon slaying game. There are sometimes stumbling blocks in pure storytelling that don’t happen when you have convenient rules. What’s to stop the characters from just succeeding at everything? If you’re the one running the game, how do you enhance the story through a character’s failure without making the player feel picked on? Dice and rule books create boundaries and agreed-upon limitations to the way the story is told, so that the act of creation is a joint effort that ends less frequently in the “Nuh uh, that’s not what I did” arguments that sometimes break up children’s games of “let’s pretend.” (At least, so one hopes! I’ve heard plenty of game tables devolve into that sort of argument, as well.)

I actually find collectible card games to be more about strategy than role playing games, so I’m not sure I could apply them the same way. And I’m not convinced that it’s the random element of success or failure that enhances the imaginative play. But I do think that parameters that are embraced by the group involved in jointly creating a story are important–whether they take the form of dice or poker chips and cards (like the old Deadlands “Weird West” game) or rock, paper, scissors (as in some of the World of Darkness LARPs). The boundaries might take away some of the creative freedom of an individual, but they set the expectations of the community. This both enhances game play and, if everyone is coming together to create a story (rather than just hack and slash), makes the storytelling better.

I would ask you, though, does one actually need rule books and dice? Or if so, is the rolling of the dice meant to mimic the intervention of the gods? And how about Magic: The Gathering cards? There, the random (i.e., “divine”) element come in the shuffling of the deck. To what degree are random elements like this necessary for mature creation-by-storytelling? (And is it more mature?) These elements aren’t usually found in children’s games, are they? It seems to me that there’s less active imagination going on in RPG’s than there is in children’s games. Do the dice (or cards) take away some imaginative or creative freedom?