Why collaborative storytelling is a meaningless phrase [Archive] - Page 3

Tanarii

2018-01-13, 10:44 AM

Darth Ultron

2018-01-13, 11:20 AM

If people wanted to use it in the form of "For some gamers, RPGs are collaborative storytelling", I'd personally be 100% fine with that as a legitimate statement. What I will never accept (recall the "I will die on this hill" thread from last year) is anyone describing what I'm doing when as a player in an RPG as collaborative storytelling. It is either a mistake, or a lie: I am not collaborating to tell a story.

I agree here.

Yeah, technically, with a very precisely chosen usage of the words, anyone playing an RPG is engaged in "collaborative storytelling"...

Getting this technical is very pointless. It's like saying the janitor is part of the movie-making process. Sure the janitor is helping to make the movie, but not exactly at the same level of the writer or director.

Players taking control of the game world beyond their characters.

This is one of the big changes.

Classic Games, like D&D, are NOT collaborative storytelling games.

But a lot of people like ''collaborative storytelling'' and made games, unlike D&D, that ARE collaborative storytelling games. And the big thing collaborative storytelling games must have is players taking control of the game world beyond their characters. And the games have this built into the rules. No GM, everyone is a player, and so forth.

But then, oddly, the people that love and play all the Other Then D&D type games stop playing those games and come back to D&D, and they bring the whole collaborative storytelling idea with them...and then in mass of confusion think all RPGs must be collaborative storytelling, because that is the type they like.

Max_Killjoy

2018-01-13, 11:38 AM

As an example, i gm L5R a lot and I mainly focus on the "samurai drama". At my table, what you have to do is create a Character straight for having conflicts and trouble, with you as the player behind that character going directly for the kinds of clashes that you want to experience along with your co-players, because that is the "game" that is going to be played. That means the "author stance" is more important than the "immersive stance", as by already taking an active part in the creative phase (you know which conflicts are coming), and already committed your character to a certain course of action.

That's what I would call "story-focus". There can be plenty of character and roleplaying, but there's an ongoing central concern for the ongoing and upcoming story.

And for me, personally, it would be a terrible drag. I'm not interested in intentionally setting my character up for trouble and loss -- if I see those things coming, my every gaming instinct is to head them off, not walk into them face-first. If I'm forced to walk into a problem my character doesn't see coming but I do, that's going to be me as the player going through the motions without any enjoyment and perhaps even a touch of bitterness about it.

And, as the player, I'm no more concerned about "the story" than my character is. Most people don't go through their lives worried about whether their daily or long-term life would "make for a good story"... why should an RPG character have that worry? And if my character doesn't have that worry... why should I, as the player?

Florian

2018-01-13, 01:31 PM

@Max

Your wouldn't turn up for a game where nothing happens. No dangers, no threats, only thing you´ve got decide is when your regular Joe goes to the loo and that doesn't have consequences, not even getting your Joe fired or into a "we-both-take-a-pee-here-right-now"-conversation.

Try "hex-crawling" in the greater Berlin area as a game: Roll 1d6. 1-2 is joggers, 3 is people with dogs and 4-6 is joggers or people with dogs and you roll a reflex save to not step in dog poo. Great game, right?

I'm just honest about both aspects of it, that's why I don't ask wh Elminster is not saving the Dales...

kyoryu

2018-01-13, 02:51 PM

@Theoboldi:

That and some of the Forge discussions sound a bit offensive, condescending even, but mostly because they tried to tackle some of the underlying issues with RPGs as a hobby, which triggers a lot of vitriol.

That's.... fairly minimizing of the problems with the Forge. I recommend you read the link Max posted - it's a good summary of the whole mess.

Florian

2018-01-13, 03:11 PM

That's.... fairly minimizing of the problems with the Forge. I recommend you read the link Max posted - it's a good summary of the whole mess.

While I already know the linked contend, I chose to ignore it because there're some things that are pretty unique to the US RPG industry that you don't find elsewhere and the discussion started by the Forge was has with another entirely different tone in other countries, generating way more productive results.

Darth Ultron

2018-01-13, 04:06 PM

And for me, personally, it would be a terrible drag. I'm not interested in intentionally setting my character up for trouble and loss -- if I see those things coming, my every gaming instinct is to head them off, not walk into them face-first. If I'm forced to walk into a problem my character doesn't see coming but I do, that's going to be me as the player going through the motions without any enjoyment and perhaps even a touch of bitterness about it.

Yet again, I agree.

This is exactly why Players are not big part of the Storytelling: They can't tell a story that they are part of in live game play.

First off, few people want to play a game with no trouble and loss. A game that was just a cakewalk of not really doing much of anything and just succeeding is not even really much of a game. To just not play through a non-game to just see how a character succeeds does not interest most people(but there are some, sure.)

So accepting that a game needs trouble and loss and negative things in general; the players can't know the specifics. For a player to know that there is a deadly spider inside a chest, and then to be forced to role play out that their character, that does not know about the spider at all, is really one of the worst types of Railroading.

And it's the same for Storytelling. A good, dramatic story...even more so an action adventure type one needs trouble and loss and hardships and conflict. And again, the player can not know about the story outline in advance. For a player to know that their characters mentor must die for their character to go on their heroes journey, and then be forced to role play that happening is some of the worst type of role playing.

And, as the player, I'm no more concerned about "the story" than my character is. Most people don't go through their lives worried about whether their daily or long-term life would "make for a good story"... why should an RPG character have that worry? And if my character doesn't have that worry... why should I, as the player?

Exactly. The character and the player should never know the story details, outline or plot. The player should always be role playing the character 100% as the character in the game reality.

Florian

2018-01-13, 05:04 PM

Had to decide whether I want to tackle that drunk or sober, settled on drunk being more reasonable...

DU, we cannot have a "game" without conflict and we cannot have "victory conditions" without (the chance of) loss. That much is clear.

Now the point is what Edwards called out as "Brain Damage". We are playing the game for the conflict, loss and drama and we should act, role-play and immerse in "normal people" of a setting that naturally want to avoid said things. There's a disjunction here, like "wash me, but don't make me wet".
This simply cannot be resolved.

It´s simply easier to state what exact kind of conflict, loss and drama you enjoy experiencing, as active participation makes it an easier task when it happens in a "game". It also means that your examples amount to BS, because you don't understand the concept behind it.

... need more beer.

Edit: Maybe check out games like Mountain Witch or Lady Blackbird to help get at the core of the trouble we having with that discussion. Maybe you'll also notice that folk with an interest in the overall theory and know the possible failings have less trouble accepting your interpretation of "railroading". Never wondered why that is so?

Max_Killjoy

2018-01-13, 06:05 PM

That's what I would call "story-focus". There can be plenty of character and roleplaying, but there's an ongoing central concern for the ongoing and upcoming story.

And for me, personally, it would be a terrible drag. I'm not interested in intentionally setting my character up for trouble and loss -- if I see those things coming, my every gaming instinct is to head them off, not walk into them face-first. If I'm forced to walk into a problem my character doesn't see coming but I do, that's going to be me as the player going through the motions without any enjoyment and perhaps even a touch of bitterness about it.

And, as the player, I'm no more concerned about "the story" than my character is. Most people don't go through their lives worried about whether their daily or long-term life would "make for a good story"... why should an RPG character have that worry? And if my character doesn't have that worry... why should I, as the player?

@Max

Your wouldn't turn up for a game where nothing happens. No dangers, no threats, only thing you´ve got decide is when your regular Joe goes to the loo and that doesn't have consequences, not even getting your Joe fired or into a "we-both-take-a-pee-here-right-now"-conversation.

I am not sure how that's a reply to what I said.

Nothing in my comment even implied a game wherein nothing happens, wherein there are no threats or dangers, no challenges, no consequences.

Maybe it's a language-barrier thing, but what I said was that I don't care about seeking out an intentional story, and have no interest in creating drama -- and that knowing a specific bad incident is coming as a player but having to leave my character hanging out to dry "for story" or "for drama" results in at best zero enjoyment, in at worst an actively negative experience.

Give me mysteries to solve, secrets to uncover, plots to foil, artifacts and treasures to recover, battles to win, allies to aid and enemies to defeat, etc, presented (to the degree possible) as my character would encounter them. If my character knows a problem is coming, they're not going to sit there and wait for it to happen, they're going to try to do something about it.

If I know "drama" is coming but my character doesn't, and it's considered "bad form" to do anything to prevent or prepare or avoid... then that's not anticipation I'm feeling, it's something else entirely.

BoringInfoGuy

2018-01-13, 08:09 PM

I do not see how thats different from my own approach to be honest.
I am not surprised you do not see a difference. This is not a dig at you.

The Edwardian Forge movement mainly did two things.

1) They developed a gaming philosophy and style that they found more enjoyable than the classic approach.

2) They actively sought out to discredit, deride, and eliminate the old style.

I have no problem with the first part. To me, it’s just like when Donald X. Vaccarino decided that the part of Magic the Gathering he really enjoyed was creating his deck, and developed a new game where building your deck took center stage, Dominion.

It is the second part that caused the problems. Personally, I find Dominion much more enjoyable than MtG. But I never felt a need to attack the Collectable Card Game format to promote the new Deck Building Game category.

But that is what the Forgists did. Worse, they did it very effectively. I have no doubt that a large part of the reason WotC coast shut down their forums was due to how effectively the D&D forum was hijacked by people pushing Forge philosophies.

Which is why it is not at all surprising that the first two responses to me describing a typical style of play from before the Forge movement came about is first ignorance “I don’t see the difference”. And then derision. “Playing with your Barbie” as Florian put it.

A relatively small group of very determined and organized zealots worked for this exact result.

again this sounds like "thoughts in my head before any of this ever hits the table" sort of stuff. whatever happens in your head to make a character work doesn't really matter, since the whole difference is so abstract and seemingly hair-splitting to me. developing the character leads to those scenes and those scenes lead to developing the character, they're inextricably linked together, since characters are practically built off of defining moments and events that allow seemingly contradictory actions and beliefs to exist. story and character and pretty much inextricably tied together, since if you don't have a character, you don't really have a story, and if you don't have a story you don't really have a character.

Like I'm really starting to wonder how much of this is just our own perception of how we roleplay vs. how we roleplay in practice. Like, in practical rolepalying terms of actual play, whether its story or character or whatever seems pretty meaningless to me, since its all connected together, and works to make a bigger harmonious whole. So I doubt any of these viewpoints people are expressing are as pure as people try to make it out to be. roleplaying is all about being this mixed bag that creates an interactive experience unlike any other in the world and has never been pure this or that, so its like.....whats so important about identifying and cultivating this pureness really? what is the practical actual difference these two views and how would they actually affect the table? I cannot see how'd they be different for the life of me, because our views are not as pure and isolated from other methods as we believe.

Purity is not a word I would use to describe any style. Focused is the term I used, because it does not exclude the existence of other elements, but shows what elements are front and center. In both Dominion and MtG, you need to build a deck. Since MtG is a CCG, a lot of the focus of the Game happens before you sit down to play. Buying, trading and just generally finding the cards you need to build your deck. In a CCG, this is just as much a part of the experience as when you sit down across from another playing and draw your starting hand. MtG can be said to have three focuses. Collecting Cards, building a deck, and playing the game.

In Dominion, the collecting aspect is largely removed. Every player starts with the same starting cards, and have access to the same cards on the field to improve their deck with as the other players. The focus is to use the same resources better than the other players. Dominion is more focused then MtG on the Deckbuilding aspect, but I would not call it a Pure deckbuilding experience. For one thing, there are expansions to collect, and add to your Dominion set base set.

So please, do not think I am advocating for some type of gaming purity. Both Dominion and MtG have a deck building element. But only Dominion is called a Deck Building game, because that is the focus of the game play. Likewise, in recognizing that there are different Roleplaying styles is not advocating for a pure Roleplaying experience.

Now, that does not help in trying to describe what the difference is. Can you accept that there is a difference, even if you can’t spot it right now?

The starting elements are pretty much the same. Like comparing similar math equations:

2+2=4
2x2=4

On the face of it, the only apparent difference between these two statements is that in the first one, the cross like symbol between the twos is upright, and in the second, it is more on the side. Otherwise, same numbers with the same result. So it would appear that there is no difference between + and x, so why bother having different symbols?

2+3=5
2x3=6

A little different, but close enough that we can ask if the difference really matters. But the further we go, the bigger and more apparent the differences become.

6+7=13
6x7=42

A result different enough that you can end up wondering how you thought ever thought they could be considered similar.

That is what the difference between character focused and story focused game styles is like. You can have the same elements, but because you are dealing with those elements using different processes, the results are different. Both results are correct, it is simply a matter which style is more enjoyable for you. What becomes important is recognizing that there are different styles, and being able to tell what style of game is being run.

and the fact that your read the implication into that use of "properly" says more about you than me. I didn't mean it like that, so I don't care for your reprimand because it wasn't needed.

Really all this seems to just be nerds hair-splitting over semantic definitions for the sake of it. Which I don't approve of. Its worrying about the process of making the beautiful painting when the important part is that it gets made. As long there the result is good, there is no problem.
Actually, all I did was point out that the connotation exists, I went no further than that. I did not - for example - accuse you have deliberately selecting the word to push a one true way of gaming agenda.

But, I do understand that pointing out that such a connotation exists carries its own connotation that you did so deliberately. Instead of flipping it back around again and saying that you taking it as a reprimand speaks more on you than me (in the “finest” tradition of internet debates) let me instead say that it was not meant as a reprimand.

Since you enjoy writing, consider this some unsolicited feedback on how word choices can carry meanings you do not want to convey to your readers.

Which is why I tried to pick more neutral terms when describing the difference in the game styles. Character focused vs Story focused seems fairly neutral. If you were hearing about Roleplaying games for the first time, and someone said that some Roleplaying games are character focused and others are story focused, than neither sounds inherently superior or more correct.

Darth Ultron

2018-01-13, 08:36 PM

Mutazoia

2018-01-13, 09:06 PM

Florian

2018-01-14, 04:44 AM

Give me mysteries to solve, secrets to uncover, plots to foil, artifacts and treasures to recover, battles to win, allies to aid and enemies to defeat, etc, presented (to the degree possible) as my character would encounter them. If my character knows a problem is coming, they're not going to sit there and wait for it to happen, they're going to try to do something about it.

If I know "drama" is coming but my character doesn't, and it's considered "bad form" to do anything to prevent or prepare or avoid... then that's not anticipation I'm feeling, it's something else entirely.

Please separate player and character for once.

Each group will have their social contract about what to game, how to game and play it, methods used, etc. pp., else you can't have a (functioning? good?) game. I think we know how badly it can end when this is not talked about beforehand, like coming up with an agreement the likes of "You may act "in character" as long as that doesn't disrupt the game." or "Create characters that are actually eager and willing to participate".

What you apparently mix up is "game" and "method". As a player, you know what will happens if you agree to join a game of "Temple of Elemental Evil" and the first thing you say is: "Well, my character would never leave Hommlet or willingly go into danger, he rather will get a job as apprentice to the blacksmith". It takes no special meta-game knowledge to see that you, right there, announced that you don't want to participate in the game.

There's an even easier way to highlight the difference. We can play D&D as "Combat as Sports" or as "Combat as War". Choosing one over the other will have a huge difference when it comes to "rules for conducting the game", meaning how the "in-game rules" are going to be used and, more important, what "methods" work well for the game and which will break it, ie. CaS will have you to abstain from certain things that might be "in character" or, more often, "logical" because the results runs counter to the more "gamey" rules behind it.

So, to pick up your example, if you join a group where "drama" is the "game" and you either create a "Teflon Billy" or a character that would squash drama to prevent it, being "logical", it´s more like failing to want to participate in that game, nothing to do with the character (which still doesn't exist and is not sitting at the table).

Florian

2018-01-14, 05:07 AM

The above is why I say the Players are not a big part of the Storytelling. To tell a story, you must know and control the ''behind the scene'' things...and players don't do that.

Ok, DU, did you notice that I'm using a lot of quotation marks to mark technical terms and keep repeating some of them over and over, mainly "game", "method" and "exploration"?

You keep misusing the word "railroading", when what you mean is "setting exploration" and what you do as a gm is creating obstacles and challenges to interact with and overcome that are "set in the fictional game world". I agree with you that this stance will create a "game" that needs the players to use certain "methods", like "Method Acting" (what I talk about with Max here) and cannot handle players going into full "author stance" because it will break down then.

But, and that is the important point here, other combinations of "game", "method" and "exploration" lead to different results that can handle an "author stance" really well and actually need it to function.

Max_Killjoy

2018-01-14, 10:01 AM

Please separate player and character for once.

The character is my one point of interface with everything going on inside the setting / "secondary world". Or at least, that's how games work for me.

Some of these other gaming styles make the game actively worse (for me) by trying to break that connection -- by treating the character as a plastic game piece or narrative element, and/or by trying to get the player to engage the "secondary world" from outside the character via what are sometimes called "narrative mechanics" or "narrative rules".

(My standard example of a "narrative rule" -- in FFG's Star Wars, there's a higher-tier Talent that allows the player to cause a technological device to fail or malfunction. This requires no action on the part of their character whatsoever, no cause-and-effect at all, and the player might explain why it happened with some little tidbit like "the normal technician was out sick and the guy who took his shift forgot to clean it" or whatever that their character had nothing to do with and will never know about.)

Each group will have their social contract about what to game, how to game and play it, methods used, etc. pp., else you can't have a (functioning? good?) game. I think we know how badly it can end when this is not talked about beforehand, like coming up with an agreement the likes of "You may act "in character" as long as that doesn't disrupt the game." or "Create characters that are actually eager and willing to participate".

Reasonable so far.

What you apparently mix up is "game" and "method". As a player, you know what will happens if you agree to join a game of "Temple of Elemental Evil" and the first thing you say is: "Well, my character would never leave Hommlet or willingly go into danger, he rather will get a job as apprentice to the blacksmith". It takes no special meta-game knowledge to see that you, right there, announced that you don't want to participate in the game.

I have no idea what you're talking about with "game and method"... which makes it hard to mix them up.

I've never in my life of gaming encountered a group who was "playing a game of (insert module name here)" -- it would always have been "We want to play D&D, and run through ToEE."

The person who creates a homebody craftsman... after struggling with that a few times, my response as a GM became "OK, you've created Bob the Blacksmith, who wants to stay home and perfect the crafting of horseshoes. Cool. Now, you can play that character, and come watch and hang out if you want, but don't expect any attention to your character, because this campaign isn't about blacksmiths or crafting or staying at home with the family, and most of it won't be taking place in that one town. Or... you can create a character who will want to travel with the rest of the PCs and 'have adventures' and can actually contribute to fighting and exploring and investigating and so on".

We had a couple of players who were so bad about it that we ended up with a name for it -- secondary character syndrome. For some reason, certain players seem to want to make "secondary characters". Comparing to fiction, it would be the character who appears three times in the entire novel and never gets a POV scene or chapter.

There's an even easier way to highlight the difference. We can play D&D as "Combat as Sports" or as "Combat as War". Choosing one over the other will have a huge difference when it comes to "rules for conducting the game", meaning how the "in-game rules" are going to be used and, more important, what "methods" work well for the game and which will break it, ie. CaS will have you to abstain from certain things that might be "in character" or, more often, "logical" because the results runs counter to the more "gamey" rules behind it.

There has to be a better way to express what you're trying to say here than using the word "rules" two different ways at once -- especially when "rules" will for many people specifically mean "game system and subsystems", "the mechanical part of the game", and/or "how the characters and setting are 'mapped' and allowed to interact non-arbitrarily."

(E: this is why I use and "game" and "campaign" of "game" and "game" as well, to avoid confusion between "game meaning the ruleset" and "game meaning the activity at the table". )

"CaS" and "CaW" are both kinda tangential, IMO... the feel and lethality of any particular combat should be determined by the setting and circumstances and characters involved.

So, to pick up your example, if you join a group where "drama" is the "game" and you either create a "Teflon Billy" or a character that would squash drama to prevent it, being "logical", it´s more like failing to want to participate in that game, nothing to do with the character (which still doesn't exist and is not sitting at the table).

If the entire point of the campaign is "drama drama drama", and there's going to be metagaming / author stance involved to deliberately make drama occur, then I wouldn't join in the first place. That's never going to be a campaign I'd enjoy. I'm not entertained by drama, and why would my character complicate their life with drama that they can avoid? (Don't confuse "drama" specifically with any and all forms of complications, challenges, setbacks, etc.)

In my experience, however, "drama" hasn't been the point of the campaign, it's part of the assumptions or preferences that some players bring to the table, and it's possible to give them what they want without forcing the other players to deal with it too. It's not necessary to cram the exact same thing down every player's throat, and each player's experience can focus on what they enjoy the most. The old group here had the player who wanted drama and intrigue, and the player who wanted to solve mysteries and uncover plots, and the player who wanted to hit stuff, and so on... and somehow, whether it was the other GM or me running a campaign, we managed to give each player what they wanted while not forcing the other players to get too deep into things they weren't interested in.

Darth Ultron

2018-01-14, 02:03 PM

Ok, DU, did you notice that I'm using a lot of quotation marks to mark technical terms and keep repeating some of them over and over, mainly "game", "method" and "exploration"?

I noticed, but if that is your writing style...

You keep misusing the word "railroading", when what you mean is "setting exploration" and what you do as a gm is creating obstacles and challenges to interact with and overcome that are "set in the fictional game world". I agree with you that this stance will create a "game" that needs the players to use certain "methods", like "Method Acting" (what I talk about with Max here) and cannot handle players going into full "author stance" because it will break down then.

But, and that is the important point here, other combinations of "game", "method" and "exploration" lead to different results that can handle an "author stance" really well and actually need it to function.

Right...so you agree with me, but don't want to agree with me, so you say you don't and then just do.

And I guess your saying, like I have also said, there are the specifically made collaborative storytelling games. Where everyone is a Player/Author/Game Master and everyone just takes a turn saying ''and then'', and after a set time everyone stops and links all the ''and thens'' together to get a story of what happened in the set time. And you get the worst type of story possible: the pile of linked ''and thens''.

Or... you can create a character who will want to travel with the rest of the PCs and 'have adventures' and can actually contribute to fighting and exploring and investigating and so on".

The vast majority of games are action adventure games, and players should know and understand this. This is a bit of the unavoidable metagame: the players will always know they are playing a game.

Florian

2018-01-14, 02:39 PM

And I guess your saying, like I have also said, there are the specifically made collaborative storytelling games. Where everyone is a Player/Author/Game Master and everyone just takes a turn saying ''and then'', and after a set time everyone stops and links all the ''and thens'' together to get a story of what happened in the set time. And you get the worst type of story possible: the pile of linked ''and thens''.

... and that is not how it works, like, at all.

Max_Killjoy

2018-01-14, 03:05 PM

... and that is not how it works, like, at all.

Indeed. I'm not even a fan of author-stance or "story-focus" RPG play or "storytelling games", and I know that's not how it works. Sheesh.

Darth Ultron

2018-01-14, 05:28 PM

... and that is not how it works, like, at all.

And that is what everyone will say, but it does not seem to be true. It's more just people don't like the ''way'' I put it, or simply people just don't want to agree with me.

A Real Story, not just the Basic Account of What Happened for a set Time Barley a Story, takes time and effort and most of all an good deal of control, predestination and outline.

In a Classic Game(like D&D) the DM makes the Story, and the players play through it. The Players can not (and don't want to) know all the story details and outline, as ''Ok everyone encounter 5, where all your characters will get captured. Everyone have your character trip or something and drop their weapons'' is the worst possible sort of non-game.

The only other way is everyone is a player/storyteller/GM. And that is just each person in the game, saying and doing whatever they want. Sure you can build on what the player before you just said..but you don't have to. And after a set time..say a couple hours...you stop and look at the Barley a Story that everyone sort of made together.

Though, guess somewhere here is the Casual Sandbox, where no matter what the players do, the DM just makes the story right in front of the characters. This type of Random Game does not need the DM to make a Story..or do much of anything else.

Max_Killjoy

2018-01-14, 08:59 PM

From the comments section below the article (http://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/6517/roleplaying-games/roleplaying-games-vs-storytelling-games) from The Alexandrian I linked to earlier (comment made by the author of the article):

Long answer: Deciding to take an action is not the same thing as exercising, obtaining, or determining narrative control. If I tell you a story about going fishing last week, it doesn’t follow that I was engaged in narrative creation while fishing. Similarly, if I tell you a story about the events in a roleplaying game, it doesn’t follow that I was engaged in narrative creation while roleplaying. (Although I might have been, it’s not inherent in the game.)

If I’m playing a storytelling game, OTOH, I am engaged in narrative creation while playing the game. It’s inherent in the mechanics — and thus the playing — of the game.

There seems to be a natural tendency to conflate the concept of “fictional” with the concept of “creating a story”. But stories don’t need to be fictional and roleplaying games open up a realm in which fictional actions can be taken outside the act of story creation.

To put it another way: Take the roleplaying out of it. If I tell you a story about this amazing game of Monopoly I played, it doesn’t mean that “roll 2d6 and move that number of spaces around the board” suddenly became a narrative control mechanic.

I'd never bothered reading the comments before, but note the parts I bolded.

Huh.

ross

2018-01-14, 09:26 PM

A Real Story, not just the Basic Account of What Happened for a set Time Barley a Story, takes time and effort and most of all an good deal of control, predestination and outline.

Are those conditions for a real story necessary, sufficient, or both, and how did you arrive at this determination?

In a Classic Game(like D&D) the DM makes the Story, and the players play through it. The Players can not (and don't want to) know all the story details and outline, as ''Ok everyone encounter 5, where all your characters will get captured. Everyone have your character trip or something and drop their weapons'' is the worst possible sort of non-game.

Why is this the worst possible sort of non-game?

The only other way is everyone is a player/storyteller/GM. And that is just each person in the game, saying and doing whatever they want. Sure you can build on what the player before you just said..but you don't have to. And after a set time..say a couple hours...you stop and look at the Barley a Story that everyone sort of made together.

Why is that barely a story?

And I guess your saying, like I have also said, there are the specifically made collaborative storytelling games. Where everyone is a Player/Author/Game Master and everyone just takes a turn saying ''and then'', and after a set time everyone stops and links all the ''and thens'' together to get a story of what happened in the set time. And you get the worst type of story possible: the pile of linked ''and thens''.

Why is that the worst type of story?

flond

2018-01-14, 10:11 PM

And that is what everyone will say, but it does not seem to be true. It's more just people don't like the ''way'' I put it, or simply people just don't want to agree with me.

A Real Story, not just the Basic Account of What Happened for a set Time Barley a Story, takes time and effort and most of all an good deal of control, predestination and outline.

In a Classic Game(like D&D) the DM makes the Story, and the players play through it. The Players can not (and don't want to) know all the story details and outline, as ''Ok everyone encounter 5, where all your characters will get captured. Everyone have your character trip or something and drop their weapons'' is the worst possible sort of non-game.

The only other way is everyone is a player/storyteller/GM. And that is just each person in the game, saying and doing whatever they want. Sure you can build on what the player before you just said..but you don't have to. And after a set time..say a couple hours...you stop and look at the Barley a Story that everyone sort of made together.

Though, guess somewhere here is the Casual Sandbox, where no matter what the players do, the DM just makes the story right in front of the characters. This type of Random Game does not need the DM to make a Story..or do much of anything else.

Or, you know you could use the rules (which most of these games have) to help define bits of the story. Take fiasco, where the game itself leads to a climax, and helps provide prompts and restrictions. Or, you know, players could talk and negotiate out what happens.

(Also, in a Classic game like DnD, generally the dice determine if a PC drops their weapons. If the GM is deciding that, it's more a "frustrated novelist storytelling experience." than a game)

Chauncymancer

2018-01-15, 01:56 AM

Now, you can play that character, and come watch and hang out if you want, but don't expect any attention to your character, because this campaign isn't about blacksmiths or crafting or staying at home with the family, and most of it won't be taking place in that one town. Or... you can create a character who will want to travel with the rest of the PCs and 'have adventures' and can actually contribute to fighting and exploring and investigating and so on".

I'm not entertained by drama, and why would my character complicate their life with drama that they can avoid? (Don't confuse "drama" specifically with any and all forms of complications, challenges, setbacks, etc.)

So just to make this clear, I'm about to describe my own favorite way to play and run RPGs, and I say this with love:
The name of tonight's dungeon is My Character is a ****ing Idiot Who's Ruining His Life. If you want to build a Smart Character Who's Handling His Life that can be you're secondary character, but if you want to interact with this campaign please build a life-ruining-fool who will do dumb **** to create drama.
When I see this stuff as a whole campaign, it's because the one thing I don't want there to be is a choice between being a damn idiot and progressing the campaign. Productively going deeper into the campaign should be something I can accomplish by being as dumb as humanely possible.

\
The only other way is everyone is a player/storyteller/GM. And that is just each person in the game, saying and doing whatever they want. Sure you can build on what the player before you just said..but you don't have to. And after a set time..say a couple hours...you stop and look at the Barley a Story that everyone sort of made together.

Though, guess somewhere here is the Casual Sandbox, where no matter what the players do, the DM just makes the story right in front of the characters. This type of Random Game does not need the DM to make a Story..or do much of anything else.
More realistically, there's a kind of game setup where everyone is doing something like "what the DM does in a sandbox game". Whether or not the DM in a sandbox game creates story is something that I see we disagree on, but suffice it to say that you're wrong about everything. :smallbiggrin:

Florian

2018-01-15, 07:50 AM

Huh.

I find that the Alexandrian has a major error in his analyses, that's why the conclusion is also faulty.

We have two major and distinctive layers to talk about:
1 - "Rules for running a game of D&D" aka "playing D&D"
2 - "Rules for playing a character in a game of D&D" aka "roleplaying a D&D character"

The fault is, that any decision made for (1) can also result in "rules elements" that will find their way into (2), else you'll get a dysfunction.

That's why I mentioned the CaS / CaW divide earlier as an example. 3E acknowledge that both exist and offered the option to play CaS by using the CR structure, or play CaW by ignoring it. The result is that CaS-based games lack in verisimilitude a bit, while CaW-based games can't manage balance. The dysfunction is that you simply cannot have both at the same time.

So the conclusion is faulty as it´s based on the assumption that for "classic play", (1) cannot directly influence (2) - which would be "disassociate mechanics" - while things are fine and acceptable when staying "hidden" by making it the GMs job to handle.

So it´s like saying "I want to play a high adventure game, but please hide the fact that we're playing a high adventure game from me, else I cannot enjoy it"

Florian

2018-01-15, 08:11 AM

And that is what everyone will say, but it does not seem to be true. It's more just people don't like the ''way'' I put it, or simply people just don't want to agree with me.

It´s more like you just don't seem to have first-hand experience with the subject matter and repeat some BS you have picked up somewhere, because what you describe doesn't match with experience and reality of people that actually gamed it that way and can tell about it.

I also suspect that this might be because early story-based games really were a bit odd and hard to stomach for the "classic D&D gamer", but things changed a lot on that front, just have a look at, say, Shadowrun: Anarchy as a damn good story-based alternative to regular SR 5.

Max_Killjoy

2018-01-15, 09:52 AM

I find that the Alexandrian has a major error in his analyses, that's why the conclusion is also faulty.

We have two major and distinctive layers to talk about:
1 - "Rules for running a game of D&D" aka "playing D&D"
2 - "Rules for playing a character in a game of D&D" aka "roleplaying a D&D character"

The fault is, that any decision made for (1) can also result in "rules elements" that will find their way into (2), else you'll get a dysfunction.

That's why I mentioned the CaS / CaW divide earlier as an example. 3E acknowledge that both exist and offered the option to play CaS by using the CR structure, or play CaW by ignoring it. The result is that CaS-based games lack in verisimilitude a bit, while CaW-based games can't manage balance. The dysfunction is that you simply cannot have both at the same time.

So the conclusion is faulty as it´s based on the assumption that for "classic play", (1) cannot directly influence (2) - which would be "disassociate mechanics" - while things are fine and acceptable when staying "hidden" by making it the GMs job to handle.

So it´s like saying "I want to play a high adventure game, but please hide the fact that we're playing a high adventure game from me, else I cannot enjoy it"

You keep talking about "rules for running a game of D&D aka playing D&D" as if that's an established thing everyone knows about and that no one will object to as an assumption or concept. What exactly are you referring to with that?

Is this simply the idea that there should be communication between everyone at the table before the campaign, with discussion of the particulars, such as setting, tone, system, etc? Because this hardly strikes me as something that needs a formalized set of rules.

Or is it something else?

Florian

2018-01-15, 10:08 AM

You keep talking about "rules for running a game of D&D aka playing D&D" as if that's an established thing everyone knows about and that no one will object to as an assumption or concept.

Because it´s the difference between "game" and "toy" and makes for the "G" in RPG because of that.

Max_Killjoy

2018-01-15, 10:22 AM

Because it´s the difference between "game" and "toy" and makes for the "G" in RPG because of that.

Then I have no idea what you're getting at that is supposedly creating two different levels of rules here.

Max_Killjoy

2018-01-15, 10:28 AM

It´s more like you just don't seem to have first-hand experience with the subject matter and repeat some BS you have picked up somewhere, because what you describe doesn't match with experience and reality of people that actually gamed it that way and can tell about it.

I also suspect that this might be because early story-based games really were a bit odd and hard to stomach for the "classic D&D gamer", but things changed a lot on that front, just have a look at, say, Shadowrun: Anarchy as a damn good story-based alternative to regular SR 5.

Even in quotation marks, the "classic D&D gamer" comment is at least reminiscent of one of the fallacies that's repeatedly been committed by some in two different camps... that there's "D&D" and then "whatever style of gaming the person is arguing for or against".

I'm not a fan of "story focus" / author stance, storygames, storytelling games, "narrative mechanics", etc.

I also washed my hands of D&D, D&D-like games, the entire d20 thing, etc, in the early 90s. There are too many elements in D&D that are antithetical to my enjoyment of RPGs.

So, either I'm neither a "storygamer" nor a "D&D gamer", or you mean something by "classic D&D gamer" that has nothing to do with D&D.

Lord Raziere

2018-01-15, 10:56 AM

Even in quotation marks, the "classic D&D gamer" comment is at least reminiscent of one of the fallacies that's repeatedly been committed by some in two different camps... that there's "D&D" and then "whatever style of gaming the person is arguing for or against".

I'm not a fan of "story focus" / author stance, storygames, storytelling games, "narrative mechanics", etc.

I also washed my hands of D&D, D&D-like games, the entire d20 thing, etc, in the early 90s. There are too many elements in D&D that are antithetical to my enjoyment of RPGs.

So, either I'm neither a "storygamer" nor a "D&D gamer", or you mean something by "classic D&D gamer" that has nothing to do with D&D.

Ok cool. so your whatever this thing we don't know is that isn't one of these two things, and therefore must be a third thing of probably many things. Are you kind enough to define yourself from other things, or are you going be unhelpful and say your a thing thats not these other things we do know of in confusingly righteous defeat of this fallacy?

cause if you don't, its just like dude, we have words for a reason, you want to discuss this, define your position other than "not these things".

Max_Killjoy

2018-01-15, 11:19 AM

Ok cool. so your whatever this thing we don't know is that isn't one of these two things, and therefore must be a third thing of probably many things. Are you kind enough to define yourself from other things, or are you going be unhelpful and say your a thing thats not these other things we do know of in confusingly righteous defeat of this fallacy?

cause if you don't, its just like dude, we have words for a reason, you want to discuss this, define your position other than "not these things".

So unless I'm able to offer up a neat little term, I'm not allowed to object to what appears to be a tenacious and pernicious false dichotomy?

If nothing else this thread should have demonstrated in spades that terminology is a minefield. I've had to tiptoe around words and phrasing just to avoid added confusion. I can't use "fiction" to describe the imagined / not-real-world elements of the game because people conflate "fictional" with "telling a story". I can't use "simulationist" because people think that means stifling minute intricate rules for every little aspect of the game and "secondary world". Etc. Etc. Etc.

So no, I can't offer a neat little definition that doesn't end up causing as much confusion as it avoids or clears up.

Lord Raziere

2018-01-15, 11:32 AM

So unless I'm able to offer up a neat little term, I'm not allowed to object to what appears to be a tenacious and pernicious false dichotomy?

If nothing else this thread should have demonstrated in spades that terminology is a minefield. I've had to tiptoe around words and phrasing just to avoid added confusion. I can't use "fiction" to describe the imagined / not-real-world elements of the game because people conflate "fictional" with "telling a story". I can't use "simulationist" because people think that means stifling minute intricate rules for every little aspect of the game and "secondary world". Etc. Etc. Etc.

So no, I can't offer a neat little definition that doesn't end up causing as much confusion as it avoids or clears up.

I'm not saying you can't object. I'm saying just objecting on its own doesn't really help. I'd rather have three definitions than two, and I'd rather have you define yourself than have someone define your for you whether you like it or not, despite how arbitrary labels are in general, because you need something to communicate things no matter how arbitrary the communication is, because otherwise we're stuck dancing around this with descriptions without getting any hard progress on getting a spectrum of viewpoints rather than a binary definition we're currently stuck in.

Tinkerer

2018-01-15, 11:53 AM

Thanks for those of you who responded to my last question.

What I find particularly interesting is several of you seem to think that "collaborative storytelling" is a description of what players and GMs do when playing an RPG, at least the roleplaying part of it. And possibly technically accurate. But that you don't think the best way to phrase it is "... about Collaborative storytelling".

The reason I find this interesting is "... about collaborative storytelling" is almost exclusively the way I see it used. Either "Roleplaying is about collaborative storytelling" or "RPGs are about colloborative storytelling" or "D&D is about collaborative storytelling." And when I say see it used, I mean by posters in these forums. It's a very common statement used to describe RPGs and roleplaying.

And that's one of the primary reasons I object. I don't believe any of those are true as a general statement of what they are about, the why or the purpose or the goal. That's obviously a different issue from a statement of how it's being done, the method being employed. (Even though I also disagree with the latter.)

----------------

Also Tinkerer, please note although I primarily think of storytelling, in regards to roleplaying games, as narrative mechanics or narrative resolution, as opposed to a predetermined story, that's just what leaps to mind. As I covered in post 438 that's not the only definitions I accept. An emergent story is a story. In other words, my definition of story in RPGs in the first post is my 'Strong' definition, but there is a valid broad one that includes recounting emergent story.

Or to put it another way, I accept that more broadly, a story is an account of events.

http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showsinglepost.php?p=22744136&postcount=438

I just disagree strongly that a player describing intent and approach, followed by GM resolving them and describing outcomes and possibly consequences, is an account of events. That is events happening in the in-game world. The mere fact that communication is necessary for events to occur in the in-game world, just because one of them is (necessarily) playing the part of the universe resolving the outcome of things being attempted, does not convert it from "event" to "account of events".**

(Edit: **important disclaimer: I am not saying that all RPG playing is done this way. What the player and DM are doing, their purpose, their goal, is what causes the division between "events occur" and "an account of events". Some people it's discussing established facts and describing them, others it's establishing the facts.)

----------

Let's add another question, that just occurred to me while typing up that last paragraph:
If talking to a DM necessarily is an account of events, when we replace the DM with a computer, and the player enters commands by keyboard and mouse instead of vocally, does gameplay suddenly change back from an account of events, to actual events occurring?

With the word "about" used in the phrase "X is about Y" comes up I always affix a "IMO" in front of it because you can never truly say that something is about something. Is Moby **** about a whale? Obsession? Fate? Divine knowledge? There are as many "RPGs are about" statements as there are gamers... okay, that's a touch of hyperbole however that is only due to using a limited shared language. Given a perfect unlimited language there would be as many "RPGs are about" statements as there are gamers because there is no authority or truth that we can test the statement against.

For the middle section that may very well be where we are forced to disagree and indeed it exemplifies the difference between how we view these. An account is merely an oral or written description of events, whether real or fictitious. Within the fiction events are occurring however in the real world an account of the events is occurring. Just like listening to a ball game on the radio. "Now, Derocher gets back in again. Vander Meer has a new ball. No balls, two strikes, two out, three on. The pitch. It's a high fly ball going into medium centerfield. Harry Craft comes under it, sets, and takes it, and it's a double no-hitter for Vander Meer." This caused me some confusion since I have the opposite point of view as stated in your paragraph. Whether or not you could call the events in a session "storytelling" at least I can see the opposing side. But I don't quite see how one could not call it an account of events.

For the latter part it depends on the format and how it is presented. Namely, is it being presented in an oral or written form or in some other manner? Let us take Zork for instance, a classic example of the genre interactive fiction. I would absolutely call that an account of events. You describe an action and the game gives you an account of the events which occur as a result.

Tanarii

2018-01-15, 12:22 PM

With the word "about" used in the phrase "X is about Y" comes up I always affix a "IMO" in front of it because you can never truly say that something is about something. Is Moby **** about a whale? Obsession? Fate? Divine knowledge? There are as many "RPGs are about" statements as there are gamers... okay, that's a touch of hyperbole however that is only due to using a limited shared language. Given a perfect unlimited language there would be as many "RPGs are about" statements as there are gamers because there is no authority or truth that we can test the statement against.That's very reasonable

For the middle section that may very well be where we are forced to disagree and indeed it exemplifies the difference between how we view these. An account is merely an oral or written description of events, whether real or fictitious. Within the fiction events are occurring however in the real world an account of the events is occurring. Just like listening to a ball game on the radio. "Now, Derocher gets back in again. Vander Meer has a new ball. No balls, two strikes, two out, three on. The pitch. It's a high fly ball going into medium centerfield. Harry Craft comes under it, sets, and takes it, and it's a double no-hitter for Vander Meer." This caused me some confusion since I have the opposite point of view as stated in your paragraph. Whether or not you could call the events in a session "storytelling" at least I can see the opposing side. But I don't quite see how one could not call it an account of events.Whereas I see what the player and DM are doing, if the player is making decisions for their character as a fictional person in the fictional environment, and the DM is resolving them and determining outcomes and consequences, AS the ballgame. The exact opposite of listening to an announcer. If a third party gave a summary, then that would be the analogue to the announcer.

At least we know exactly why we disagree, in clear terms now. :smallbiggrin:

For the latter part it depends on the format and how it is presented. Namely, is it being presented in an oral or written form or in some other manner? Let us take Zork for instance, a classic example of the genre interactive fiction. I would absolutely call that an account of events. You describe an action and the game gives you an account of the events which occur as a result.Sadly, I'm not familiar so I can't comment.

But to me there's no real difference in terms of what's going on underneath the scenes between:
- a player using a vocal control interface to control their character, and the DM determining outcomes and consequences.
- a player using a hand control interface to control their character, and the computer determining outcomes and consequences.

What is different is in a TRPG the player isn't limited to a set of pre-programmed approaches and intents, and the DM isn't limited to a set of pre-programmed outcomes and consequences. And of course that the DM can improvise the world and challenges in it on the fly, as opposed to them needing to be arduously programmed. But in regards to "events happen" vs "account of events", an RPG can easily be analogous to both a CRPG or the real world in terms of how you play, as opposed to an interactive book or a movie.

Florian

2018-01-15, 12:37 PM

Sadly, I'm not familiar so I can't comment.

Reference to old-school point-and-click adventures. You know, here's a scene, there is stuff in it to interact, make the right choices and you proceed to the next scene (Door, Orc, Pie...)
So, the "story" is basically told and will reveal itself when you succeed at playing the game. (I kick in the door, kill the pie and kiss the orc...)

Tanarii

2018-01-15, 12:45 PM

Tinkerer

2018-01-15, 01:08 PM

Whereas I see what the player and DM are doing, if the player is making decisions for their character as a fictional person in the fictional environment, and the DM is resolving them and determining outcomes and consequences, AS the ballgame. The exact opposite of listening to an announcer. If a third party gave a summary, then that would be the analogue to the announcer.

At least we know exactly why we disagree, in clear terms now. :smallbiggrin:

Yes, I think we do. As one final note here I should mention is that I also view the player and GM as acting as the ballgame. They are just functioning as the announcer on top of that. I don't quite view those tasks as mutually exclusive.

Florian

2018-01-15, 01:15 PM

Man, I remember trying to play Hitchhikers Guide in green-pixel font. I got so frustrated with the pixel-bitching, or whatever the pre-point-and-click version of it would be called. I mean, I was only like 7 or 8, but even then I recognized what not at all fun is like. :smallyuk:

Ey, you didn't play Future Wars on the Amiga, because that was the game where you had to hit exactly that one Pixel to proceed and actually start the story.....

Still, relevant to the overall topic, tho.

Tanarii

2018-01-15, 01:19 PM

Yes, I think we do. As one final note here I should mention is that I also view the player and GM as acting as the ballgame. They are just functioning as the announcer on top of that. I don't quite view those tasks as mutually exclusive.
Schrodinger's Announcer? Simultaneously defines the event and provides an account of it, until you open the box and the campaign ends? :smallbiggrin:

Max_Killjoy

2018-01-15, 01:22 PM

kitanas

2018-01-15, 01:33 PM

Schrodinger's Announcer? Simultaneously defines the event and provides an account of it, until you open the box and the campaign ends? :smallbiggrin:

More like both, at the same time. Like if our hypothetical baseball announcer was also a playing in the game as he announced it. I'd say this happens automatically in TTRPG's because the action required to do so is the same, talk about what is happening in game.

Florian

2018-01-15, 01:37 PM

Still curious as to where this idea of two different layers of "rules" comes from and what it claims.

"Traditionally", we divide participant of the game between "players" and "referees", with one having access to the PHB, the other the DMG.

Now let me ask you: How have you learned to play D&D? By being taught by someone, By reading the DMG or by reading the PHB and extrapolating some rules or going over to acknowledge that you need the DMG to make it work? This will inform you that player (+PHB) and referee (or rather: GM + Dmg) will provide the "working" game.

(Sorry, it can be pretty draining for me to discuss stuff like that in english. The german language offers some more precise terms with clearer meanings and I'm frustrated at not operating at the communicative level I'm used to)

Tanarii

2018-01-15, 01:47 PM

More like both, at the same time. Like if our hypothetical baseball announcer was also a playing in the game as he announced it. I'd say this happens automatically in TTRPG's because the action required to do so is the same, talk about what is happening in game.
That just doesn't work for me. I reject that merely talking about an event automatically = "an account of an event". Just because that's what it does for real events, it does not follow that's what happens for a fictional event being invented. The fictional event must be established before an account of it can be provided.

kitanas

2018-01-15, 01:59 PM

That just doesn't work for me. I reject that merely talking about an event automatically = "an account of an event". Just because that's what it does for real events, it does not follow that's what happens for a fictional event being invented. The fictional event must be established before an account of it can be provided.

Why does it not follow? What is the differentiation? IE if I was hypothetically listening to the narration of your game, how would I be able to tell if it was an account, or the establishment of the fictional event?

Florian

2018-01-15, 02:11 PM

Why does it not follow? What is the differentiation? IE if I was hypothetically listening to the narration of your game, how would I be able to tell if it was an account, or the establishment of the fictional event?

Watch a pattern repeat itself: Tanarii will tell you that his only concern is playing his character, "in character". Should the GM, say, DU, arrange things in such a way that it will provide a "story", then it was not his intend.

Max_Killjoy

2018-01-15, 02:11 PM

"Traditionally", we divide participant of the game between "players" and "referees", with one having access to the PHB, the other the DMG.

Now let me ask you: How have you learned to play D&D? By being taught by someone, By reading the DMG or by reading the PHB and extrapolating some rules or going over to acknowledge that you need the DMG to make it work? This will inform you that player (+PHB) and referee (or rather: GM + Dmg) will provide the "working" game.

(Sorry, it can be pretty draining for me to discuss stuff like that in english. The german language offers some more precise terms with clearer meanings and I'm frustrated at not operating at the communicative level I'm used to)

In my experience, most RPGs / systems don't divide up into a players' book and a GM's book -- this seems to largely be a D&D / Gygaxian approach. The WEG d6 Star Wars various editions didn't, HERO 4th and 5th edition didn't, White Wolf's various lines didn't, most of the PDFs I have of various things for research don't. They may have had some books with the words "gamemaster" or "player" or "storyteller" in the title, but nothing in those books was really divided out that way OR crucial to running or playing using that system or in those settings or whatever, they were just titles on the books.

As for how I learned the details of RPGs. For AD&D, once I learned about it, I bought the PHB, the DMG, Monster Manuals, etc, and didn't restrict myself to any one player or DM "table role", I just read everything I could get my hands on. Starting in the mid 80s, I collected WEG Star Wars books and read through them cover to cover repeatedly, made sample characters, messed with the dice, etc, for many years, but never had a chance to play the game until I was in college. Same thing with White Wolf, HERO, etc -- read everything I can get my hands on, pick brains, read internet stuff (going back to the days of Usenet), etc.

Most of the people I played with were also like this, people who knew the systems inside and out, and often had GMed before even if they weren't GMing the current campaign. The idea of two different "layers" of rules would never have occurred to us -- we all knew and analyzed and discussed the rules of the games, and none of the games (in the sense of the systems OR in the sense of the campaign) we were playing had any divide or difference, it was simply a "rules set".

E: which also reminds me of something I was going to post earlier. You've said that we don't sit down and "play D&D", we sit down and play a game using D&D, that D&D is not the game. It has been my observation, even just reading these forums, that many players do in fact expect to sit down and specifically play D&D. They expect rules-as-written, with all the published material being fair game, and take umbrage when a DM restricts their choices based on the setting or balance concerns. There will be claims that D&D is a universal system for fantasy games, but any effort to tweak the system for other settings or to better match setting expectations... will be met with stiff resistance from some of those same players.

HERO, on the other hand, there's almost no one who would say that you're "playing HERO". The system is a toolkit with tools meant to be used or not used as fits the setting and campaign and "power level" and so on. Even if a group is "playing Champions", they understand that the system is just a toolkit for creating superheroic campaigns and "mapping" those settings etc.

Tanarii

2018-01-15, 02:15 PM

Why does it not follow? What is the differentiation? IE if I was hypothetically listening to the narration of your game, how would I be able to tell if it was an account, or the establishment of the fictional event?Why is anyone listening to the gameplay relevant? All that matters is the intent of the player and DM.

Edit: To answer more fully, generally there is no way for an outside observer to tell the difference between an emergent story and a story being told intentionally to be a story.

BoringInfoGuy

2018-01-15, 02:34 PM

Reference to old-school point-and-click adventures. You know, here's a scene, there is stuff in it to interact, make the right choices and you proceed to the next scene (Door, Orc, Pie...)
So, the "story" is basically told and will reveal itself when you succeed at playing the game. (I kick in the door, kill the pie and kiss the orc...)
Zork is an even older school than point and click adventures.

Being released commercially in the 1980’s, the Zork Series debuted back when most (all?) home computers had monochrome monitors and no mouse. The original trilogy are pure “Text Adventures”. A later sequel, Beyond Zork: the Coconut of Quendor, was still primarily text in its interface, but added a simple on screen map to aid in navigation. It wasn’t until Return to Zork was released in 1993 that the game took on a graphic based point and click environment.

Zork Games in general were much more about exploration and puzzle solving then a series of scenes where you had to make the right choices to get to the next scene. The way you describe it, I would envision a screen with stuff to interact with, and only after solving the stuff on screen A can I move on to screen B. On the other hand, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy Text Adventure game fits that model fairly closely, having a fairly linear progression.

kyoryu

2018-01-15, 02:38 PM

Zork Games in general were much more about exploration and puzzle solving then a series of scenes where you had to make the right choices to get to the next scene. The way you describe it, I would envision a screen with stuff to interact with, and only after solving the stuff on screen A can I move on to screen B. On the other hand, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy Text Adventure game fits that model fairly closely, having a fairly linear progression.

Not really. While there were some linear bits, as a whole the game was a set of unconnected areas that you could do in arbitrary order. Its structure was closer to that of your typical Bioware game than anything.

Though the structure of an old-school Infocom game is fairly close to that of a roleplaying game, in that it meets the "here's teh situation, what do you do?" model to a T, even if the math behind it doesn't match up for anything. The idea in Zork of "bring the treasures back to the house" is a close analogue to gp for xp in old school D&D.

Max_Killjoy

2018-01-15, 03:51 PM

On that and as a note, often in forum arguments, it's possible to see yourself as contesting another posters 'extreme' viewpoint, 'defending' against aspects of it with your moderate point of view, as opposed to being the opposite 'extreme'. For the record, that's how I viewed myself coming into this thread: Defending against an extremist definition with a more moderate viewpoint. Aggressively defending though. Pretty sure many other posters see themselves doing the same in their counterpoints. :smallbiggrin:

On this -- I've found that it's very hard to talk about what's wrong with a position or claim, without people assuming you're making your own claim or somehow running with the assumptions of the position or claim you're refuting.

So... if the GNS model asserts a set of exclusive creative agendas that can't be mixed without harming the game and must be handled by systems and campaigns specifically designed exclusively to foster those agendas... but I assert that an actual RPG sits in the space where factors that can be expressed using those creative agendas as shorthand would overlap on a Venn diagram, even as the priorities vary within that overlapping area... then somehow that becomes not my criticism of GNS/Big Model, but supposedly an active statement of my own specific position as if I'm making my statement starting from their presumptions.

BoringInfoGuy

2018-01-15, 04:16 PM

Not really. While there were some linear bits, as a whole the game was a set of unconnected areas that you could do in arbitrary order. Its structure was closer to that of your typical Bioware game than anything.

Though the structure of an old-school Infocom game is fairly close to that of a roleplaying game, in that it meets the "here's teh situation, what do you do?" model to a T, even if the math behind it doesn't match up for anything. The idea in Zork of "bring the treasures back to the house" is a close analogue to gp for xp in old school D&D.
Kyoryu, I agree, and that was largely my point - for Zork.

Hitchhiker was a standout in the genre for being strongly linear, with several sections you had to complete before you could move on. Notably, there was little backtracking. Once you left your house, you quickly got to the point where you could not re-enter your house. After leaving the pub area and ending up with the Vogons, you can’t return for obvious reasons. Once you get in the HoG, you can’t return to the Vogons. Once on the HoG, you have seem to have more options, but - as I recall in the sections I figured out - figuring out a puzzle generally put you into a scenario which you got to go through once, and could not return to. By and large, Hitchhikers had plenty of moments where you could not progress because you forgot to pick up an item or solve a puzzle in a section you could not get back to. Plenty of needing to start from the beginning or from an earlier save. Oh, and remember how many of those puzzles had time limits? Take too many turns, and oops, gameplay may continue, but you can’t win anymore.

So for Zork, Florian’s description was way off base. But in fairness, I think it is not too far off for Hitchhiker’s. (Aside from still not being point and click).

Knaight

2018-01-15, 04:32 PM

In my experience, most RPGs / systems don't divide up into a players' book and a GM's book -- this seems to largely be a D&D / Gygaxian approach. The WEG d6 Star Wars various editions didn't, HERO 4th and 5th edition didn't, White Wolf's various lines didn't, most of the PDFs I have of various things for research don't. They may have had some books with the words "gamemaster" or "player" or "storyteller" in the title, but nothing in those books was really divided out that way OR crucial to running or playing using that system or in those settings or whatever, they were just titles on the books.
A lot of this is more system length than anything - distinct GM sections within a book are really common, it just doesn't need to be a whole book because the rest of the industry has realized that it doesn't take a thousand pages of core rules to make a game.

E: which also reminds me of something I was going to post earlier. You've said that we don't sit down and "play D&D", we sit down and play a game using D&D, that D&D is not the game. It has been my observation, even just reading these forums, that many players do in fact expect to sit down and specifically play D&D. They expect rules-as-written, with all the published material being fair game, and take umbrage when a DM restricts their choices based on the setting or balance concerns. There will be claims that D&D is a universal system for fantasy games, but any effort to tweak the system for other settings or to better match setting expectations... will be met with stiff resistance from some of those same players.
The D&D player base is full of people who will setting lawyer the implicit setting incredibly hard while not acknowledging that as setting lawyering (another reason I don't like those systems), but that's not too relevant to the idea of two layers.

That's more simple - that there's the layer of interacting with the rules, and that there's the layer of interacting with the setting that's been built out of those rules. I don't find the two layer model particularly useful, but the idea that the rules set is first used to build a bunch of setting elements (PCs, NPCs, etc.) and then you interact with those is clearly true. It's the old rules-scenario divide that also exists in a lot of wargames, and that emphatically doesn't exist in most boardgames or videogames.

Max_Killjoy

2018-01-15, 05:41 PM

A lot of this is more system length than anything - distinct GM sections within a book are really common, it just doesn't need to be a whole book because the rest of the industry has realized that it doesn't take a thousand pages of core rules to make a game.

Setting and NPC secrets aside, I don't recall those GM sections usually having the explicit or implicit "keep out all non-GMs" or "if you're not GMing don't read this section you cheater" warnings that I recall from D&D.

If nothing else, I think the "rules for players" and "rules for GMs" division isn't a fair assumption to make about all players and all games, and a hard "player" vs "GM" split beyond the context of a single campaign is a bad assumption for any analysis or theory -- in my experience we all GMed at some point, and we all played PCs at some point.

Max_Killjoy

2018-01-15, 05:51 PM

The Supremacy of Context (https://refereeingandreflection.wordpress.com/2016/02/19/the-supremacy-of-context/)

"For the purposes of this article, I am defining “context” as being “information which prevents the fiction or some element of the fiction from being arbitrary”, where the “fiction” is defined along Dungeon World-inspired lines as “the imaginative construct that is the focus of play in RPGs and story games”."

Somewhat related, and an interesting different angle on the inclusion of "story" and "setting" in RPGs, and the "purpose" of setting.

Personally, I think an RPG setting can be, if constructed carefully, a place to game in, a place that-could-be-real, and a place to tell stories in, all at once, and that it does't need to fixate on one thing.

kyoryu

2018-01-15, 06:21 PM

Kyoryu, I agree, and that was largely my point - for Zork.

Hitchhiker was a standout in the genre for being strongly linear, with several sections you had to complete before you could move on. Notably, there was little backtracking. Once you left your house, you quickly got to the point where you could not re-enter your house. After leaving the pub area and ending up with the Vogons, you can’t return for obvious reasons. Once you get in the HoG, you can’t return to the Vogons. Once on the HoG, you have seem to have more options, but - as I recall in the sections I figured out - figuring out a puzzle generally put you into a scenario which you got to go through once, and could not return to. By and large, Hitchhikers had plenty of moments where you could not progress because you forgot to pick up an item or solve a puzzle in a section you could not get back to. Plenty of needing to start from the beginning or from an earlier save. Oh, and remember how many of those puzzles had time limits? Take too many turns, and oops, gameplay may continue, but you can’t win anymore.

So for Zork, Florian’s description was way off base. But in fairness, I think it is not too far off for Hitchhiker’s. (Aside from still not being point and click).

That's why I describe it as being very similar to a Bioware game - an entry section, a middle where there's several unrelated sections that can be done arbitrarily, and a final section or two that again go linear.

Darth Ultron

2018-01-15, 06:42 PM

Are those conditions for a real story necessary, sufficient, or both, and how did you arrive at this determination?

Necessary and common sense.

Why is this the worst possible sort of non-game?

If there is a script, an exact detailed account of what each character will do and how everything happens...it's not even a game. It's just acting...or reading a play(or screenplay).

Why is that barely a story?

A Story needs things like a focus and a plot and a start and and ending. Having a couple people just randomly say stuff only makes a ''tell the tale'' type story.

You can do any thing for a time...say an hour...then stop and write down what you did for that past hour. It is ''officially'' a story, but only barley. It's like bread and water are a meal. A real story needs all sorts of things to be a real story, it is not just ''what I did for a time.''

Why is that the worst type of story?

At best it is a mess a vaguely linked random messes of whims, and at worse it's just a pure mess of chaos. Each person player author controller can do whatever they want as they are all equal. They can agree on things...but they don't have too. And even when they agree they won't agree exactly the same. And each person can talk over, chance and destroy whatever anyone else does...as the last one to speak gets to do anything they want.

(Also, in a Classic game like DnD, generally the dice determine if a PC drops their weapons. If the GM is deciding that, it's more a "frustrated novelist storytelling experience." than a game)

Right, except we are not talking about the Almighty Rules...we are talking about Storytelling. Classic games like D&D don't have storytelling rules.

More realistically, there's a kind of game setup where everyone is doing something like "what the DM does in a sandbox game". Whether or not the DM in a sandbox game creates story is something that I see we disagree on, but suffice it to say that you're wrong about everything. :smallbiggrin:

So your idea of a Sandbox game is just the Random Mess?

And the DM always creates the story. Sure I player can say ''my character wants to go kill a dragon'', but that is not creating a story in any way shape or form.

It´s more like you just don't seem to have first-hand experience with the subject matter and repeat some BS you have picked up somewhere, because what you describe doesn't match with experience and reality of people that actually gamed it that way and can tell about it.

It's true I have not played every RPG to ever come out.

So unless I'm able to offer up a neat little term,

I'd point out that I make up my own little terms all the time......and no one likes that :)

"Traditionally", we divide participant of the game between "players" and "referees", with one having access to the PHB, the other the DMG.

But it's all the same rules? So how are there different rules again?

Watch a pattern repeat itself: Tanarii will tell you that his only concern is playing his character, "in character". Should the GM, say, DU, arrange things in such a way that it will provide a "story", then it was not his intend.

As a DM it's always my intention to provide a Story. In fact there will be the main Adventure Story, a Group Story and each character will have at least one Story.

flond

2018-01-15, 06:49 PM

Right, except we are not talking about the Almighty Rules...we are talking about Storytelling. Classic games like D&D don't have storytelling rules.

Except that DND has rules that correlate to actions. If someone dies, that means they're dead. If someone tries to climb a wall, and fails, that means they've failed. And if they succeed, it means they've succeeded. If you're not taking that into account, you're not playing a "Storytelling game" you're being a Telltale GM. "Your choices matter! (Except they don't)." and, if you're going to do that...well, actual Telltale has much better production values! :smile:

And the DM always creates the story. Sure I player can say ''my character wants to go kill a dragon'', but that is not creating a story in any way shape or form.

And if the players decide to run away from that dragon, or try to negotiate with a dragon. Or start robbing houses to hire someone else. The dms "Story of a dragon slaying" isn't going to happen, now is it? (And if you think that's disruptive or unlikely, well, that's how I feel about you forcing your plot in all of the time.)

Darth Ultron

2018-01-15, 07:53 PM

Except that DND has rules that correlate to actions. If someone dies, that means they're dead. If someone tries to climb a wall, and fails, that means they've failed. And if they succeed, it means they've succeeded. If you're not taking that into account, you're not playing a "Storytelling game" you're being a Telltale GM. "Your choices matter! (Except they don't)." and, if you're going to do that...well, actual Telltale has much better production values! :smile:

The rules are only for actions, and just about only character actions. So most rules don't have any effect on the Story or effect the Story at all.

Even a characters actions don't effect the Adventure Story much...unless they are at a change point. and those are rare in a good story.

And if the players decide to run away from that dragon, or try to negotiate with a dragon. Or start robbing houses to hire someone else. The dms "Story of a dragon slaying" isn't going to happen, now is it? (And if you think that's disruptive or unlikely, well, that's how I feel about you forcing your plot in all of the time.)

What the players have the characters do does not matter much as they follow the adventure story. Though it is a bit dumb of them to ignore things the DM has put in the setting. If the DM adds a weapon of dragonslaying, it's just dumb for the players to say ''well, we won't have anything to do with that as the DM made that up''.

Though yes the players do have to play through the Adventure Story....that is how the game works. The players can say they don't want to play if they don't want too. Otherwise, the Adventure Story runs on.

If the players might be a problem, the DM can always ask the players what adventure they would like before the game starts. and assuming the DM can get a coherent answer, then the DM can make that adventure.

flond

2018-01-15, 08:59 PM

The rules are only for actions, and just about only character actions. So most rules don't have any effect on the Story or effect the Story at all.

Even a characters actions don't effect the Adventure Story much...unless they are at a change point. and those are rare in a good story.

What the players have the characters do does not matter much as they follow the adventure story. Though it is a bit dumb of them to ignore things the DM has put in the setting. If the DM adds a weapon of dragonslaying, it's just dumb for the players to say ''well, we won't have anything to do with that as the DM made that up''.

Though yes the players do have to play through the Adventure Story....that is how the game works. The players can say they don't want to play if they don't want too. Otherwise, the Adventure Story runs on.

If the players might be a problem, the DM can always ask the players what adventure they would like before the game starts. and assuming the DM can get a coherent answer, then the DM can make that adventure.

So, yes. You run "Telltale RPGs". Now there's not anything wrong with it, but it is pretty simplistic. Yes, if there's a sword of dragonslaying, a dragon, and empty corridors between the two, the path is obvious. But don't go around claiming "Use sword on dragon" is an epic. Or the best use of an rpg. People play in those, yes, because they're easy. They're comfort food rpgs.

Max_Killjoy

2018-01-15, 09:14 PM

flond

2018-01-15, 09:35 PM

Someone once named that style "Story Before", as opposed to "Story Now" (Edwardian "Narrative") or "Story After" (emergent story).

And "Story Before" is all cool, provided there's buy-in and that's what the players agreed to.

This is a fair cop. (Except of course that I don't think DU makes any attempt to clear anything.)

(I do object though, to the idea that this is the epitome of story in rpgs)

Max_Killjoy

2018-01-15, 09:50 PM

This is a fair cop. (Except of course that I don't think DU makes any attempt to clear anything.)

(I do object though, to the idea that this is the epitome of story in rpgs)

It is not the epitome, it's simply something some players may like, even if I personally do not.

And you are correct about the parenthetical -- he has said that he considers player agency and player buy-in to be "poisonous" or something of the sort.

Florian

2018-01-16, 04:43 AM

@Max:

Good morning. Somehow you seem to struggle to connect the dots that you yourself can name.

First, there's the marked divide when you have different, not connecting rules sections. "This is for players", "This if for GMs", "This is how to build the world", "This is how to gm the game", and so on.

Second, when you have different sets of "styles", that will inform what the actual game is and heavily modify how to understand the "player rules". As we have DU along, lets stay with "Story Before" as "hard rules", as that will inform us what the game is about and that we need to follow some rules in regard to "player buy-in", "range and limit of agency", "reward mechanics", so on.
That leads to the second layer, that is about "story as setting" or "story in setting" (or meshing both). This is about the difference between "We play Giantslayer" and "We play in Golarion and the AP is Giantslayer", subtle, but a difference.

The origins of GNS as an analytical tool deal with exactly those difference and why something is "sand in the gears" and why using the term "I play D&D" doesn't help at all - ie finding out and being honest about why more often than not a table with "RAW is the game" and "The story is the game" gamers will often run into trouble (Ex for this is again DU with the "power gamers", mostly meaning someone feeling that RAW beats Story, thereby actually being in the wrong "game").

Darth Ultron

2018-01-16, 08:11 AM

So, yes. You run "Telltale RPGs". Now there's not anything wrong with it, but it is pretty simplistic. Yes, if there's a sword of dragonslaying, a dragon, and empty corridors between the two, the path is obvious. But don't go around claiming "Use sword on dragon" is an epic. Or the best use of an rpg. People play in those, yes, because they're easy. They're comfort food rpgs.

Telling a Tale is the way the anti-D&D folks do it: they just do a pile of random unplanned stuff and then stop at some point...look back...and then tell what happened and call it a (Barley) Story. This is the easy, casual way to run a game that a lot of people like.

My way is more Focused Storytelling: The DM makes the Stories, and the players run through the stories.

Someone once named that style "Story Before", as opposed to "Story Now" (Edwardian "Narrative") or "Story After" (emergent story).

And "Story Before" is all cool, provided there's buy-in and that's what the players agreed to.

I don't really get the hate for the Story Before, as that is the only way to have a Good Real Story. The Story Now is just the random mess, and the Story After is the Barley Story.

Like for example: The set up is The player makes a backstory for a character of their sister was kidnapped, but the player makes up no details and specifically leaves the story open for the DM to fill in. So then the game starts with a typical first adventure, like say goblin bandits with it's own story. But both the DM and the Player do want to do the save the sister story as part of the game and tie it in with the groups adventure. And the Player, being just a Player can not do anything to make the save the sister story happen outside the game or metagamewise, the only thing they can do is in character take actions(like they can ask a npc if they have seen her).

Story Before: Well the DM takes a couple minutes and comes up with a who/what/why/how the sister was grabbed, a rough timeline and where she is now. Then, knowing all the details, the DM can start the active story of Save the Sister, by dropping a clue(or three, per the standard) in the bandits lair. This is the only way to advance a real story.

Story Now: Well, the DM does nothing. They have their novel of setting notes, but don't do anything because they refuse to make a story or do anything without reacting to the players. So the players randomly have their characters do random things in the game. The DM has not made any details of the sister story, so they can't drop a clue. And even if they did drop a clue, it would just be a random one based on nothing: as the DM has nothing to base it on. And at worst :The player can look at the non-clue, randomly say whatever is whatever and not follow the clue as no matter where they go or what they do the DM will just make the sister story out of thin air, right in front of the character.

Story After: Well, this DM does nothing as well. Except this DM won't make the story right in front of the character.

So, the only way to have a Good, Real Story is to have the Story First.

Max_Killjoy

2018-01-16, 10:00 AM

@Max:

Good morning. Somehow you seem to struggle to connect the dots that you yourself can name.

Is that pattern of stars a bear... or a cooking utensil?

First, there's the marked divide when you have different, not connecting rules sections. "This is for players", "This if for GMs", "This is how to build the world", "This is how to gm the game", and so on.

And again, that's a far more prominent thing in some systems than in others. It's been a big deal in some editions of D&D, but in contrast multiple editions of HERO have zero rules and no special rules section for GMs.

Some systems don't have rules for wouldbuilding at all, or leave that to advice and guidelines given in specific "genre" supplements or sections.

Some systems don't have disconnected rules for GMs, or have a section that's full of non-rules advice for GMs, or...

This reminds me of one of the recurring gremlins of RPG theory and analysis -- people come into the hobby via a specific very popular system (D&D in the US, maybe The Dark Eye elsewhere, whatever), see how that system is written and played, and then find something else that suits them far better... and then frame everything and everyone else's experience in the context of the popular system vs their personal "revelation" system or idea.

Or they stay with that first system and frame everything in the context of how that first system does things and how its playerbase / community does things.

Second, when you have different sets of "styles", that will inform what the actual game is and heavily modify how to understand the "player rules". As we have DU along, lets stay with "Story Before" as "hard rules", as that will inform us what the game is about and that we need to follow some rules in regard to "player buy-in", "range and limit of agency", "reward mechanics", so on.

That leads to the second layer, that is about "story as setting" or "story in setting" (or meshing both). This is about the difference between "We play Giantslayer" and "We play in Golarion and the AP is Giantslayer", subtle, but a difference.

The origins of GNS as an analytical tool deal with exactly those difference and why something is "sand in the gears" and why using the term "I play D&D" doesn't help at all - ie finding out and being honest about why more often than not a table with "RAW is the game" and "The story is the game" gamers will often run into trouble (Ex for this is again DU with the "power gamers", mostly meaning someone feeling that RAW beats Story, thereby actually being in the wrong "game").

Yup, people like different things and in different amounts, and different tastes can clash, and it's good to discuss that and try to avoid problems. None of that is contentious. It's good to do some analysis on those questions.

GNS is to RPG analysis what Freud or Jung are to psychology.

It pushed to the forefront an existing awareness that there are problems to be solved and questions to be asked, got some of the questions right... and then proceeded to get other questions and most of the answers very very wrong in service to one man's issues and troubles (in the case of GNS, Mr Edwards).

And yet like Freudian and Jungian psychology, Edwardian RPG analysis has people who will swear by its Truthiness and warp all observations to fit the theory until the day they die, no matter how much we find out that the theory got dead wrong.

GNS is mistaken in its specific categories of what people like (each is too broad, the list is too short), and in its assertion that people can only like one of them, and its assertion that a system or campaign can only do one of them at a time while being functional.

I'd like to say that the discussion has long since moved on, but The Forge gave RPG theory and analysis such a bad name that it's been largely stunted ever since, with people still referring to bits and pieces of GNS as Truth, and the terminology still stuck with their assumptions.

https://refereeingandreflection.wordpress.com/2014/12/22/remembering-the-forge/ (https://refereeingandreflection.wordpress.com/2014/12/22/remembering-the-forge/)
http://whitehall-paraindustries.com/Theory/Threefold/rpg_theory_bad_rep.htm (http://whitehall-paraindustries.com/Theory/Threefold/rpg_theory_bad_rep.htm)

http://www.seankreynolds.com/rpgfiles/gaming/BreakdownOfRPGPlayers.html (http://www.seankreynolds.com/rpgfiles/gaming/BreakdownOfRPGPlayers.html)
http://trustrum.com/wotc-market-research/ (http://trustrum.com/wotc-market-research/)

http://angrydm.com/2014/01/gaming-for-fun-part-1-eight-kinds-of-fun/ (http://angrydm.com/2014/01/gaming-for-fun-part-1-eight-kinds-of-fun/)

Tinkerer

2018-01-16, 10:11 AM

The origins of GNS as an analytical tool deal with exactly those difference and why something is "sand in the gears" and why using the term "I play D&D" doesn't help at all - ie finding out and being honest about why more often than not a table with "RAW is the game" and "The story is the game" gamers will often run into trouble (Ex for this is again DU with the "power gamers", mostly meaning someone feeling that RAW beats Story, thereby actually being in the wrong "game").

That is exactly why people dislike GNS theory. For starters it was entirely superfluous when it was released, being essentially a ripoff of the Threefold Model simply with the emphasis placed on different points. Secondly it is entirely too divisionary of a model encouraging people to ignore the other aspects and indeed being outright insulting to other methods (routinely calling people who enjoy combat idiots or morons for example). Thirdly it fails as a tool of analysis because of that divisiveness due to the fact that the categories are not mutually exclusive. As an example if it were describing a car the three aspects could be something like colour, engine, and body type.

One of the few things that Max_Killjoy and I agree on is that GNS theory is complete and utter garbage. I personally prefer to ignore it and leave it in the dustbin hence why this is... heck the first time I've discussed it in years. If you are interested in a better version I would highly encourage you to check out The Angry GM's Eight Kinds of Fun.

EDIT: Well nevermind. I really need to stop walking away when I'm halfway through my post.

Max_Killjoy

2018-01-16, 10:15 AM

Florian

2018-01-16, 11:30 AM

I think it´s fair to say that the whole discussion the Forge spawned was more productive outside the US industry and RPG community because of different structures and culture- less Indy vs. the Mainstream (because the Mainstream sucks) and less separation between the different systems and between fan base and companies.

It´s simply different when authors and owners from all major RPG companies hang out on the same forums as (more vocal and active) parts of the player base do, ie it´s not the "cult of Edwards" that talk about it, but the guys in charge of the best-selling RPG discussing it with the fan base.

kyoryu

2018-01-16, 11:43 AM

That is exactly why people dislike GNS theory. For starters it was entirely superfluous when it was released, being essentially a ripoff of the Threefold Model simply with the emphasis placed on different points. Secondly it is entirely too divisionary of a model encouraging people to ignore the other aspects and indeed being outright insulting to other methods (routinely calling people who enjoy combat idiots or morons for example). Thirdly it fails as a tool of analysis because of that divisiveness due to the fact that the categories are not mutually exclusive. As an example if it were describing a car the three aspects could be something like colour, engine, and body type.

It also gained traction because it used smart-sounding words, and said that a particular style of game was Super Important, that others had dismissed. It's the category of "theory" (sic) that essentially exists to prove a particular opinion as Objectively Correct.

A better car analogy would be that cars were either for Carrying People, Carrying Things, or Going Fast. And that a coherent car would either sacrifice everything for person-carrying capabilities, would maximize cargo space, or maximize performance. In other words, everything should either be a minivan, a hyper-sports car, or a pickup truck (preferably with the seat removed).

This completely ignores many categories of vehicles that do more than one of these things competently (sports sedans, SUVs, trucks with crew cabs, etc.). Under Car GNS, these cars would be "incoherent" and objectively bad.

Forge theory also fails as a theory because incredibly popular games that have many, many players, are deemed objectively "bad", while Forge theory itself, especially games that really try to adhere to it, have failed to make a truly huge success. The two most successful games (AW and Fate) either loosely (at best) adhere to GNS, or are actually (per the author) a refutation of GNS.

At best, GNS is a good predictor for "Will Ron Edwards (and others with the same tastes as him) like this game?"

(Note that I am not presuming popularity is an absolute measure of quality. However, for something to be popular, a number of people must find something of value in it. And if GNS was as good of a theory as some people seem to think, given that it is a prescriptive model, some works developed from it should be at least highly successful independent/secondary games behind the 800 pound gorilla of D&D).

Max_Killjoy

2018-01-16, 03:08 PM

It also gained traction because it used smart-sounding words, and said that a particular style of game was Super Important, that others had dismissed. It's the category of "theory" (sic) that essentially exists to prove a particular opinion as Objectively Correct.

A better car analogy would be that cars were either for Carrying People, Carrying Things, or Going Fast. And that a coherent car would either sacrifice everything for person-carrying capabilities, would maximize cargo space, or maximize performance. In other words, everything should either be a minivan, a hyper-sports car, or a pickup truck (preferably with the seat removed).

This completely ignores many categories of vehicles that do more than one of these things competently (sports sedans, SUVs, trucks with crew cabs, etc.). Under Car GNS, these cars would be "incoherent" and objectively bad.

Forge theory also fails as a theory because incredibly popular games that have many, many players, are deemed objectively "bad", while Forge theory itself, especially games that really try to adhere to it, have failed to make a truly huge success. The two most successful games (AW and Fate) either loosely (at best) adhere to GNS, or are actually (per the author) a refutation of GNS.

At best, GNS is a good predictor for "Will Ron Edwards (and others with the same tastes as him) like this game?"

(Note that I am not presuming popularity is an absolute measure of quality. However, for something to be popular, a number of people must find something of value in it. And if GNS was as good of a theory as some people seem to think, given that it is a prescriptive model, some works developed from it should be at least highly successful independent/secondary games behind the 800 pound gorilla of D&D).

GNS is also something of an example of trying to find a single defining characteristic that makes a thing what it is, and then assuming that more of that characteristic makes a thing "more that thing", and less of that characteristic makes a thing "less that thing". Because it assumes mutually exclusive "creative agendas" and that mixing is bad, it assumes that systems/games that go as far as possible towards serving only one "creative agenda" are "better", and those which blend "creative agendas" are worse.

This is where the old post of mine quoted upthread a ways came in -- it was an attempt at the time to set aside all the other disputes and disagreements for the moment, and refute simply that one assertion.

Thing is, I'd say the opposite is true, and that in order to even be an RPG, a thing has to blend all those elements -- it needs rules (gamist) to provide framework and neutral arbitration, and in order to allow the characters to interact with each other and their fictional world (simulationist), and from that interaction a story emerges (narrativist), not to mention that gaming and fiction share certain things like characters, and worldbuilding.

Exclude any element or go too far into any one element, and you've gone off to a neighboring country that's not really the land of RPGs.

My point was that they had something very important exactly backwards -- that what they were calling the separate "creative agendas" are ways of describing elements that together make a thing actually an RPG, and that by attempting to purify for any one of those "agendas", they were actually moving their games towards or beyond the borders of what can actually be called an RPG instead of something else.

flond

2018-01-16, 03:11 PM

Telling a Tale is the way the anti-D&D folks do it: they just do a pile of random unplanned stuff and then stop at some point...look back...and then tell what happened and call it a (Barley) Story. This is the easy, casual way to run a game that a lot of people like.

My way is more Focused Storytelling: The DM makes the Stories, and the players run through the stories.

I don't really get the hate for the Story Before, as that is the only way to have a Good Real Story. The Story Now is just the random mess, and the Story After is the Barley Story.

Like for example: The set up is The player makes a backstory for a character of their sister was kidnapped, but the player makes up no details and specifically leaves the story open for the DM to fill in. So then the game starts with a typical first adventure, like say goblin bandits with it's own story. But both the DM and the Player do want to do the save the sister story as part of the game and tie it in with the groups adventure. And the Player, being just a Player can not do anything to make the save the sister story happen outside the game or metagamewise, the only thing they can do is in character take actions(like they can ask a npc if they have seen her).

Story Before: Well the DM takes a couple minutes and comes up with a who/what/why/how the sister was grabbed, a rough timeline and where she is now. Then, knowing all the details, the DM can start the active story of Save the Sister, by dropping a clue(or three, per the standard) in the bandits lair. This is the only way to advance a real story.

Story Now: Well, the DM does nothing. They have their novel of setting notes, but don't do anything because they refuse to make a story or do anything without reacting to the players. So the players randomly have their characters do random things in the game. The DM has not made any details of the sister story, so they can't drop a clue. And even if they did drop a clue, it would just be a random one based on nothing: as the DM has nothing to base it on. And at worst :The player can look at the non-clue, randomly say whatever is whatever and not follow the clue as no matter where they go or what they do the DM will just make the sister story out of thin air, right in front of the character.

Story After: Well, this DM does nothing as well. Except this DM won't make the story right in front of the character.

So, the only way to have a Good, Real Story is to have the Story First.

Nah. I called you a Telltale GM. You know, based on the video games. The ones that claim to have a giant branching story where you matter...but after your third one you need to decide if you're ok with the fact that everything is super on rails.

Secondly, why would the GM (if there is one) have a book full of setting knowledge. This is probably no myth! What's on the table is probably what was established in sessions 0-n. So, we know exactly how much of a sister story there is. And more importantly, if someone with the ability to say so (by the rules, horror of horrors, or group consensus, double horrors), says something is a clue and explains how, that's now the truth at the table. Same as if a GM stated it in a "Story First" sort of game (Or a Story After sort of game). The difference is we didn't come here to have a static story told to us, we came to all get immersed in crafting one, one that will be unpredictable because of us and the dice, and other people. And if you don't like the way it's going, speak up. And if you have irreconcilable differences with someone who keeps inserting dozens of marvel superheros...why are you playing with them? Same as why do you play with the DM who keeps stealing their notes from the last Days of our Lives.

And as for Story After. I could be wrong, but I think they set up everything beforehand. They just don't force it. As much as possible is dispassionately refereed. It produces a different feeling of suspense because, yes, the clue is in that cave, but it's in that cave. If the players get it wrong, dead sister. And you play it where it lies. And that itself is a fun, exciting sort of tension.

(tl;dr, I don't think DU cares about "story" so much as about a specific division of surprise. Players 100% DM 0%)

kyoryu

2018-01-16, 04:33 PM

Max_Killjoy

2018-01-16, 07:39 PM

Darth Ultron

2018-01-16, 09:23 PM

Nah. I called you a Telltale GM. You know, based on the video games. The ones that claim to have a giant branching story where you matter...but after your third one you need to decide if you're ok with the fact that everything is super on rails.

Nah, I hate video games and don't play them.

Secondly, why would the GM (if there is one) have a book full of setting knowledge. This is probably no myth! What's on the table is probably what was established in sessions 0-n. So, we know exactly how much of a sister story there is. And more importantly, if someone with the ability to say so (by the rules, horror of horrors, or group consensus, double horrors), says something is a clue and explains how, that's now the truth at the table. Same as if a GM stated it in a "Story First" sort of game (Or a Story After sort of game). The difference is we didn't come here to have a static story told to us, we came to all get immersed in crafting one, one that will be unpredictable because of us and the dice, and other people. And if you don't like the way it's going, speak up. And if you have irreconcilable differences with someone who keeps inserting dozens of marvel superheros...why are you playing with them? Same as why do you play with the DM who keeps stealing their notes from the last Days of our Lives.

If there are no setting notes...and no setting, then the game just takes place nowhere?

Now see your crossing the line from a Player that wants to play a single character in a story and a Author that wants to create stories.

So your talking about the type of game where anyone can simply randomly do anything, where everyone has control over everything and just says ''and then this happens''. Then the next person says ''and then this happens'' and so on. But this is not even a game at this point.

And do you really go through all the silliness of the Player knows all, then just pretends to be the character not knowing it all. Like ''well I know my sister is in the Dark Tower to the North, but my character will go south and search the Wild Coast''. Like how long do you avoid doing the right thing? At what point does the player randomly have the character go in the right direction?

And as for Story After. I could be wrong, but I think they set up everything beforehand. They just don't force it. As much as possible is dispassionately refereed. It produces a different feeling of suspense because, yes, the clue is in that cave, but it's in that cave. If the players get it wrong, dead sister. And you play it where it lies. And that itself is a fun, exciting sort of tension.

But if you set up the Story beforehand...that is Story Before, not Story After.

(tl;dr, I don't think DU cares about "story" so much as about a specific division of surprise. Players 100% DM 0%)

I don't think I try to ''surprise'' players....that seems pointless. As a DM you can just automatically surprise the players, so that makes it a bit worthless.

And for a player to be all focused on trying to surprise the DM is very much Player vs DM thinking and that is always bad, and makes the player a jerk at best, and a cheater at worst. It's the worst when a player outright cheats, and like say writes down 1000 hit points, and then after talking tons of damage is like ''surprise DM, my character has 1000 hit points!"

Now a player that role players their character well and good and does something the DM finds surprising is great....but sadly, rare.

flond

2018-01-16, 09:41 PM

If there are no setting notes...and no setting, then the game just takes place nowhere?

Now see your crossing the line from a Player that wants to play a single character in a story and a Author that wants to create stories.

So your talking about the type of game where anyone can simply randomly do anything, where everyone has control over everything and just says ''and then this happens''. Then the next person says ''and then this happens'' and so on. But this is not even a game at this point.

And do you really go through all the silliness of the Player knows all, then just pretends to be the character not knowing it all. Like ''well I know my sister is in the Dark Tower to the North, but my character will go south and search the Wild Coast''. Like how long do you avoid doing the right thing? At what point does the player randomly have the character go in the right direction?

Firstly, the game takes place where it's established as taking place. By the group. In a session zero. And generally, the rule is that established facts (that is, things that were declared to be true in play, can't be taken back) Secondly, usually there are roles and rules which make it a game. Kinda like how you could run a story before game without any rules, and just "if the players do the right thing they move forward" but you need things like, you know, combat to make it matter.

Also, while sometimes players decide to do the wrong thing, usually what happens is twists get introduced. Calculations. Things that throw in curveballs (while not refuting the fiction in play, because you know that'd be dumb.)

It's no more random than a full GM story, because well, people can build off each other and talk things out just as well as you can. Are your stories random because you can summon orcus at any time? If not, neither are these. :smalltongue:

Darth Ultron

2018-01-17, 07:25 AM

Firstly, the game takes place where it's established as taking place. By the group. In a session zero. And generally, the rule is that established facts (that is, things that were declared to be true in play, can't be taken back) Secondly, usually there are roles and rules which make it a game. Kinda like how you could run a story before game without any rules, and just "if the players do the right thing they move forward" but you need things like, you know, combat to make it matter.

But it's the GM that makes the established place setting for the game, unless it is a storytelling game were each person is an author/controller/GM and just says ''and then'' and it is.

I'm not really sure what ''facts'' can't be taken back....this sounds like more of a hostile player thing where a player demands something in the game and then never wants it changed.

Any game that is not a Storytelling type game, does not have story rules.

Also, while sometimes players decide to do the wrong thing, usually what happens is twists get introduced. Calculations. Things that throw in curveballs (while not refuting the fiction in play, because you know that'd be dumb.)

It's no more random than a full GM story, because well, people can build off each other and talk things out just as well as you can. Are your stories random because you can summon orcus at any time? If not, neither are these. :smalltongue:

Sure A group of people can sit down and build a story, but that is not playing a RPG. And a group of people can sit down and play a storytelling RPG where each person just randomly says ''and then'' for a time...then they all stop and look at the random pile of story they have made.

But when one person (or a group even) makes a story, ahead of time before any game play, it's not random...it's pre made/planned/set/thought out/prepared.

Florian

2018-01-17, 09:08 AM

@Darth....

You keep repeating that nonsense.

Let me give you an example: I'm gm´ing a L5R campaign that uses both, "classic" and a "storytelling" techniques at the same time.

The setting (Rokugan), the meta-plot (Prelude to the Scorpion Clan Coup timeline, 5 years before the Clan War) and my plot for this campaign (friction between three political factions governing the city) are in effect, understood by the players and set in stone. The goal for this campaign is also agreed on: Rise in power with one of those factions, eliminate or befriend the other two.

Those are facts that cannot be "unmade", even with "story power". Once told, they are "true". There is a Shogun, there is a Chamberlain, there is the Red Lotus sect with a High Priest, they are part of play and you cannot "storytell them out", as they're already a part of the "Relationship Map", meaning facts of the setting.

As gm, I have the facts of the story already laid out and connected to the plot and meta-plot:
- Young lord uses blood magic, plans a coup along with some friends to show they're "true samurai"
- Some underworld ronin provide victims for blood magic, household servitor are witness but cowed
- Family matriarch steps in, kills ronin and witness, stages "fake lover suicide"
Adventure starts with a simple: "Two dead found at the lake".

Now the job of the players is to "role-play" that and "stay in character" for it, but they have greater narrative control and, unlike Max believes it to be, that can actually help with the "Immersion". Each player has narrative power that fits setting and character, so it actually feels more natural when the "Crab Clan Samurai" declares: "There's a Kuni Witch Hunter working as city coroner. Take the bodies there and have them examined!". Who do they declare that to? Well, they're Emerald Magistrates, there should be regular beat cops around.....

So stuff your "and then.. and then...". You shouldn't participate in this kind of game when you can't get "in character" and "in setting".

Max_Killjoy

2018-01-17, 10:07 AM

Now the job of the players is to "role-play" that and "stay in character" for it, but they have greater narrative control and, unlike Max believes it to be, that can actually help with the "Immersion". Each player has narrative power that fits setting and character, so it actually feels more natural when the "Crab Clan Samurai" declares: "There's a Kuni Witch Hunter working as city coroner. Take the bodies there and have them examined!". Who do they declare that to? Well, they're Emerald Magistrates, there should be regular beat cops around.....

So stuff your "and then.. and then...". You shouldn't participate in this kind of game when you can't get "in character" and "in setting".

I agree with your refutation against the person you're arguing against there.

I agree that what you're describing can be a good approach for some players, and can even be more immersive for some players.

However... your "unlike Max believes it to be" comment comes off as an assertion that it's better for not just for some immersion-seeking players, but for all immersion-seeking players, universally. And thus an assertion that we don't know what we actually like... or that we'd like it if we just gave it another try, or that we need to be more "open minded", or... whatever.

I started off saying that some players don't like the "'Okay, you succeed. What piece of information do you find that helps you?' and 'Okay, so you failed, what complication happens as a response?'" approach, and then explained why that is.

That wasn't a questioning or criticism of your enjoyment of what you enjoy, or your success with approaches and styles that have been successful for you. It was an attempt to explain my position and why certain things don't work for me and gamers like me.

For some of us, the approach you describe doesn't feel natural at all, and makes it harder to get "in character" and "in setting" (and that's a big part of what makes gaming fun for us, character and setting). That's not an assertion that the approach you describe doesn't work for you. It's a flat statement of fact that handing us player-level control over the setting, as opposed to character-level interaction with the setting, is actively detrimental for our immersion.

I've tried very hard (in part due to conversations with posters here, kyoryu for example) to control my gut reflexes developed in the days when online RPG discussion in the US was practically a battlefield, and those of us who weren't "old school" or "narrative" were caught in the middle, and the games being produced somewhat reflected this... and it really really felt like anyone who wasn't in one of those camps was being squeezed out entirely and would eventually be left without anything being published that wasn't targeted at one of those camps. Even now, it feels like a lot of new stuff coming out is "rules lite", "OSR clone", or "Forge legacy" in some way.

It doesn't help me fight those reflexes when comments read like the sort of "you only believe that because you don't understand" / "you'd like this if you actually gave it a try, so if you don't like it you must not have honestly tried it" comments that were so common back in those days.

Aliquid

2018-01-17, 10:18 AM

For some of us, the approach you describe doesn't feel natural at all, and makes it harder to get "in character" and "in setting" (and that's a big part of what makes gaming fun for us, character and setting). That's not an assertion that the approach you describe doesn't work for you. It's a flat statement of fact that handing us player-level control over the setting, as opposed to character-level interaction with the setting, is actively detrimental for our immersion. I wonder if it is some sort of RPG style Rorschach test... Is this a reflection of how people view the real world. (not a negative comment on either side of the argument)

It doesn't help me fight those reflexes when comments read like the sort of "you only believe that because you don't understand" / "you'd like this if you actually gave it a try, so if you don't like it you must not have honestly tried it" comments that were so common back in those days.That's a massive failing in people for so many reasons beyond just this. People seem to have a hard time comprehending that other people don't think and feel the same way that they do.

PhoenixPhyre

2018-01-17, 10:25 AM

That's a massive failing in people for so many reasons beyond just this. People seem to have a hard time comprehending that other people don't think and feel the same way that they do.

In many areas of life. Things that are facially obvious to one are incomprehensible to another. Things that are self-evidently right to one are absolutely and unalterably wrong to others. A little epistemic humility (accepting that I don't have all the answers and that what I know may not be either universal or objectively true) would help tremendously for all of us (myself very much included).

/digression

ImNotTrevor

2018-01-17, 10:27 AM

1. Stop feeding Darth. He's been trying to derail this thread and it hasn't worked until these past few pages.

2. Why are we parading GNS's old corpse around again? Most rpg design discussion happens on google+ nowadays or in discord chats. I've never seen anyone but people just barely starting on design research mentioning GNS as legitimate. Actual designers have already taken the useful bits and discarded the baggage.

This actually parallels Freud and Jung. Aside from armchair psychology enthusiasts and psych 101 students, basically no one uses Freudian techniques. (I literally work at a psych hospital. I sit in on therapy sessions all the time. I've not heard a single usage of Freudian psych in nearly 7 years here.) EXCEPT the Rorschach test, which actually can be used to accurately diagnose schizophrenia (and nothing else), the term "subconscious" since it is useful for describing actions done without realising it (since describing them as Unconscious makes it seem like you are not awake), and a few other useful words with better uses nowadays.

What it seems like is that people use a few words from GNS (which, newsflash, aren't exclusive to GNS) and a few alarmists show up to drag the corpse out of its grave on puppet strings like the monster walks again.

Meanwhile, the Forge has been closed for years and Edwards has abandoned GNS as a theory.
The only people talking about it are amateurs, and the only response needs to be this: "eh. Nobody uses GNS anymore. Even the creator abandoned the theory."
As opposed to
"GNS and its cronies are cancer and I hate them and their cult."

Like.... wow. It's like watching grandpa flip out about communist sympathizers. Like, sure it was a bad thing and it has some holdouts but.... it's not exactly the pressing issue of the day.

kyoryu

2018-01-17, 12:00 PM

The funny thing here is that I'm fairly in the middle in terms of the whole divide.

I've been a "traditional" game for a long, long time. Probably close to 35 years I've been elf-gaming. I picked up Fate a few years ago to figure out this whole "narrative" thing.

So I can dig both styles. I understand the jarring nature of some of this stuff, as I felt that at one point (I did find that, for me, that went away after a while, but I still get it). So I can understand where people are coming from when they say it's "collaborative storytelling" - it is, to you. And I can understand where Max is coming from when he says it's not - because to him, it's not. There's different ways of engaging with the hobby, none are "correct", and the biggest issue I see is that people assume that how they approach the hobby is necessarily the only way.

In many ways, people playing an old school dungeon/hexcrawl, people playing a more "traditional" Adventure Path style game, people playing more open story-focused games, and people playing storygames (note the distinction) are all playing very, very different games - different enough that coming up with one description that covers them *all* is going to be incredibly difficult.

Really, the best descriptions I've seen are "let's pretend, but with rules" and "you play a character in a world. The GM tells you what's happening around you, and you tell the GM how you respond." These are both wildly insufficient (and the second one is almost, but not quite universal), but seem to be the major commonalities and best address the "core" of the hobby.

Segev

2018-01-17, 12:14 PM

And for some players, those two questions are exactly what they really don't want to hear from their GM in the middle of a session.

It completely blows up the sense of entering a "secondary world", a place-that-could-be-real, a place that invokes the emotional impression that it's a living, breathing reality that exists before, beyond, and after.

Coldly, rationally, I know these places and people aren't real... but emotionally, I cannot treat them that way or drains everything compelling... whether we're talking about playing an RPG, worldbuilding, or writing fiction.

I agree with you, here. If I want to tell the GM what my character finds, I'll suggest it to him as part of the action. If I'm asking, it's because I don't know what there IS to find, and I expect the world to exist sufficiently in the GM's head that he DOES.

I'm a fan of the Exalted stunting system, but that's proactive, not reactive. If you're inventing elements as part of a stunt, you're taking the initiative to say, "I think this would be a cool way to achieve this." Having said what you do, THEN being asked what its results are in the world, is a bit...what's the GM actually bringing to the table, again?

PhoenixPhyre

2018-01-17, 12:14 PM

Really, the best descriptions I've seen are "let's pretend, but with rules" and "you play a character in a world. The GM tells you what's happening around you, and you tell the GM how you respond."

Those (and mostly the second one) is how I naively (before this thread) used "collaborative storytelling"--as a mostly-true (but loose) approximation to that full(er) description.

flond

2018-01-17, 12:17 PM

But it's the GM that makes the established place setting for the game, unless it is a storytelling game were each person is an author/controller/GM and just says ''and then'' and it is.

I'm not really sure what ''facts'' can't be taken back....this sounds like more of a hostile player thing where a player demands something in the game and then never wants it changed.

Any game that is not a Storytelling type game, does not have story rules.

Sure A group of people can sit down and build a story, but that is not playing a RPG. And a group of people can sit down and play a storytelling RPG where each person just randomly says ''and then'' for a time...then they all stop and look at the random pile of story they have made.

But when one person (or a group even) makes a story, ahead of time before any game play, it's not random...it's pre made/planned/set/thought out/prepared.

Facts not being taken back is how you accomplish no myth play. It's how you build a coherent story at the table. It doesn't mean that things can't change. It just means that, for example, if there's a river between two towns (as was declared three sessions ago) there can't not be one now. (I mean, there could be a dam or the like.) And that's the foundational issue here. What you keep calling "random" and "a pile" is multiple people working together to shape a story, building with each other (and also probably using the rules to divide labor.)

And that is why people get on your case. Not because you've discovered a new and piercing insight, but because you fundamentally misidentify games, and do so in a frankly pretty obnoxious way. Narrative Role Playing Games are no more "random piles" than (I hope) your games are like that example from the SUE files, wherein, because the plot is pre-determined, if all the crew of star trek were destroyed, the ship would re-assemble itself and go from planet to planet, doing its own exploring, empty.

(Also, I'll note I feel like some games totally have Storytelling rules without any division of authority. (I'm mostly looking at white wolf here, Especially things like 1e Promethean where the GM is obliged to write up milestones.)

flond

2018-01-17, 12:25 PM

I agree with you, here. If I want to tell the GM what my character finds, I'll suggest it to him as part of the action. If I'm asking, it's because I don't know what there IS to find, and I expect the world to exist sufficiently in the GM's head that he DOES.

I'm a fan of the Exalted stunting system, but that's proactive, not reactive. If you're inventing elements as part of a stunt, you're taking the initiative to say, "I think this would be a cool way to achieve this." Having said what you do, THEN being asked what its results are in the world, is a bit...what's the GM actually bringing to the table, again?

I like how PbtA games do this (or at least how Apocalypse World does) where the questions are usually a seasoning, and also, generally focused on stuff the PC "should" know. So if you go poking around in the bottom of a well the DM might decide and tell you you find Demner's tools...and his skeleton. And then ask what he used to do in the hold. (Thus you know, justifying the need for a DM, while allowing the players to decide what job is either not being done, or being filled in for. (And probably what his tools are).

(I'm not saying this is for everyone, I just think it's a bit of neat tech)

Florian

2018-01-17, 01:03 PM

I've been a "traditional" game for a long, long time. Probably close to 35 years I've been elf-gaming.

So I can dig both styles.

Wellcome to the club. Grew up in occupied Germany next to an US Army Base, the G.I.s there started gaming with their kids, so us class mates joined in. Been my hobby ever since. The army left, so I had to adjust to local german style, which was vastly different, even back then, then I started freelance work all over the EU and meeting still other different gaming cultures...

So a bit base on experience, a bit baed on my work and a bit based on some eccentric other hobbies (like making a wine and later beer Somelier), I'm acceptive of a lot of things, but I'm still very strict when it comes to differentiating between personal taste and judgement of general function.
I mean, I can give a wine a 94 out of 100 and discuss it, but it still might not be to my personal taste.

Tanarii

2018-01-17, 05:12 PM

You know, I was on Facebook, in a Fate group, and the discussion was "how do you prep for Fate?"

One person's response was "practice standing in front of a mirror and saying things like 'Okay, you succeed. What piece of information do you find that helps you?' and 'Okay, so you failed, what complication happens as a response?'"

I said that while that was certainly *a* valid play style, it wasn't the only one, and that games where you run completely on that style of gameplay always kind of rub me wrong.

The response from someone else? "My mantra is 'collaborative storytelling."

That's why I argue against the use of the term as a blanket description of all RPGs. Because that description is used to describe that style of play, and, to be honest, I think it's closer to the assumptions that most people make when they hear that phrase.
It's certainly one of the things I think of when I hear the phrase.
Either:
- players taking responsibility for deciding narrative resolutions, not just their character's attempted & intended actions in the environment. This can be freeform like your example, or from explicit narrative-oriented mechanics.
- someone actively writing the emergent story down in some kind of campaign log, after the fact.

Certainly not: We're all talking. Therefore determining our character's intended action & approach, and the GM resolving natural outcomes and consequences, which is necessary to establish the event, somehow becomes an account of the event instead.

Note that the players getting involved in resolution, and thus in establishing events, doesn't have to be storytelling. But it usually is, because the questions the GM is asking or that they're using narrative-oriented mechanics to get involved in are not causal, but narrative. The first question on what information is found is a good example of a narrative-oriented question (ie it's loaded towards narrative, not a causal resolution), especially when determined by a player on the spot. The second one could conceivably be either a causal (natural consequences) resolution to a complication, or a narrative-oriented resolution to a complication.

Edit: There are definitely decision making paradigms involving some narrative-focus in between the "I think of" and "clearly not". Or that don't fit into either a "causal"<->"narrative" or "event"<->"account of event" division/spectrum at all.

Mutazoia

2018-01-18, 05:55 AM

But when one person (or a group even) makes a story, ahead of time before any game play, it's not random...it's pre made/planned/set/thought out/prepared.

Unless you have a really bad, railroady GM, nobody makes the story ahead of time. A GM may make a situation, but they don't make up much else.

No GM I've ever heard of has ever said "Okay, you find the One Ring and have to take it to Mt. Doom. You have to pass through Rivendell and Moria, and you have to talk to these people, and say these things..."

GMs say "Okay, you found the One Ring. Gandalf says you should probably take it to Elrond." And that's all. Everything else is the players deciding what happens next. Sure the GM can have a few set encounters ready...such as meeting Elrond, but that's usually about it.

Max_Killjoy

2018-01-18, 07:19 AM

I wonder if it is some sort of RPG style Rorschach test... Is this a reflection of how people view the real world. (not a negative comment on either side of the argument)

It would be interesting to find a way to see if there's any correlation between how much control and what sort of control one feels they actually have over the real world around them, and what sort of control one feels is most "natural" for playing an RPG.

That's a massive failing in people for so many reasons beyond just this. People seem to have a hard time comprehending that other people don't think and feel the same way that they do.

I am daily confronted with the reality that most people evidently do not think and feel the same way I do.

Darth Ultron

2018-01-18, 08:37 AM

Let me give you an example: I'm gm´ing a L5R campaign that uses both, "classic" and a "storytelling" techniques at the same time.

Ok, thanks for the example. Now, looking at your example...your a pure Story First DM. The setting has a pre made story and you the DM have added to that story and made a story of your own. All before the first game session.

And then the players are adding to the setting story and the DM made story...but no player is creating worlds out of the blue: they are adding to the big game stories.

So stuff your "and then.. and then...". You shouldn't participate in this kind of game when you can't get "in character" and "in setting".

I agree this is a bad type of game, but it's popular and if people have fun doing it why should we care?

I started off saying that some players don't like the "'Okay, you succeed. What piece of information do you find that helps you?' and 'Okay, so you failed, what complication happens as a response?'" approach, and then explained why that is.

His example was not so clear....but is this what your talking about? This goes back to the Casual DM (or even the Lazy DM).

So when any story event happens in the game, you as DM, just sit back and do nothing and ask the players to be Side Table DM's for a minute and take control of the game and make and create things? If so, this just leads down the path to the Random Mess. You can't have a Real Story if you will just toss everything out the window at the whim of every player.

For some of us, the approach you describe doesn't feel natural at all, and makes it harder to get "in character" and "in setting" (and that's a big part of what makes gaming fun for us, character and setting). That's not an assertion that the approach you describe doesn't work for you. It's a flat statement of fact that handing us player-level control over the setting, as opposed to character-level interaction with the setting, is actively detrimental for our immersion.

I think this is a bad idea myself and would never do it in a game. I'm against player control of the game. I guess it ''feels good'' to some players as they can stand up and be all like ''I'm in control''. But it just seems to ruin a game.

First off, as the Game Story can be changed on a whim...it's a pointless, random mess. You can only have the Bad After Barley Story. And, even worse, you get that False Playing. Like say the characters are looking for some buried treasure...what is the point of even pretending to look when any player can just say ''oh the treasure is over under that tree''. How long to you ''play in circles'' when everyone in the game knows a ''fact'', but the players ''don't know''? And this also has the huge player exploit problem of players doing things to gain advantage in the game, like they take control of the game and say ''the bank only has one guard, 90 year old Gus and he is a sleep'', and then they slip back into character and rob the bank.

I myself, and plenty of other players, don't want that kind of control over the game as a player. It's very silly to pretend not to know things you know in active game play. And it really ruins the fun of even being a player to have control of the game. Like why not just say ''my character is made a demi god''?

I agree with you, here. If I want to tell the GM what my character finds, I'll suggest it to him as part of the action. If I'm asking, it's because I don't know what there IS to find, and I expect the world to exist sufficiently in the GM's head that he DOES.

To have a player say what a character finds sounds very bland. Sure, some players can improvise and make up amazing stuff in one second.....but most of the people that can and what to do that DM. And it's a bit dull to get asked ''what do you find'' and then you say ''a gold bar'', then...maybe..your role player your character and they say ''wow, a gold bar!''. This takes away a huge part of role playing: the interaction between DM and player...and the wonder, and surprise and fun of the unknown.

For a lot of players discovering people, places and things is a big part of the fun.

Facts not being taken back is how you accomplish no myth play. It's how you build a coherent story at the table. It doesn't mean that things can't change. It just means that, for example, if there's a river between two towns (as was declared three sessions ago) there can't not be one now. (I mean, there could be a dam or the like.) And that's the foundational issue here. What you keep calling "random" and "a pile" is multiple people working together to shape a story, building with each other (and also probably using the rules to divide labor.)

I'm saying that, unless your playing a storytelling game with specifically made storytelling rules you can't do this in every RPG. A DM, and a group of players, who want to just control a single character and play through the game adventure, plot and story can not ''collaborate''.

You seem to keep coming back to the ''and then '' type. Like the DM will say there is a river. Then player ones says there is a bridge. And player two says there is a troll guarding the bridge. And player three says it's a fire breathing troll. And player for says the fire breathing troll wants a toll of 1000 gold. Wow...guess some would say that was an amazing story building activity where everyone built something off of each other....right? But it is also Random. Each person is just saying ''whatever'' and there is no structure.

And notice the player that made the troll fire breathing...so he randomly made the troll a 'fire' troll to make it tougher as the characters can't just ''use fire to kill it'' like a classic troll. And sure, that is great...sort of. But what if one player says ''the troll is very old and weak'', well now that player is making it easy for the characters to attack and kill the troll.

If like any time a character encounters any sort of obstacle, the players just alter reality, what is the point of the game? The DM says ''the door is locked'', and the player says ''oh, my character looks under the mat, finds the key there, and opens the door."

Unless you have a really bad, railroady GM, nobody makes the story ahead of time. A GM may make a situation, but they don't make up much else.

No GM I've ever heard of has ever said "Okay, you find the One Ring and have to take it to Mt. Doom. You have to pass through Rivendell and Moria, and you have to talk to these people, and say these things..."

GMs say "Okay, you found the One Ring. Gandalf says you should probably take it to Elrond." And that's all. Everything else is the players deciding what happens next. Sure the GM can have a few set encounters ready...such as meeting Elrond, but that's usually about it.

Your confusing a RPG Story with a Novel Story. Yes...a Novel story is set in stone and can never, ever, ever be changed even a tiny bit. But then a Novel Story is just one person (most often) telling a specific story for a reason. It is not in any way, shape or form a person in anyway playing an RPG.

In an RPG, a Story is much like you have said. The DM has an outline of who,what, where, and when. And the DM has a vague plan of who, what and where will do (or attempt to do) in the immediate future. The DM has a bunch of pre planed encounters and events and things to happen. And an over all Story to tell. BUT, as was said pages ago, and RPG Story is like a Mad Lib(just in case no one knows what this is, it would be a simple story on a page like ''Bob went to the (blank) and bought a (blank)''. Then a person could write anything they wanted to in the blank. You could write ''store'' and ''loaf of bread'' or get goofy and write ''the Moon'' and ''a pocket full of sunshine'' or anything else you wanted to. BUT note Bob will always be going somewhere and always be buying something. ) So the Story has Holes in it (blanks) the players can fill. So if there are orc bandits in the dark wood, the players, by playing their characters, can change that story(fill in the blanks), but they are not making a story by themselves out of thin air and do not ever have full control over the whole Story and Game.

I am daily confronted with the reality that most people evidently do not think and feel the same way I do.

YUP

The Random NPC

2018-01-18, 10:59 AM

So the Story has Holes in it (blanks) the players can fill.

This is called collaboration.

Jormengand

2018-01-18, 11:21 AM

Nah. I called you a Telltale GM. You know, based on the video games.

DU will remember that.

Thrudd

2018-01-18, 11:33 AM

DU will remember that.
Lol. Just like in the games, the relevance of that to the ultimate outcome of this whole thing is questionable. Probably makes no difference at all.

Florian

2018-01-18, 12:31 PM

they are adding to the big game stories.

That, too, is collaboration.

flond

2018-01-18, 03:47 PM

Ok, thanks for the example. Now, looking at your example...your a pure Story First DM. The setting has a pre made story and you the DM have added to that story and made a story of your own. All before the first game session.

I'm saying that, unless your playing a storytelling game with specifically made storytelling rules you can't do this in every RPG. A DM, and a group of players, who want to just control a single character and play through the game adventure, plot and story can not ''collaborate''.

You seem to keep coming back to the ''and then '' type. Like the DM will say there is a river. Then player ones says there is a bridge. And player two says there is a troll guarding the bridge. And player three says it's a fire breathing troll. And player for says the fire breathing troll wants a toll of 1000 gold. Wow...guess some would say that was an amazing story building activity where everyone built something off of each other....right? But it is also Random. Each person is just saying ''whatever'' and there is no structure.

And notice the player that made the troll fire breathing...so he randomly made the troll a 'fire' troll to make it tougher as the characters can't just ''use fire to kill it'' like a classic troll. And sure, that is great...sort of. But what if one player says ''the troll is very old and weak'', well now that player is making it easy for the characters to attack and kill the troll.

If like any time a character encounters any sort of obstacle, the players just alter reality, what is the point of the game? The DM says ''the door is locked'', and the player says ''oh, my character looks under the mat, finds the key there, and opens the door."

Firstly, that sure doesn't seem to be what you're arguing. (Re:collaborative storytelling games). It seems like what you're arguing is that collaborative storytelling is a crock.

But, since we're here, I'll note two things. One, it's entirely possible to do a freeform game, it happens all the time! And secondly, what you're describing isn't by any means something that only happens in author-stance games. Who hasn't had the DM who lets anything happens. Or, contrawise, the DM who decides to make the game a shaggy dog story of obstacles, where you can't progress because "and then something else is in the way". What you need to have a coherent narrative is everyone on board. That's it. (And having challenge focused play is only important if you, you know, want a challange. It's entirely possible to have other forms of play, with or without a GM.)

I don't think people who like exploration focused play are wrong. That's a fine sort of play. My goal here is to talk about everyone sharing narrative power, and how it can produce fine things, and is only as random as the players playing. Same as any game where the GM hasn't set their prep in stone.

Darth Ultron

2018-01-19, 07:34 AM

This is called collaboration.

Yes, in a vague sense. Like the way the Janitor on the movie set collaborated with the Director to make a movie.

But it is not really ''collaboration'' when one person is in control of the story and a couple of other people have no control and do 5% of the work.

That, too, is collaboration.

It seems like everyone is saying a ''collaboration'' is any time two people are together.....and that is a very vague definition. Like Bob and Fred stood next to each other, so they collaborated.

Firstly, that sure doesn't seem to be what you're arguing. (Re:collaborative storytelling games). It seems like what you're arguing is that collaborative storytelling is a crock.

It is generally safe to assume that I am arguing whatever I type...though I lot of posters do ''see things'' between the lines.

But, since we're here, I'll note two things. One, it's entirely possible to do a freeform game, it happens all the time! And secondly, what you're describing isn't by any means something that only happens in author-stance games. Who hasn't had the DM who lets anything happens. Or, contrawise, the DM who decides to make the game a shaggy dog story of obstacles, where you can't progress because "and then something else is in the way". What you need to have a coherent narrative is everyone on board. That's it. (And having challenge focused play is only important if you, you know, want a challange. It's entirely possible to have other forms of play, with or without a GM.)

Yes, freeform games are possible? Ok, never said they were not?

Um...''coherent narrative'' = ''Story".

I don't think people who like exploration focused play are wrong. That's a fine sort of play. My goal here is to talk about everyone sharing narrative power, and how it can produce fine things, and is only as random as the players playing. Same as any game where the GM hasn't set their prep in stone.

My goal is to show how a player, with a single character playing in the game, can't share narrative power, and is a best a random mess, and worse just a random pile of non-playing.

Max_Killjoy

2018-01-19, 07:51 AM

Darth Ultron

2018-01-19, 08:07 AM

Writing about something in another thread, and realized that it made for a good example here too.

There's a TV series I used to love, a crime drama/comedy... but it got to the point where I could predict the outcome of each episode based not on the evidence at hand or the behavior of the characters, but on "story writing elements", on the tropes the writers liked to hit, on the patterns established, etc.

To understand what was happening and would happen next, the things going on within the "world" of the show mattered less than the things going on at "story level"... and it kinda ruined the series for me.

Yet another good point from Max.

And to put it in game terms, for a lot of Players, it is no fun for them to understand what was happening and would happen next....and worse for them to have narrative control to just make things happen next.

Of course, this is also an example of bad show creation, and for an RPG a bad DM. A lot of TV shows do this a lot. It is easy and simple and it works.....and best of all ''the masses'' love it. A huge amount of viewers love watching the same thing week after week after week with only tiny token changes.

Florian

2018-01-19, 08:13 AM

Writing about something in another thread, and realized that it made for a good example here too.

There's a TV series I used to love, a crime drama/comedy... but it got to the point where I could predict the outcome of each episode based not on the evidence at hand or the behavior of the characters, but on "story writing elements", on the tropes the writers liked to hit, on the patterns established, etc.

To understand what was happening and would happen next, the things going on within the "world" of the show mattered less than the things going on at "story level"... and it kinda ruined the series for me.

The ups and downs of working with time-tested and reliable tools, once pople start spotting the tell-tale signs, the result is less "magical" but more "lackluster, as expected". Yes, that makes it pretty obvious that the "world" is just the backdrop to the "story" and that follows certain narrative paths the authors think will be great for the audience.

Still, you'd also be very bored with just "slice of life" stuff, admit it.

Max_Killjoy

2018-01-19, 08:23 AM

The ups and downs of working with time-tested and reliable tools, once pople start spotting the tell-tale signs, the result is less "magical" but more "lackluster, as expected". Yes, that makes it pretty obvious that the "world" is just the backdrop to the "story" and that follows certain narrative paths the authors think will be great for the audience.

Still, you'd also be very bored with just "slice of life" stuff, admit it.

I'd prefer it if what happens next makes sense based on what's going on in the world of the story, with the characters, with the facts at hand, etc... rather than what's going on in the writer's room.

Florian

2018-01-19, 10:45 AM

I'd prefer it if what happens next makes sense based on what's going on in the world of the story, with the characters, with the facts at hand, etc... rather than what's going on in the writer's room.

Basic problem with the human psyche. We're geared towards pattern recognition and that's tied to our emotions: We feel suspense, fear and so on when we recognize there is a pattern but can't solve it, we feel joy or "clever" when we can solve it before it fully formed. That's also why we enjoy recurring patterns, like insider jokes, characters or recurring themes. We also feel cheated and manipulated when it becomes too obvious that certain techniques are used. But we also feel bored wen things are random and no pattern emerges.

That's both strength and weakness of the tv serial format. You have the time to build up the greater pattern (ex: True Detectives), but you still must entertain the casual viewer with each episode.

In context of this discussion, you always mention the passive, the consumer side. Why is that?

Segev

2018-01-19, 02:14 PM

Writing about something in another thread, and realized that it made for a good example here too.

There's a TV series I used to love, a crime drama/comedy... but it got to the point where I could predict the outcome of each episode based not on the evidence at hand or the behavior of the characters, but on "story writing elements", on the tropes the writers liked to hit, on the patterns established, etc.

To understand what was happening and would happen next, the things going on within the "world" of the show mattered less than the things going on at "story level"... and it kinda ruined the series for me.

I am just guessing, but... Law & Order?

I know that it got to the point where I could tell based on ethnicity and social class of a character whether they were the red herring or real villain of the episode.

Max_Killjoy

2018-01-19, 02:18 PM

I am just guessing, but... Law & Order?

I know that it got to the point where I could tell based on ethnicity and social class of a character whether they were the red herring or real villain of the episode.

Castle, actually.

If there was one thing that the original L&O had going for it... it was that the show was far more about the cases than it was about "personal drama" and delving into the lives the characters.

Florian

2018-01-19, 02:26 PM

Castle, actually.

Castle? Ouch.

Max_Killjoy

2018-01-19, 02:39 PM

Castle? Ouch.

Gee, thanks. I should have gone with my first instinct and not named the show regardless of what it was.

Florian

2018-01-19, 02:49 PM

Gee, thanks. I should have gone with my first instinct and not named the show regardless of what it was.

*Laugh*

That wasn't directed at you, but at the series. Like Monk and some others, that has really gone formulaic and self-centered fast.

Segev

2018-01-19, 04:53 PM

Castle, actually.

If there was one thing that the original L&O had going for it... it was that the show was far more about the cases than it was about "personal drama" and delving into the lives the characters.

I've not seen much Castle; liked the few episodes I did see. Sorry to hear it got disappointing later.

And despite my ability to often pick the plot out based on stereotypes that are supposedly "twists" but have become their own tropes, I do appreciate L&O.

It actually is a pretty good show for trying to figure out how to structure a mystery, demonstrating ways false trails can be laid in such a way that the same evidence that points towards them still fits with the truth once those have been run out, turning various apparent dead ends into clues in their own right if thought about.

Max_Killjoy

2018-01-19, 05:57 PM

Basic problem with the human psyche. We're geared towards pattern recognition and that's tied to our emotions: We feel suspense, fear and so on when we recognize there is a pattern but can't solve it, we feel joy or "clever" when we can solve it before it fully formed. That's also why we enjoy recurring patterns, like insider jokes, characters or recurring themes. We also feel cheated and manipulated when it becomes too obvious that certain techniques are used. But we also feel bored wen things are random and no pattern emerges.

That's both strength and weakness of the tv serial format. You have the time to build up the greater pattern (ex: True Detectives), but you still must entertain the casual viewer with each episode.

I see it in books, too, though... where you can plainly predict that a death or something is going to happen for a "storytelling reason"... or you can tell when something happened because it "had to" for "storytelling reasons". There's some structural thing or pattern or trope or archetype or theme that you can see driving things along at that point.

Personally, I'm not looking for patterns. "Patterns" here feels like another word for "cliche" or "tired overused trope" to me. But I also understand that I "am not normal", and this makes it hard for me to write stories, as much as I'd like to. It's a deep challenge for me to write such that it doesn't feel artificial or even contrived.

In context of this discussion, you always mention the passive, the consumer side. Why is that?

First, because in the context of this discussion I've been talking about the player side -- the GM is managing all or nearly all of the non-PC elements of the "secondary world", even when their approach isn't "narrative" at all, they have to think a bit more like a writer (in other parlance, take on additional stances) even if their approach isn't really what would could call "narrative" in nature.

Second, because there are parallels between the things that reduce my enjoyment as a player in an RPG and the things that reduce my enjoyment as a reader or viewer of fiction. With the current example, as a player in an RPG I don't want to have what's coming next telegraphed by story-driven factors outside my character's perceptions, while as a reader or viewer of fictions, I don't want what's coming next telegraphed by storytelling factors -- if I can tell what's going to happen next, I want it based on in-world things like character personalities, evidence and events we've been shown, etc.

It's not because I view both roles as "passive". Heck, "consuming" fiction isn't really passive for me, especially when reading... my brain has to work at building and maintaining the fictional world and events and characters in my head as I read the words on the page.

Lord Raziere

2018-01-19, 06:06 PM

But I also understand that I "am not normal", and this makes it hard for me to write stories, as much as I'd like to. It's a deep challenge for me to write such that it doesn't feel artificial or even contrived.

Dude, I love stories, writing any stories not just rpgs, and I struggle with that sometimes. there are cliches I hate, even if I like other ones. like in my pokemon fan fic, I'm trying to write a determined hero who uses more than just force to defeat her foes and try to get tricks of guile and tactics in there as well, sometimes I have to let the force happen if I can't come up with anything else so I can move on and go against the cliche in a place thats better and suited when I make it good, because I've found that often if you can't avoid a cliche, its best to just execute it well and with as much thought as possible so that when it happens things play out realistically or believably because of it.

Edit: just realized after I posted this, it sounds like you like rational fiction. its a genre thats most common in sci-fi but is starting to spread through fan fiction. maybe go read some of those? its all about characters acting as smart as they can without any contrived stupidity.

Lacuna Caster

2018-01-20, 10:31 AM

Okay. I'm gonna do something foolish and just jump into the discussion after only skimming the preceding thread-

And as repeating noted above, defining story as "any sequence of events" reduces the word to meaninglessness -- it makes EVERYTHING a story, which is total nonsense.
I agree with this. What I think people mean by the phrase 'Collaborative Storytelling' is that the role-playing either produces or includes a story with some critical merit: i.e, good. Then one has to solve for (A) what 'good story' means and (B) for whether the rules and text of play particularly facilitate that result.

To a certain extent, 'good story' is subjective. A lot of detective fiction and sci-fi is, if I might slip into an aspect of GNS jargon that seems to be largely accepted these days, aimed at Simulationists (itself a shorthand for 'individuals who incline toward, though not necessarily exclusively, a simulationist style of play'). But many, probably most, people seem to derive more excitement and interest from character development and emotional drama, which has a different set of demands.

Traditionally, many RPGs have outlined a procedure whereby you bring a story (or at least a sequence of events) to the table, and then you essentially act out the broad strokes of the script. But the fact that RPGs have generally supposed to involve substantial choice in declared actions and randomisation of outcomes meant that the baseline rules were always grinding against the structural format. It could work, either by socially-sanctioned fudging or exploiting the law of averages or manipulating the fictional environment or all of the above, but these were all potential breaking points that tended to leave a certain contingent of players unsatisfied.

I would say the 'character-driven drama' definition of 'good story' grinds against this format particularly hard. A character's personality is defined by their response to value-ambivalent cost/benefit stimuli- which is to say, their consequential moral/ethical choices, which is to say, drama. If there are no such choices to be made, either you learn nothing about the characters, in which case there's no development, or their choices don't matter, in which case the story isn't really about them, or the character's decisions have to uncoupled from the player's, in which case the player isn't playing.

So the question of whether you could get 'good story' without resorting to illusionism- or better yet, if the rules could actively promote that outcome- was a major topic of discussion and development since about the early-to-mid 90s. And that's when the phrase started to get so contentious, because people were bringing all these mutually-conflicting ideas of how story was supposed to be packaged within RPGs to the table.

I don't think it's a meaningless phrase, once you've usefully defined the component terms, but while the collaborative part is clear enough, and the story part can be explained with reasonable economy, I think the telling part is misleading. It suggests that you brought the story to the table with you and relate it on request, and how that's supposed to happen collaboratively is unclear. Story-authorship might be a better (if highfalutin) phrase.

If I'm playing my character, then like my character, I don't give a fig about any of that. If my character has an opening to defeat the "BBEG" in the first five minutes with some cheap trick, then I'm taking it -- my character doesn't care if it's anti-climactic, or doesn't make for a good story (I mean, an actual genuinely good story, not "the good story" of Narrative Causality), they're in it to win it, just like a real person would be.
I think we covered this in past discussions, but there's nothing in principle to stop you from extracting a good story from a comprehensive and detailed setting- it just means you lean heavily on the 'rigorous modelling of consequences' side of things in the Story = Choices X Consequences equation, and take care to plant the PCs along the fault-lines of some moral and ethical tensions embedded within the setting.

As in those previous discussions, however, I think 'metagame' of some form or another is almost impossible to exclude. The question is whether you can harness it for constructive purposes.

Darth Ultron

2018-01-20, 04:03 PM

There's a TV series.....

This does make me think that Pop Culture maybe a big part of the blame, even more so the Mainstream. Starting in about the 90's there has been a slide to a very bland and dull place. And for whole generations this bland, dull popular mainstream culture is all most people have known.

I'd prefer it if what happens next makes sense based on what's going on in the world of the story, with the characters, with the facts at hand, etc... rather than what's going on in the writer's room.

Mainstream movies, and even more so TV shows, are very much written with a ''metaplot''. Things like the main characters can't die, innocents can't get hurt, peoples bodies must amazingly be covered at all times and so on. It's a huge list of bland and dull things.

But it is only one way to tell a fictional story...there are other ways. But if you watched only mainstream things you would likely just about always see only that one dull, bland way...and think that was the only way.

Castle, actually.

Yup, good example. I agree too.

there are parallels between the things that reduce my enjoyment as a player in an RPG and the things that reduce my enjoyment as a reader or viewer of fiction. With the current example, as a player in an RPG I don't want to have what's coming next telegraphed by story-driven factors outside my character's perceptions, while as a reader or viewer of fictions, I don't want what's coming next telegraphed by storytelling factors -- if I can tell what's going to happen next, I want it based on in-world things like character personalities, evidence and events we've been shown, etc.

I Agree here. It's why I hate that dumb big bad guy ''boss monster'' at the end of the level thing. They are not based on any Story reason, but the more horrible video game reason that the ''boss monster'' must show up and be ''X''.

The Random NPC

2018-01-21, 01:34 PM

Yes, in a vague sense. Like the way the Janitor on the movie set collaborated with the Director to make a movie.

No, it's more like how the actors collaborated with the director to make a movie.

Darth Ultron

2018-01-21, 02:27 PM

No, it's more like how the actors collaborated with the director to make a movie.

Except it does not exactly work that way?

First off a movie has a Story and a Plot, done by writer(s), and the actor agrees to follow this. It is the actors job.

Now sure can an actor ask to change something...sure, they do it often. But they don't have the power and control to just change the whole movie. In fact, the director can over rule the actor with no effort.

So again, it's the director telling the actor literately everything to do from where to stand, how to move, what to say and how to say it. And the actor can ask to say another word for one line.

Wow....collaboration there, right?

Florian

2018-01-21, 03:00 PM

Lol, yeah. Actually, the actors have a huge influence on the script, going so far as to rewrite entire passages and alter major characters and locations. Experienced directors know this and can handle that well, as that makes great movies.

The Random NPC

2018-01-21, 03:04 PM

Except it does not exactly work that way?

First off a movie has a Story and a Plot, done by writer(s), and the actor agrees to follow this. It is the actors job.

Now sure can an actor ask to change something...sure, they do it often. But they don't have the power and control to just change the whole movie. In fact, the director can over rule the actor with no effort.

So again, it's the director telling the actor literately everything to do from where to stand, how to move, what to say and how to say it. And the actor can ask to say another word for one line.

Wow....collaboration there, right?

First, that isn't how it works, actors ad lib all the time. That being said if the director doesn't like it they can force a reshoot, or edit the scene, or even fire the actor. Second, a movie isn't the best example anyways. A better one would be a play. Sure the director can tell the actors what to do all they want, but on opening night, if the actors start changing things the director has very little power to stop them.

Darth Ultron

2018-01-21, 09:04 PM

A better one would be a play. Sure the director can tell the actors what to do all they want, but on opening night, if the actors start changing things the director has very little power to stop them.

That might even be a worse example. So everyone in a play rehearses a set story. Then on opening night an actor just changes things to whatever they want? But it's not like a director would be powerless....this is yet another reason why a play has a understudy/other non jerk person that knows the jerk actors part.

So the question of whether you could get 'good story' without resorting to illusionism

You can have a good reality story, but a good fictional story needs illusionism.

The Random NPC

2018-01-21, 10:44 PM

That might even be a worse example. So everyone in a play rehearses a set story. Then on opening night an actor just changes things to whatever they want? But it's not like a director would be powerless....this is yet another reason why a play has a understudy/other non jerk person that knows the jerk actors part.

You can have a good reality story, but a good fictional story needs illusionism.

I said he had little power, not that he was powerless. The director would have to decide if the play was tanking hard enough justify canceling the showing or if they could work around the changes. And if the changes are minor enough, it's unlikely that the rest of the group would stand for benching the actor. And even if the actor was benched during a costume change or something, the director still needs to work around the changes that the original actor implemented.
All that being said, a player in a game has even more power to change the story than any actor. If the GM has a story about the epic heroes valiantly defeating the dragon in personal combat, but the players decide to just convince everyone to move out the dragon's territory, then you won't have a story about dragon fighting. Ideally, such a tonal mismatch won't exist, but mistakes happen. Perhaps the GM overestimated the player's interest in dragon slaying or their confidence in their fighting capability, but none of the changes the fact that the Players get to decide what the response is to the situation the GM laid out, thereby influencing the direction of the story. Hence they have collaborated with the GM on the story.

Addendum: I've always heard collaborative storytelling used as an aid to help people understand what roleplaying games are about. In those instances, it's a benefit that the definition is cyclical as most people understand what collaboration is, and what storytelling is, which helps them understand what roleplaying games are.

Lacuna Caster

2018-01-22, 06:15 AM

You can have a good reality story, but a good fictional story needs illusionism.
You're going to have to elaborate on that for me. Maybe you understand 'illusionism' differently, but there's a vast range of 'story now' RPGs that either explicitly or implicitly reject that premise.

Florian

2018-01-22, 06:38 AM

Lacuna Caster

2018-01-22, 06:55 AM

I guess that the Quantum Ogre believes in DU.
I can google 'the Quantum Ogre', but what's 'DU' in this context?

The solution to the Quantum Ogre problem is relatively simple- players state their actual medium-term intent (e.g, 'getting to the fortress') and negotiate up-front what challenges/dice-rolls are needed to get there and what the side effects of failure would be. Of course, to do that, you must abandon the idea that information hidden from the PCs must be hidden from the players. So it actually excludes conventional illusionism.

Darth Ultron

2018-01-22, 07:49 AM

You're going to have to elaborate on that for me. Maybe you understand 'illusionism' differently, but there's a vast range of 'story now' RPGs that either explicitly or implicitly reject that premise.

A good fiction story needs things to happen and not happen as part of the story: If x does not happen then y can't happen or not happen. And I know everyone gets all bent out of shape about how the players must be side table DM demi gods and have to be able to control the story at all times....but lets just put that aside and talk about things happening in a story that are not things the player characters are doing directly in game. So the example would be if the characters rob a greedy/vengeful NPC, then that NPC will come after them. To make the story ''Revenge of the Mob Boss'' that character must oppose and come after the Pc's....or there is no story.

And fictional story needs such things to happen, and everyone knows this......but the players still take actions knowing that 'things will happen', often but not always obvious things. So that is the illusion....you know stuff will happen, but you don't overly think about it as the only alternative is not to even play the game. (And yes you can sometimes have nothing happen...but only sometimes, as if you do it all the time nothing ever happens ).

'Story now' makes just a weak Barley a Story Random Pile of Stuff....but then that is the intention. The Story Now does not want to use or have any of the normal Story elements. It's just a group of people doing the pile of ''and thens''. And it's a great type of game for the people that like that.

I can google 'the Quantum Ogre', but what's 'DU' in this context?

The solution to the Quantum Ogre problem is relatively simple- players state their actual medium-term intent (e.g, 'getting to the fortress') and negotiate up-front what challenges/dice-rolls are needed to get there and what the side effects of failure would be. Of course, to do that, you must abandon the idea that information hidden from the PCs must be hidden from the players. So it actually excludes conventional illusionism.

I call this the Acting Non-Game...and it's not even really role playing or a game....it's just acting out a preset script. Some players like this, but most don't. For all the players to know the treasure is buried under the old oak tree by the barn, but to have them have their characters search anywhere else is just silly at best and beyond boring at worst. "Sigh, ok, we know the treasure is under the old oak tree...but, sigh, we have a characters search the well and we don't find anything again." They can sit around for hours 'not' doing anything. It's even worse if the characters actions are scripted too: "ok, we walk over to the grove of pine trees and drop our weapons and surrender to the ambush of orcs there''.

I wonder what the Quantum Ogre is in my context too?

I don't use the that, my game has a plot and story, that my players...being good players that both want to play the game and want to play out the plot and story, follow: A classic game.

The Quantum Ogre is mostly used by Casual or Lazy DM's: no matter what the players have their characters do the plot and story stays right in front of them.

Lacuna Caster

2018-01-22, 08:16 AM

A good fiction story needs things to happen and not happen as part of the story: If x does not happen then y can't happen or not happen. And I know everyone gets all bent out of shape about how the players must be side table DM demi gods and have to be able to control the story at all times...
I think you're defining Story as a sequence of fixed events that displays causality. But all you need for causality is an effort at simulation, and I don't personally define Story as a series of fixed events. I define it as moral/ethical choices having consequences.

I call this the Acting Non-Game...and it's not even really role playing or a game....it's just acting out a preset script.
Well, no. The effect is the exact opposite. There's nothing binding the players to a particular intent in the first place, but depending on how the dice rolls go, and whether attendant complications arise, the PCs might find themselves punted off in some radically different direction from their original intent. And because the dice are all rolled in the open, and the stakes have been negotiated in advance, you can't wriggle out of it.

For example: Player says, "I want to obtain some incriminating evidence on the magistrate." GM says, "okay, how?" Player says, "By picking the lock to his chambers during the banquet that's being thrown tomorrow night." GM and player negotiate what skills need to be tested for that to happen- social skills to get invited, stealth to slip away, lock-picking to enter his chambers, searching to find papers, etc. Standard stuff. The GM also gives the player some idea of what happens if those rolls fail- they don't get invited for months, get caught by guards, et cetera. If the player succeeds, boom, they have incriminating evidence on the magistrate. If not, they get caught by guards and have to either fight or face charges of their own.

Some players like this, but most don't. For all the players to know the treasure is buried under the old oak tree by the barn, but to have them have their characters search anywhere else is just silly at best and beyond boring at worst...
That's too fine-grained. The players wouldn't be rolling to search in places where the players know the treasure isn't buried. They'd be rolling to know where the treasure is buried. Or, if time really isn't a factor, you can just assume they keep digging until they stumble onto it by luck. If time is a factor, then you roll to see if they can dig well enough to find the treasure (by luck) before some other side-effects kick in.

Koo Rehtorb

2018-01-22, 12:37 PM

As a bit of a side note. Certain people around here like to complain about the notion of doing things for the "sake of the story" and I've just had a nice simple example in one of my games.

My character has a big personal nemesis and also a somewhat self destructive streak. Certain events happened which meant that she had to go confront her nemesis at some point in the near future. As part of previous characterization it made perfect sense for her to go sneak off and confront him alone, and probably die in the process. But me doing a solo quest and then dying doesn't sound especially interesting so I said "She's going to try sneak off in the middle of the night but it sounds more interesting to me if she gets caught doing it if you want to." and didn't bother making a roll for it because it sounded like more fun for everyone involved.

That's all that playing with an eye towards the narrative really means. In other situations it might be more interesting for her to have a personal scene with an NPC without four other idiots crowding around. In other situations various outcomes might all be interesting so it might be worth a roll to see which one happens. It really depends on context.

Max_Killjoy

2018-01-22, 01:05 PM

I agree with this. What I think people mean by the phrase 'Collaborative Storytelling' is that the role-playing either produces or includes a story with some critical merit: i.e, good. Then one has to solve for (A) what 'good story' means and (B) for whether the rules and text of play particularly facilitate that result.

To a certain extent, 'good story' is subjective. A lot of detective fiction and sci-fi is, if I might slip into an aspect of GNS jargon that seems to be largely accepted these days, aimed at Simulationists (itself a shorthand for 'individuals who incline toward, though not necessarily exclusively, a simulationist style of play'). But many, probably most, people seem to derive more excitement and interest from character development and emotional drama, which has a different set of demands.

Detective, "crime procedural", science fiction, certain fantasy works, tend to be up my alley.

One thing I keep pondering is whether a story can be "character driven" without being about (focused on, built around, whatever) character development. I know that roleplaying can be driven purely by a characters personality, goals, reactions, decisions, etc, with no regard to story, and thus be "character driven" / "character focused". Can a story revolve around character in that sense, without spending time/words on character development ?

Traditionally, many RPGs have outlined a procedure whereby you bring a story (or at least a sequence of events) to the table, and then you essentially act out the broad strokes of the script. But the fact that RPGs have generally supposed to involve substantial choice in declared actions and randomisation of outcomes meant that the baseline rules were always grinding against the structural format. It could work, either by socially-sanctioned fudging or exploiting the law of averages or manipulating the fictional environment or all of the above, but these were all potential breaking points that tended to leave a certain contingent of players unsatisfied.

I've only ever met one GM who could successfully and skillfully weave the PCs through a story he had in mind while maintaining full player agency and allowing the PC's choices and the consequences free effect, but he was a professional freelance "storyteller" and presenter, probably in the 99th or better percentile in ability to balance the two conflicting goals.

The rest were: trying to railroad their own predetermined story; trying to get the players to engage in deliberate "storymaking"; or were presenting a situation of known and unknown facts and allowing the interplay of PC and NPC actions to determine the course of events and a new set of facts, etc.

The later is my preference both as a GM and as a player. But, as a GM, I've occasionally found that some players seize the reigns with glee... and a few players feel a bit rudderless and keep waiting for events to come to them, because they've some to expect a bit of preplanned story from the GM based on past experiences.

I would say the 'character-driven drama' definition of 'good story' grinds against this format particularly hard. A character's personality is defined by their response to value-ambivalent cost/benefit stimuli- which is to say, their consequential moral/ethical choices, which is to say, drama. If there are no such choices to be made, either you learn nothing about the characters, in which case there's no development, or their choices don't matter, in which case the story isn't really about them, or the character's decisions have to uncoupled from the player's, in which case the player isn't playing.

I may have a narrower definition of "drama", or be less bothered by drama that arises from stuff happening than I am by "drama for its own sake". What I mean by that is, did we happen upon quote-unquote "drama" as a natural result of the conflicts and circumstances at hand (important NPC gets infected with disease based on probability, knowledge and skill rolls, etc, whatever, as they were trying to help the victims, and now they might die) rather than drama because someone wants to impose drama (important NPC gets infected with disease because GM wants to force "hard decisions" on the players/PCs, and now the NPC might die unless the PCs risk others dying to make sure the NPC gets the cure).

Even in authorial fiction, when the later occurs and is transparently hitting a well-worn trope, it doesn't make me feel for the characters or engage me in the events, it pushes me out of the story and makes me look at the story as a construct or even contrivance -- it's obvious that the writer did something because they want to show something about the characters or manipulate the audience's feelings.

I think character decisions can drive the story (authorial or emergent) without getting into "drama", and we can have a well-developed characters without getting into character development (the latter defined as characters changing / "growing").

So the question of whether you could get 'good story' without resorting to illusionism- or better yet, if the rules could actively promote that outcome- was a major topic of discussion and development since about the early-to-mid 90s. And that's when the phrase started to get so contentious, because people were bringing all these mutually-conflicting ideas of how story was supposed to be packaged within RPGs to the table.

I don't think it's a meaningless phrase, once you've usefully defined the component terms, but while the collaborative part is clear enough, and the story part can be explained with reasonable economy, I think the telling part is misleading. It suggests that you brought the story to the table with you and relate it on request, and how that's supposed to happen collaboratively is unclear. Story-authorship might be a better (if highfalutin) phrase.

For me, "collaborative storytelling" can be "story now" in a manner similar to how improv acting tells a story even though no one brought an existing story to the stage.

But for someone playing an RPG to be engaged in "collaborative storytelling", they must be actively and deliberately working with others to intentionally tell a story, whether that's a "story before" story or "story now" story (IMO, at least).

I think you're defining Story as a sequence of fixed events that displays causality. But all you need for causality is an effort at simulation, and I don't personally define Story as a series of fixed events. I define it as moral/ethical choices having consequences.

The above was directed at someone else, but if I can respond to the general subtopic, causality doesn't rely on a predetermined series of events. Causality (that is, cause-and-effect is cyclical and naturally flows from existing facts to new facts as a result of what's going on with characters and setting) is an independent issue, that might or might not be handled well -- whether the story is predetermined/prewritten (authorial fiction being read/watched, or an RPG campaign in "story before" style), deliberately created in the moment (improv theater or "story now" style in an RPG), or told after the fact based on events that already happened ("so on the way to work yesterday..." presented to be entertaining, or "story after" / emergent story that comes out of an RPG).

Darth Ultron

2018-01-22, 08:49 PM

I think you're defining Story as a sequence of fixed events that displays causality. But all you need for causality is an effort at simulation, and I don't personally define Story as a series of fixed events. I define it as moral/ethical choices having consequences.

Morals and ethics? Ok...

Well, no. The effect is the exact opposite. There's nothing binding the players to a particular intent in the first place, but depending on how the dice rolls go, and whether attendant complications arise, the PCs might find themselves punted off in some radically different direction from their original intent. And because the dice are all rolled in the open, and the stakes have been negotiated in advance, you can't wriggle out of it.

For an Acting Story Non Game, all the people in the game get together and in detail lay out the whole story of the game. Everything from start to finish. Then they are just acting out what was agreed on. So the dice don't matter at all, everything happens as it was agreed on before the game.

That's too fine-grained. The players wouldn't be rolling to search in places where the players know the treasure isn't buried. They'd be rolling to know where the treasure is buried. Or, if time really isn't a factor, you can just assume they keep digging until they stumble onto it by luck. If time is a factor, then you roll to see if they can dig well enough to find the treasure (by luck) before some other side-effects kick in.

In the acting non game, the players know everything. Then they, a bit pointlessly, pretend their character's don't know and act that out. Just like acting in a play or movie.

Now in a normal, classic game the player does not want to know any more of the story then their character in the story knows. They want to willingly pretend to ''not know'' they are playing a game, and want to role play the character ''for real''(in the game).

And the very fact that the player knows nothing about the Game Story means they can't ''tell(or create or collaborate)'' that story at all...they can just play thought it and see what happens.

One thing I keep pondering is whether a story can be "character driven" without being about (focused on, built around, whatever) character development. I know that roleplaying can be driven purely by a characters personality, goals, reactions, decisions, etc, with no regard to story, and thus be "character driven" / "character focused". Can a story revolve around character in that sense, without spending time/words on character development ?

Sadly, I will say this answer is YES.

I love telling stories in games, simple ones, complex ones, controversial ones and so on. It works out great when a player asks for a story, but only from a very vague idea of ''I'd like this'' with the player knowing no details of the story and having no narrative god-like control over the story(just their character story control. ) Even if the player does not ask for a story, I will toss a couple in to ''tell/show'' the players something. Often I will tag it to a characters backstory or even a players personality.

The end goal is to have the character (and player) learn and grow and develop. But this only works and happens if the player is open minded enough to let it happen. Tons of players are ''set'' and will never change their mind, or will just always ''play'' their character as themselves. So no matter what happens in a story, the character will be totally unchanged...no development. Like a bad TV show, the player ''hits the reset button'' often.

Even in authorial fiction, when the later occurs and is transparently hitting a well-worn trope, it doesn't make me feel for the characters or engage me in the events, it pushes me out of the story and makes me look at the story as a construct or even contrivance -- it's obvious that the writer did something because they want to show something about the characters or manipulate the audience's feelings.

I'd say you can't have a good fictional story without this. ''Stuff'' has to happen. And it must be ''adventure worthy'' stuff.

I think character decisions can drive the story (authorial or emergent) without getting into "drama", and we can have a well-developed characters without getting into character development (the latter defined as characters changing / "growing").

A character making decisions can never drive a story...after all, with no drama, there would not even be a story to drive and with no character development there is no reason for the character to do anything.

With no drama, why would a character do anything? The character could go after the bandits for just something to do? And would just do it to be good? And you can't have a well developed character that never develops.

Florian

2018-01-23, 06:52 AM

Lacuna Caster

2018-01-23, 08:40 AM

One thing I keep pondering is whether a story can be "character driven" without being about (focused on, built around, whatever) character development. I know that roleplaying can be driven purely by a characters personality, goals, reactions, decisions, etc, with no regard to story, and thus be "character driven" / "character focused". Can a story revolve around character in that sense, without spending time/words on character development?
That essentially just requires that the characters be the primary agents of change within the story, and since the story is about what the characters do, that's fairly tautological. Again, the question is whether the story might be considered to have critical merit, for some particular definition of 'merit'.

Character development means hitting the characters with situations that reveal something new about their personality. A certain amount of that will happen 'organically' if they have both agency and there are moral/ethical tensions embedded in the local setting. If you want to do it in a more sustained, high-pressure fashion, then it can be helpful to keep the setting sketchy and invent locations, NPCs and situations that push the PCs' hot-buttons, but you would probably perceive that as "drama for it's own sake".

Since I think you're playing/designing with an ear toward simulation, and want the story to be about how the setting changes, I would just suggest it helps if the PCs are some of the more competent and/or high-ranking persons within it. Those individuals tend by default to have the most influence on events.

The later is my preference both as a GM and as a player. But, as a GM, I've occasionally found that some players seize the reigns with glee... and a few players feel a bit rudderless and keep waiting for events to come to them, because they've some to expect a bit of preplanned story from the GM based on past experiences...

...But for someone playing an RPG to be engaged in "collaborative storytelling", they must be actively and deliberately working with others to intentionally tell a story, whether that's a "story before" story or "story now" story (IMO, at least).
At least according to my understanding of GNS terminology, if the characters are clearly addressing moral/ethical questions through the lens of player agency and the consequences of those decisions are what determine long-range outcomes, then you are playing 'Narrativist'. I can certainly remember a few discussions on the Forge where this was patiently explained to players who had no particular intention of creating a story at all and certainly had no fixed plot in mind.

And yeah, 'Turtles' are apparently a thing (http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/7/).

I have met dozens, perhaps over a hundred, very experienced role-players with this profile: a limited repertoire of games behind him and extremely defensive and turtle-like play tactics. Ask for a character background, and he resists, or if he gives you one, he never makes use of it or responds to cues about it. Ask for actions - he hunkers down and does nothing unless there's a totally unambiguous lead to follow or a foe to fight. His universal responses include "My guy doesn't want to," and, "I say nothing."

I haven't met anyone who met that exact description, but I think they're nextdoor to the players who creep along the corridor in ten-foot increments calling for spot/listen checks. I've bumped into a few of them.

For an Acting Story Non Game, all the people in the game get together and in detail lay out the whole story of the game. Everything from start to finish. Then they are just acting out what was agreed on. So the dice don't matter at all, everything happens as it was agreed on before the game...
Again, that's not what I'm describing. I don't really know how'd you infer that from what I was writing about, but to be clear- the action is resolved one conflict at at time by negotiating stakes- not actual outcomes- for that particular conflict. The shape that subsequent conflicts take is indeterminate, precisely because outcomes hinge on player choice and random events. There is no 'whole story' that you can lay out in advance and impose during play.

Max_Killjoy

2018-01-23, 10:30 AM

That essentially just requires that the characters be the primary agents of change within the story, and since the story is about what the characters do, that's fairly tautological. Again, the question is whether the story might be considered to have critical merit, for some particular definition of 'merit'.

Character development means hitting the characters with situations that reveal something new about their personality. A certain amount of that will happen 'organically' if they have both agency and there are moral/ethical tensions embedded in the local setting. If you want to do it in a more sustained, high-pressure fashion, then it can be helpful to keep the setting sketchy and invent locations, NPCs and situations that push the PCs' hot-buttons, but you would probably perceive that as "drama for it's own sake".

Since I think you're playing/designing with an ear toward simulation, and want the story to be about how the setting changes, I would just suggest it helps if the PCs are some of the more competent and/or high-ranking persons within it. Those individuals tend by default to have the most influence on events.

My understanding of "character development" is that it requires the character to change, not just "be revealed". This may be a case of different definitions competing in the wider authorial and literary discussion space, because my understanding is based on things I've read/heard from authors, critics, professors, etc, involved in the field.

What you're describing here is closer to what I was calling character-driven -- the character's personality, decisions, reactions, actions, etc, are central to the cause-effect cycle inside the story or inside the events of the game.

For me, there doesn't have to be any change in the characters or settings to make for an engaging and satisfying story, unless one counts all events as "change", which (to me) gets us back to diluting words too much. As one example, I don't consider identifying, prosecuting, and imprisoning the person behind a crime to be "change" in the setting or characters as would count for these discussions. The only thing that has changed is that the murder is now solved and the murderer is now in prison.

At least according to my understanding of GNS terminology, if the characters are clearly addressing moral/ethical questions through the lens of player agency and the consequences of those decisions are what determine long-range outcomes, then you are playing 'Narrativist'. I can certainly remember a few discussions on the Forge where this was patiently explained to players who had no particular intention of creating a story at all and certainly had no fixed plot in mind.

The critical issue in this thread isn't whether there is a fixed / predetermined plot or not, but whether there's an intention of "creating story" and/or pursuing certain broad arcs or themes (which can be done without a fixed or predetermined plot).

I really don't agree with the GNS-stated definitions of "narrativist" or "simulationist".

"Narrativism" got very narrow and attempted to hijack "character" in service to Mr Edward's personal view of it (narrativism) being about "addressing an agreed-upon issue or feature of human existence" and rejecting all forms except "story now" as irrelevant to "narrativism". Many elements were pared off and thrown in the ditch as the definition become purely about one gamer getting what he had wanted from gaming all along.

Meanwhile, "Simulationism" became distorted into this sort of "emulating genre" nonsense that had nothing to do with verisimilitude, avoiding inconsistency and dissonance, solid worldbuilding, etc. It became the dumping ground for all the things that Mr Edwards didn't want in his own personal "Narrativism". Toon, for example, is considered "simulationist" in GNS.

In the context of RPGs, no one "approach" has a claim or monopoly on "character" -- "character" is orthogonal.

"Genre emulation", not sure where it goes, but it's certainly not what I'd consider a core aspect of "sim".

EDIT: To some reading this discussion, my disputes with GNS regarding definitions and categorization may seem pointless or trivial. However, GNS goes on to assert that systems/rules, gameplay, and focus should be narrow and exclusive to a single category -- G, N, or S.

So one might say that they prefer character (personality, beliefs, decisions, reactions, actions, etc) to be the driving element of how the game proceeds -- that they want their point of contact with the setting and events to be the character, and for the character's decisions and actions to matter.

The "Edwardian" comes along and says "Oh, you're a Narrativist, you need a game with Narrativist rules and to play in a Narrative manner."

Only there's nothing about those types of rules or that manner of playing that the player actually enjoys. They know from experience that they want associated rules and setting-rules synchronicity, task-based resolution, no "player powers", and little-to-no metacurrency. And they say so.

And at that point, the "Edwardian" then tells them that they're "incoherent". :smallmad:

Max_Killjoy

2018-01-23, 10:43 AM

@Max:

I think your understanding of "drama" is wrong in context of RPGs. Drama focuses heavily on the plot and the only matter is what happens "on stage" and with the actual actors in it. You will always have "drama for the sake of drama" because the game itself is about things happening and you having your character engage in that, ie. a dungeon is there to be explored, a monster to fight, and NPC to interact with.
You might try and sugar-coat that with a level of velrsimilutide, but that's more a matter of taste than an requirement for playing an RPG.

Then our understanding of what RPGs are, what we're doing and out, and why we play... may be fundamentally different to the point of unavoidably talking past each other.

If "drama" isn't the word you'd use here, not sure what word would work, but there's a fundamental difference between:

* Character has to face the death of a loved-one because the ongoing events of the campaign and setting resulted in the death of a loved-one.

* Character has to face the death of a loved-one because the player decided they wanted their character to face the death of a loved-one, and worked with the GM (or the group in case of a GMless setup) to bring the course of events to that specific point.

Or these two:

* Character undergoes a shift in worldview because the causal events bring them to that point.

* Character undergoes a shift in worldview because the player decided they wanted their character to undergo that "arc" with all its associated struggles.

kyoryu

2018-01-23, 01:08 PM

If "drama" isn't the word you'd use here, not sure what word would work, but there's a fundamental difference between:

* Character has to face the death of a loved-one because the ongoing events of the campaign and setting resulted in the death of a loved-one.

* Character has to face the death of a loved-one because the player decided they wanted their character to face the death of a loved-one, and worked with the GM (or the group in case of a GMless setup) to bring the course of events to that specific point.

Or these two:

* Character undergoes a shift in worldview because the causal events bring them to that point.

* Character undergoes a shift in worldview because the player decided they wanted their character to undergo that "arc" with all its associated struggles.

While I agree with you, and understand your point, there's a lot of contrivances in most games that exist for the sake of gameplay. Actually "realistic" games would be incredibly dull. There's a certain similarity between the character facing the death of a loved one because the players want that kind of thing to happen, and a dungeon being conveniently nearby the players because players like going in dungeons.

The difference is just what those contrivance are there to facilitate.

Max_Killjoy

2018-01-23, 01:50 PM

While I agree with you, and understand your point, there's a lot of contrivances in most games that exist for the sake of gameplay. Actually "realistic" games would be incredibly dull. There's a certain similarity between the character facing the death of a loved one because the players want that kind of thing to happen, and a dungeon being conveniently nearby the players because players like going in dungeons.

The difference is just what those contrivance are there to facilitate.

Just going off the dungeon example, I'm far more likely to put the "ancient ruins" or whatever in a spot that makes sense for the setting, and then "contrive" the travel by fast-forwarding through most of the uneventful parts if necessary, than I am to plop it down within easy travel distance.

kyoryu

2018-01-23, 02:32 PM

Just going off the dungeon example, I'm far more likely to put the "ancient ruins" or whatever in a spot that makes sense for the setting, and then "contrive" the travel by fast-forwarding through most of the uneventful parts if necessary, than I am to plop it down within easy travel distance.

Regardless, the fact is that dungeon (in whatever form) exists not based on naturalistic cause and effect, but because people want dungeons in their games.

Max_Killjoy

2018-01-23, 02:50 PM

Regardless, the fact is that dungeon (in whatever form) exists not based on naturalistic cause and effect, but because people want dungeons in their games.

OK, sure.

First, I'd say that there's a difference between "we want our campaign to take place in this kind of setting with these kinds of elements", and "I want my character to go through a fall and redemption arc".

Second, at least for me, it's a lot easier to work backwards from "We want to delve dungeons" to a starting point that then works forward to a setting where ancient ruins and hidden fortresses are a coherent and consistent part of the present-day, than it is for me to somehow work a specific arc into the future events of the story. One's worldbuilding with a goal in mind, the other involves something else entirely.

Florian

2018-01-23, 04:31 PM

OK, sure.

Apparently not and sorry, I've got to point a "Barbie" at you again. It´s a game. You play the role of one character in it. The game has content and you have to engage with it to actively play the game.
That's what is happening "on stage" and that's pretty much all there is to it.

You keep trying to add layers of complexity to it that might suit your personal taste and socialization, but they are not part of the core game or in any way required to play the game. You basically talk about "off stage" matters, like "realism", "verisimilitude" and such, but in a game of dungeon delving and dragon slaying (to use D&D), you don't have to know why that stuff is there in the first place.

Tanarii

2018-01-23, 04:41 PM

but in a game of dungeon delving and dragon slaying (to use D&D), you don't have to know why that stuff is there in the first place.Which is IMO an argument against "story" being required as a part of RPGs. Not for it.

You always have to roleplay, or make decisions for what your character does in the fictional environment. You don't always have to have a narrative for what's going on in the fictional environment, an underlying "why". There's doesn't have to be a particular reason, any more than there has to be a reason in real life. Stuff just happens.

(Edit: To be clear, I'm talking about "why" as in purpose, not "why" as in the rules for the underlying structure of the universe or matrix's operating system or whatever.)

Max_Killjoy

2018-01-23, 04:46 PM

Apparently not and sorry, I've got to point a "Barbie" at you again.

If you're incapable of refraining from this sort of juvenile nonsense, then don't bother trying to engage me on these topics.

Max_Killjoy

2018-01-23, 04:58 PM

Which is IMO an argument against "story" being required as a part of RPGs. Not for it.

You always have to roleplay, or make decisions for what your character does in the fictional environment. You don't always have to have a narrative for what's going on in the fictional environment, an underlying "why". There's doesn't have to be a particular reason, any more than there has to be a reason in real life. Stuff just happens.

Indeed, there is a certain irony there.

But yeah, if someone wants to bash in orc skulls and sneak past beholders in the ancient ruins a day's travel from town, then that's their fun and they can do that. If someone wants to have secondary world of depth and breadth and consistency that explains the underlying what and when and why and how, then that's their fun and they can do. If someone wants to explore character or narrative arcs or delve into themes or collaboratively craft stories as they undertake adventures or whatever, then that's their fun and they can do that.

But none of those require the others, nor are any of those mutually exclusive of the others. All of those are somewhat orthogonal to whether the player is making decisions as/for their character, or about their character. Wanting a deep world and character-driven RP doesn't mean you have to care about story, or not care about story.

And no one -- no one -- but you gets to decide why you play RPGs or what you get out of RPGs or what's going on in your head when you play an RPG.

Darth Ultron

2018-01-23, 05:52 PM

Again, that's not what I'm describing. I don't really know how'd you infer that from what I was writing about, but to be clear- the action is resolved one conflict at at time by negotiating stakes- not actual outcomes- for that particular conflict. The shape that subsequent conflicts take is indeterminate, precisely because outcomes hinge on player choice and random events. There is no 'whole story' that you can lay out in advance and impose during play.

I guess we are talking about different things? Anyway...

A good Classic RPG game(that is one DM and some Players, with the players having no special knowledge, narrative control or power...so they can only role play their single character.) needs a Story. The Story is why anything is even happening and is what the character(s) are doing.

Yes, you can have a Second Life Barely A Game where the characters just randomly wander around and randomly do things. Some people do like this sort of game: it's easy and requires no thought. It works great for the casual game where people want to waste a couple hours and toss some dice around.

But anything more then that, and you do need a Story. And the Story needs to come Before the Game. If you do the Story Now, then it's just a random Quantum Ogre game...no matter what the players do, the Story forms right in front of them. Though this bland story can't have any real complexity, or plot, as it just randomly comes into being at the whim of the players. And a Story After is just a big pile of random mess Barley a Story.

Lacuna Caster

2018-01-23, 05:56 PM

My understanding of "character development" is that it requires the character to change, not just "be revealed". This may be a case of different definitions competing in the wider authorial and literary discussion space, because my understanding is based on things I've read/heard from authors, critics, professors, etc, involved in the field.
The one tends to produce the other, given that the situations which reveal personality also tend to make characters question their priorities- the act of observation alters the observed, as it were. It's also generally encouraging to see characters accumulate wisdom from their experiences, get more skilled and proficient, et cetera.

As a counterexample, in A Man For All Seasons, Thomas More doesn't really change his position or outlook at any given time. So drama is extracted from plumbing the extent of his commitment to religious faith and personal integrity- he has to give up more and more of his privileges and possessions in order to hold onto it. That's 'character development' in the sense of extracting information about personality, without the character themselves actually changing.

As one example, I don't consider identifying, prosecuting, and imprisoning the person behind a crime to be "change" in the setting or characters as would count for these discussions. The only thing that has changed is that the murder is now solved and the murderer is now in prison.
As long as there was a morally/ethically-charged decision- revenge, deceit, pursuit of justice, etc.- that has a consequence (murderer behind bars), then sure, that's story. Maybe a very simple one, maybe part of a larger epic, but story.

Only there's nothing about those types of rules or that manner of playing that the player actually enjoys. They know from experience that they want associated rules and setting-rules synchronicity, task-based resolution, no "player powers", and little-to-no metacurrency. And they say so.

And at that point, the "Edwardian" then tells them that they're "incoherent". :smallmad:
I don't know if this is a jab at me, specifically, but I would point out that RE has been perfectly willing to give narrativist-simulationist hybrid designs their due (http://www.indie-rpgs.com/reviews/4/).

However, The Riddle of Steel is like a guy waving his hand in the back of the room -"Scuse me, scuse me, what about that first road? I'm not ready to jettison that idea yet." It's as if someone stepped into The Chaosium in 1977, and said, "Hey, you know, if you don't put some kind of player-modulated personality mechanic in there, this game is going to be all about killing monsters and collecting Clacks." This didn't happen in 1977, and that's why RuneQuest play was often indeed all about those things. But it's happened now...

...People who have been drawn by the ultra-gritty combat system often miss this point. Sure, you can get two to five bonus dice in a given combat exchange by picking and choosing your combat maneuvers carefully. But if your Spiritual Attributes are firing in tandem, you can have up to twenty-five extra dice, many of them re-usable! There's just no comparison: given competent opponents, a player who does not make use of these Attributes will see his character die screaming; a player who does can and will often triumph.

That's not to say that you, individually, need a metagame reward system to role-play in a sim-heavy environment. But without explicit mechanics to promote this behaviour, well... you're going to have to find 3-5 other people who instinctively share those exact same priorities. Because GNS doesn't apply to individuals per se, it applies to the dynamics of a stable group.

(FWIW, I actually agree that Toon is a form of simulationism- it does exist to simulate the feel and mechanics of a looney-tunes episode. Simulating reality is certainly a different form of simulation, but I think for afficionados of the cartoon genre, the same brain circuits are engaged.)

Lacuna Caster

2018-01-23, 06:04 PM

I guess we are talking about different things? Anyway...

A good Classic RPG game(that is one DM and some Players, with the players having no special knowledge, narrative control or power...so they can only role play their single character.) needs a Story. The Story is why anything is even happening and is what the character(s) are doing.

Yes, you can have a Second Life Barely A Game where the characters just randomly wander around and randomly do things. Some people do like this sort of game: it's easy and requires no thought. It works great for the casual game where people want to waste a couple hours and toss some dice around.
Again, I would say that this is a false dichotomy. Characters don't need to be ambling about at random in order for players to have agency and influence the direction of events. The players do, however, need to take some responsibility for keeping track of their characters' own motives and objectives and pushing to realise those on their own initiative.

If this really is stumping you, I could possibly try organising a session or two over Roll20 with the right system, but I'm not talking about some mythical chimera, here.

Squiddish

2018-01-23, 06:11 PM

Collaborative storytelling is a meaningful, if easily misused, phrase.

Assuming your RPG has a story (i.e. It's presented as a narrative and not "you roll the dice and then if you roll them good you move on to roll them more") and it's not entirely in the hands of the DM (i.e., the players can alter the story by their choices) it's to some extent collaborative storytelling. The question is, to what extent? Some games, such as fate, have the players somewhat separate from their characters, and in partial control of the actions of others. Other games, such as D&D, have a more rigid connection: you control your character, and can influence the dungeon master outside of the rules.

Generally, when somebody says D&D is about collaborative storytelling, they mean the game should be more collaborative in its storytelling; that the players shouldn't be acting exclusively as their characters but as humans who are working together to make a story.

Tanarii

2018-01-23, 06:16 PM

Assuming your RPG has a story (i.e. It's presented as a narrative and not "you roll the dice and then if you roll them good you move on to roll them more")It's important to note that a lack of narrative doesn't mean "you roll the dice and then if you roll them good you move on to roll them more". It's possible for things to happen as consequences of actions, or as if it's a living world, and yet lack narrative.

Not particularly likely, given the way most DMs think. But possible.

Max_Killjoy

2018-01-23, 06:17 PM

@ Lacuna Caster

100% not a jab at you -- I don't recall you ever being the sort to tell other gamers that their preferences are "incoherent" or otherwise be disdainful or derisive.

I've had variations on that conversation, more than once, including within the last year. (Anyone who says The Forge Is Dead and Irrelevant is getting lucky in what they're encountering, I'm still running into those sorts of conversations as recently as 2017.)

This conversation, with you, is however the first where I've ever seen "character development" explicitly disentangled from "change" and more closely tied to "revealing things about the character". I've seen so many comments over the years that have amounted to a fancy way of saying "if your characters don't change then they suck and your story sucks" that the term "character development" just tends to get my hackles up.

I think my own view on "genre emulation" is that it's tangential to a GDS or GNS breakdown. Toon can just as easily be seen as an attempt to "tell cartoon stories" as it is an attempt to "evoke the cartoon world feel". One could perhaps even have a "Gamist" approach that is meant to "play like" a certain genre.

Max_Killjoy

2018-01-23, 06:19 PM

Squiddish

2018-01-23, 10:18 PM

And yet, after 22 pages, it should be clear at this point that some players specifically want to "act exclusively as their characters", and that engaging in "working together to tell a story" is detrimental to their enjoyment of an RPG, and contrary to why and how they're playing.

Okay, that doesn't mean it's a meaningless phrase. That means that some people don't want to do collaborative storytelling, and that a system like FATE is probably a bad choice for them.

Max_Killjoy

2018-01-23, 10:46 PM

Okay, that doesn't mean it's a meaningless phrase. That means that some people don't want to do collaborative storytelling, and that a system like FATE is probably a bad choice for them.

That's fair.

The irony is that it's only "meaningless" if it's deconstructed to the point that it applies to all RPG play.

ImNotTrevor

2018-01-24, 12:43 AM

The real irony is that someone (me) already explained that the phrase is usually (ie, literally every time I or anyone I know in real life has used it) used to very quickly establish the gist of what TRPGs generally are.

Where we got off on a weird tangent is ghat apparently some people on a now-defunct website ten years ago used it in a particular way that has permanently scarred people so badly that when they see hair or hide of the phrase it clearly means 'ol GNS is back from the dead and they must take up arms.

As opposed to, like, it's a decent and accurate-enough shorthand to get the point across to someone who has no clue what D&D is. Without sitting down and teaching a seminar on playstyles.

That's the irony. They're complaining about a narrow application of a broad term that doesn't really happen anymore.

BoringInfoGuy

2018-01-24, 02:53 AM

Generally, when somebody says D&D is about collaborative storytelling, they mean the game should be more collaborative in its storytelling; that the players shouldn't be acting exclusively as their characters but as humans who are working together to make a story.

Should and shouldn’t are the problem terms here.

You CAN approach D&D as a tool to make collaborative stories, if that is the type of gaming you enjoy.

You CAN approach D&D as an excuse to hang out with friends, and spend more time swapping stories and cracking jokes than on the game.

You CAN approach D&D as a tool to play with system mechanics, as you work out ideas to create your own system.

You CAN approach D&D as a game of tactics, both in and out of combat.

You CAN approach D&D as an opportunity to practice acting.

You can approach D&D as an excuse to paint miniatures, and build elaborate models.

You CAN even play it as a game where you take on the role of an adventurer, and have them react as a person in a world instead of a character in a story.

There are plenty of ways to play D&D. The only thing people SHOULD do is find a group they are compatible with, and figure out what style of play works best for them.

Once a group as figured out what works best for them, they SHOULD NOT assume they have found the secret formula for fun, which they are then duty bound to force down everyone else’s throats.

Talk about what you enjoy and find engaging, why you like what you like. And let others do the same, without telling them they should be liking what you like instead.

Koo Rehtorb

2018-01-24, 02:57 AM

There are plenty of ways to play D&D. The only thing people SHOULD do is find a group they are compatible with, and figure out what style of play works best for them.

That said, games are designed to be good at specific things. If you try to do a grand political intrigue with little to no combat in D&D you're probably either playing the game wrong or playing the wrong game.

Florian

2018-01-24, 03:18 AM

If you're incapable of refraining from this sort of juvenile nonsense, then don't bother trying to engage me on these topics.

Sorry, but there's hardly a way to avoid that as long as you keep insisting on two things:
- Characters exist and matter for that discussion
- Your preference that "stuff that happens" needs to have a realistic feeling to it, so you can enjoy it.

Yes, characters are a, if not the, central part of role-playing games, as they are the main playing pieces and act as window to the fiction(al world). But they´re still no active participants in the game itself because they don't exist at the table as players.
You want your character to be your toy, that's a purely "off stage" matter, which can be done with RPGs just fine, but is not central to them or their functions.

You keep clinging to the illusion of verisimilitude and use that as "proof" that story doesn't necessarily exist. Still, the central part of the game is having content to interact with, which is the "on stage" matter and practically everything there is. This is the "drama" part. Even the most passive sandbox consists of elements to interact with and uses random charts that are there to have things happen and none of it will work unless the players exhibit their agency to formulate goals and actively go out and do something in it.

Florian

2018-01-24, 03:30 AM

Should and shouldn’t are the problem terms here.

Not really. Differentiate between "game", "play" and "toy". Look at your list and count how many of your examples actually "play a game of D&D", "play using D&D" and "use D&D as a toy". That's not saying this is badwrongfun, but in a discussion about role-playing, the folks that don't role-play while using D&D actually don't matter (ie. when using D&D rules to play a skirmish-level war-game, that's just that then, when using D&D rules to "play", then there's no big difference to using Descent or Runebound - both don't make it an RPG because you're using D&D)

BoringInfoGuy

2018-01-24, 03:38 AM

That said, games are designed to be good at specific things. If you try to do a grand political intrigue with little to no combat in D&D you're probably either playing the game wrong or playing the wrong game.

To a degree, yes. D&D is built around heroic fantasy with a strong emphasis on combat. So it is not a vehicle designed for tons of political intrigue with little or no combat. However, if a group is using D&D for such a game, and enjoying it, then why should anyone have the arrogance to say they are playing wrong? It’s their table, let them have their fun.

A suggestion, such as “Have you tried game [x]? It is built exactly for the type of theme you are running,” is not out of line.

But telling someone the way they are enjoying their recreational activity wrong is ridiculous.

To be honest, I have long suspected that the continued success of D&D is because it is much more flexible than it appears at first glance.

Satinavian

2018-01-24, 06:11 AM

You want your character to be your toy, that's a purely "off stage" matter, which can be done with RPGs just fine, but is not central to them or their functions.No, it is just a valid way to play RPGs. Of course it is not the only way, so that stuff is not central. But neither is the stage as you can play RPGs this way just fine.

Personally i prefer the same kind of game as Max_Killjoy. One that is not really story driven and where versimilitude is the most important goal. Doesn't mean that stories can't happen, but if they don't that is fine too.

Not really. Differentiate between "game", "play" and "toy". Look at your list and count how many of your examples actually "play a game of D&D", "play using D&D" and "use D&D as a toy". That's not saying this is badwrongfun, but in a discussion about role-playing, the folks that don't role-play while using D&D actually don't matter (ie. when using D&D rules to play a skirmish-level war-game, that's just that then, when using D&D rules to "play", then there's no big difference to using Descent or Runebound - both don't make it an RPG because you're using D&D)Not sure if this is just circular logic "an RPG always contain story -> when someone uses RPG rules to create something without a story, that is not an RPG experience ->an RPG always contain story" or just a true scotsman argument "real roleplaying always has story"

Lacuna Caster

2018-01-24, 06:39 AM

100% not a jab at you -- I don't recall you ever being the sort to tell other gamers that their preferences are "incoherent" or otherwise be disdainful or derisive.

I've had variations on that conversation, more than once, including within the last year. (Anyone who says The Forge Is Dead and Irrelevant is getting lucky in what they're encountering, I'm still running into those sorts of conversations as recently as 2017.)
Well, the Forge is certainly 'dead'- it was deliberately shifted into a 'winter phase' a couple of years ago and then archived, since RE felt it had served it's core purpose.

I don't think anyone telling you that persons are 'incoherent' is particularly abreast of the relevant theory, though. Individuals don't always fit neatly within any particular GNS box. Incoherence occurs within groups when their members have preferences different enough that they can't productively compromise and 'have fun', even given good-faith efforts at otherwise getting along.

(For what it's worth, I would just mention that RE does talk about 'Hard Core' gamism being as incompatible with regular gamism as it is with N/S modes of play, in which case GNS + Hard Core looks rather similar to the Bartle taxonomy of player types (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartle_taxonomy_of_player_types).)

This conversation, with you, is however the first where I've ever seen "character development" explicitly disentangled from "change" and more closely tied to "revealing things about the character". I've seen so many comments over the years that have amounted to a fancy way of saying "if your characters don't change then they suck and your story sucks" that the term "character development" just tends to get my hackles up.
A lot of literary and film critics tend to lean this way, but I think it's mistaking a second-order effect with the fundamentals.

I would also say that characters that don't change tend to be probed to the point of destruction in the name of sustained drama. (Whether you want drama to necessarily be that sustained is another question.)

I think my own view on "genre emulation" is that it's tangential to a GDS or GNS breakdown. Toon can just as easily be seen as an attempt to "tell cartoon stories" as it is an attempt to "evoke the cartoon world feel". One could perhaps even have a "Gamist" approach that is meant to "play like" a certain genre.
I think it's very difficult to tell dramatic stories within that kind of cartoon universe, because it's such a consequence-free environment that one side of the Choice X Consequence formula dries up entirely.

You could certainly have a system based off, say, the older Teen Titans or My Little Pony or certain flavours of Disney flick that had some explicit prep-guidelines and gameplay mechanics for generating consequential drama, but whether that counts as a Sim or Nar-oriented system depends on whether those mechanics & guidelines are present or not.

Darth Ultron

2018-01-24, 07:26 AM

It's important to note that a lack of narrative doesn't mean "you roll the dice and then if you roll them good you move on to roll them more". It's possible for things to happen as consequences of actions, or as if it's a living world, and yet lack narrative.

Not particularly likely, given the way most DMs think. But possible.

It is possible to have a game with no Story. Both the Random Game, where stuff just randomly happens and the Second Life game, where the players just ''live a second life'' have no Story.

Though I'd note that a world of consequences or a living world there must be a Story for anything to happen.

And yet, after 22 pages, it should be clear at this point that some players specifically want to "act exclusively as their characters", and that engaging in "working together to tell a story" is detrimental to their enjoyment of an RPG, and contrary to why and how they're playing.

Agreed.

To have a group hug and tell a story together is one way to play an RPG, and they even makes games for that.

But it is not the only way to play.

And it is not super duper better awesome, just because you like it.

Max_Killjoy

2018-01-24, 07:29 AM

Not really. Differentiate between "game", "play" and "toy". Look at your list and count how many of your examples actually "play a game of D&D", "play using D&D" and "use D&D as a toy". That's not saying this is badwrongfun, but in a discussion about role-playing, the folks that don't role-play while using D&D actually don't matter (ie. when using D&D rules to play a skirmish-level war-game, that's just that then, when using D&D rules to "play", then there's no big difference to using Descent or Runebound - both don't make it an RPG because you're using D&D)

You've entirely missed their point, then.

"Should and shouldn’t are the problem terms here."

There are a lot of outright and covert "OneTrueWayism" claims and "Badwrongfun" accusations in certain posts on this thread.

Florian

2018-01-24, 07:31 AM

To be honest, I have long suspected that the continued success of D&D is because it is much more flexible than it appears at first glance.

D&Ds greatest strength, as well as greatest weakness is the lack of focus. As long as you keep it unfocused, it can accommodate a lot of different player types without a hassle, including at the same table, making it a rather "inclusive" game.

That stops working once you put something into focus or highlight one aspect of it above the others, that´s when the friction starts.

There's a now famous example originating from the german RPG community: "The flashlight incident": Game is Call of Cthulhu, a haunted house, ghouls in the cellar and a group of Investigators with only one of them having a flashlight. They go down, combat starts and the player of the guy with the flashlight decides to intentionally botch the fear check, have his character drop the flashlight and make a run for it, because that seems to be the "in character" solution. The rest of the characters get butchered in the darkness and their players are rather upset now, because they're dedicated "skirmish gamers" and felt that this decision violated the "social contract" to play it as a "game" first, staying "in character" second.

No, it is just a valid way to play RPGs. Of course it is not the only way, so that stuff is not central. But neither is the stage as you can play RPGs this way just fine.

Personally i prefer the same kind of game as Max_Killjoy. One that is not really story driven and where versimilitude is the most important goal. Doesn't mean that stories can't happen, but if they don't that is fine too.
Not sure if this is just circular logic "an RPG always contain story -> when someone uses RPG rules to create something without a story, that is not an RPG experience ->an RPG always contain story" or just a true scotsman argument "real roleplaying always has story"

I don´t argue the point that immersion and verisimilitude are great things and make the gaming experience more enjoyable by adding depth to it. Being able to relate to, or even feel empathy with your character is fine and a high art.

But: In principle, you'll always do "Exploration", whether of "character", "setting", "morality", you name it.... "using a character", which is an important point of differentiation here.
You need to be provided with appropriate content to do just that and that content should be geared towards it, else no "Exploration" happens. The outcome of this "Exploration" is always "Story".

The thing I'm arguing against is the strange active/passive divide going on here.

You've entirely missed their point, then.

"Should and shouldn’t are the problem terms here."

There are a lot of outright and covert "OneTrueWayism" claims and "Badwrongfun" accusations in certain posts on this thread.

That happens and you've got to live with it. I don't have a problem saying "This is Maki Sushi" and "You can also make a great Maki roll using roast duck/Pulled Pork and cucumber", both using the basic ingredients for a Maki roll, the one using raw fish, the other something else. I don't argue taste, but points out the difference between "Maki" and "Sushi" and that there're similarities, but no overlap (as pulled pork doesn't qualify as raw tuna).

Edit: And for sake of discussion, we can either focus on "Maki" or "Sushi" or both, but we should be clear about naming what is what. Neither Pork nor Duck are Sushi, but they can be Maki.

Edit 2: Love my auto-correct, "Pork" turns up to be "Pro".

Max_Killjoy

2018-01-24, 07:57 AM

Sorry, but there's hardly a way to avoid that as long as you keep insisting on two things:
- Characters exist and matter for that discussion
- Your preference that "stuff that happens" needs to have a realistic feeling to it, so you can enjoy it.

Yes, characters are a, if not the, central part of role-playing games, as they are the main playing pieces and act as window to the fiction(al world). But they´re still no active participants in the game itself because they don't exist at the table as players.
You want your character to be your toy, that's a purely "off stage" matter, which can be done with RPGs just fine, but is not central to them or their functions.

You keep clinging to the illusion of verisimilitude and use that as "proof" that story doesn't necessarily exist. Still, the central part of the game is having content to interact with, which is the "on stage" matter and practically everything there is. This is the "drama" part. Even the most passive sandbox consists of elements to interact with and uses random charts that are there to have things happen and none of it will work unless the players exhibit their agency to formulate goals and actively go out and do something in it.

"What I like about RPGs is the core of RPGs, but what you like about RPGs is just you clinging to an illusion".

You keep mistaking "knowing things about the character that inform who they are, what they want, how they behave and react, so that they're three-dimensional and consistent" with "playing with a toy". I'm not sure, but I suspect that tells us more about your assumptions and preferences, and perhaps your inability to see around them, than it does about the other gamers you keep insulting with your "Barbies" and "go play with your toys" comments. And then you double-down by accusing people of "clinging to illusions".

As with worldbuilding, sometimes that part of the iceberg under water that no one sees is what's holding up the part above water that's visible. This applies both to writing fiction and to playing RPGs. In writing, some authors don't care about anything that's not on the page, and some authors need to know more about the setting and the characters than will ever show up on the page. In an RPG, some players (including GMs) are fine with nothing but what's said at the table, but for others that almost immediately begins to feel like an old west movie set with building facades held up by angled 2x4s, and nothing inside behind the window dressing.

Just because maintaining the sense of a "world-that-could-be-real" and characters as "people-who-could-be-real" isn't part of your personal approach to RPGs, doesn't mean that it's some foofy tack-on. "What is an RPG" can't be boiled down to a single short easy definition, it's best expressed as an overlapping area on a Venn diagram of various qualities. And yet it appears that you have/are engaged in this largely counterproductive and exclusionary "paring away" to get to the "true essence" and "one true definition" of RPGs, and in the process you're just cutting out everything that's not YOUR way of doing things and insulting everyone who doesn't share YOUR tastes.

Max_Killjoy

2018-01-24, 08:03 AM

I don´t argue the point that immersion and verisimilitude are great things and make the gaming experience more enjoyable by adding depth to it. Being able to relate to, or even feel empathy with your character is fine and a high art.

But: In principle, you'll always do "Exploration", whether of "character", "setting", "morality", you name it.... "using a character", which is an important point of differentiation here.
You need to be provided with appropriate content to do just that and that content should be geared towards it, else no "Exploration" happens. The outcome of this "Exploration" is always "Story".

The thing I'm arguing against is the strange active/passive divide going on here.

There's no active/passive divide here, it just looks that way when you mistake your personal approach to gaming -- why you game, how you game, what you enjoy about gaming -- for a universal objective definition of what an RPG "really is".

You assert that the outcome is always "Story", and in doing so utterly miss the gulf, the chasm in "why, how, and what" that exists between setting out to intentionally craft a story as part of the process of playing the game, or the characters doing things (or the players interacting with the setting and each other through the characters, or whatever you prefer I guess) that a story could happen to be told about later if one wanted to tell a story.

One of the few things The Forge actually got right was laying out the difference between "story before", "story now", and "story after". (Of course, the next step was to pick the one that RE liked and pare away everything else that didn't serve that goal.)

That happens and you've got to live with it. I don't have a problem saying "This is Maki Sushi" and "You can also make a great Maki roll using roast duck/Pulled Pork and cucumber", both using the basic ingredients for a Maki roll, the one using raw fish, the other something else. I don't argue taste, but points out the difference between "Maki" and "Sushi" and that there're similarities, but no overlap (as pulled pork doesn't qualify as raw tuna).

Edit: And for sake of discussion, we can either focus on "Maki" or "Sushi" or both, but we should be clear about naming what is what. Neither Pork nor Duck are Sushi, but they can be Maki.

Or rather, everything you're posting here just comes across as an assertion that the kind of sushi you subjectively prefer is "the core of what sushi really is", and that the kind of sushi that other people prefer is "just some stuff tacked on that you might as well eat by yourself".

Max_Killjoy

2018-01-24, 08:33 AM

No, it is just a valid way to play RPGs. Of course it is not the only way, so that stuff is not central. But neither is the stage as you can play RPGs this way just fine.

Personally i prefer the same kind of game as Max_Killjoy. One that is not really story driven and where versimilitude is the most important goal. Doesn't mean that stories can't happen, but if they don't that is fine too.

Speaking of the "stage" terminology, that reminds me of something that RPG theory seems very vulnerable to -- people mistaking RPGs for something else that they has parallels with. Because they have parallels with authorial fiction, some people will mistakenly analyze and define RPGs purely as authorial fiction. Because they have parallels with acting (improv or otherwise), some people will mistakenly analyze and define RPGs purely as stage acting or improve theater. Because they have some parallels with storytelling, some people will mistakenly analyze and define RPGs purely as storytelling. Etc.

Related, some people will always analyze all RPG systems through the lens of their first system, all RPG campaigns through the lens of their early campaigns, etc -- positively or negatively. There are plenty of people out there who can't get past their own experience, playing game X first and not really liking it, then finding game Y and liking it so much more... that they fall into the convert's fallacy.

Not sure if this is just circular logic "an RPG always contain story -> when someone uses RPG rules to create something without a story, that is not an RPG experience ->an RPG always contain story" or just a true scotsman argument "real roleplaying always has story"

Or a little of both...

Tanarii

2018-01-24, 10:24 AM

The real irony is that someone (me) already explained that the phrase is usually (ie, literally every time I or anyone I know in real life has used it) used to very quickly establish the gist of what TRPGs generally are. And that's fine and dandy for anyone that's going to sit down at one of your tables.

But if that player then comes to sit down at a table I'm DMing, I might have to unteach them. Because they've been given a specific gist, and now they have to learn that it's only the gist for a specific subset of TRPG play style.

Conversely, I might teach them that for this very first game, I want them to pretend their character is just them with some special abilities, and to interact with the world.

I might teach the player about to sit down to a heavily battle mat based & dungeon of the week game of D&D, it will be primarily a miniatures combat game where you delve into dungeons and kill things.

Or I might teach them this game or that game, at my table, is primarily about improvised method acting. Pretending to be someone you are not.

I might teach the players in a game of Paranoia that the point of the RPG at my table is to personally experience (ie the player) the terror your character is feeling of everyone else being out to get you if your character doesn't get them first, and not knowing enough about anything. Also, you've just been executed for knowing that much.

Max_Killjoy

2018-01-24, 10:38 AM

kyoryu

2018-01-24, 12:45 PM

(For what it's worth, I would just mention that RE does talk about 'Hard Core' gamism being as incompatible with regular gamism as it is with N/S modes of play, in which case GNS + Hard Core looks rather similar to the Bartle taxonomy of player types (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartle_taxonomy_of_player_types).)

Do NOT get me started on Bartle Types. They're less of an overall taxonomy, and more of a glimpse of the people that were attracted to one particular MUD.

They suffer the common problem of over-generalization from a small set of self-selecting data.

Max_Killjoy

2018-01-24, 12:53 PM

Do NOT get me started on Bartle Types. They're less of an overall taxonomy, and more of a glimpse of the people that were attracted to one particular MUD.

They suffer the common problem of over-generalization from a small set of self-selecting data.

To me their breakdown would be more useful if they treated them as different aspects that players could be more or less interested in, as opposed to mutually exclusive categories. As they stand, they imply that a particular player just simply cannot be highly interested in elements at both ends of an axis at the same time.

kyoryu

2018-01-24, 02:11 PM

To me their breakdown would be more useful if they treated them as different aspects that players could be more or less interested in, as opposed to mutually exclusive categories. As they stand, they imply that a particular player just simply cannot be highly interested in elements at both ends of an axis at the same time.

They literally were developed by examining the player base of one particular MUD that Bartle ran.

While they may have applicability outside of that, that needs to be researched or proven, rather than (as is currently done) projected.

As an analogy, let's say that I run a MUD or game that focuses on yoyo tricks. While it may have some crossover, this MUD will attract people that like yoyo tricks and that also like MUDs.

So any study done on that will really be a study on "MUD gamers that like yoyo tricks" and not a study on the general population. While some of the findings *may* transfer, as a general rule we cannot presume that they transfer.

IOW, if you play MUD2, you'll understand the Bartle Types a lot better and say to yourself "yup, those are reasons someone might play this game", rather than "these are universal truths about games and gamers." The Types are more of a statement about the design of MUD2 than they are anythign else.

Max_Killjoy

2018-01-24, 03:27 PM

They literally were developed by examining the player base of one particular MUD that Bartle ran.

While they may have applicability outside of that, that needs to be researched or proven, rather than (as is currently done) projected.

As an analogy, let's say that I run a MUD or game that focuses on yoyo tricks. While it may have some crossover, this MUD will attract people that like yoyo tricks and that also like MUDs.

So any study done on that will really be a study on "MUD gamers that like yoyo tricks" and not a study on the general population. While some of the findings *may* transfer, as a general rule we cannot presume that they transfer.

IOW, if you play MUD2, you'll understand the Bartle Types a lot better and say to yourself "yup, those are reasons someone might play this game", rather than "these are universal truths about games and gamers." The Types are more of a statement about the design of MUD2 than they are anythign else.

True.

I guess my point was just that a lot of these studies and theories seem to be set up to split gamers up into boxes and archetype them, then they're set up to actual understand anything.

Lacuna Caster

2018-01-24, 03:56 PM

Do NOT get me started on Bartle Types. They're less of an overall taxonomy, and more of a glimpse of the people that were attracted to one particular MUD.

To me their breakdown would be more useful if they treated them as different aspects that players could be more or less interested in, as opposed to mutually exclusive categories...
They are. The related questionnaire rates you to varying 'percentages' across all four categories, with a total of 200%.

Some more recent (http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/motivations.pdf) formulations (https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/134842/personality_and_play_styles_a_.php?page=3) have turned up dimensions that I think match up reasonably well with, say Extraversion, Agreeableness and Openness within the Big 5 personality model (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchical_structure_of_the_Big_Five). And there's likely to be a lot of self-selection among people who play games in the first place (low-extraversion, low-openness, high-conscientiousness individuals aren't likely to show up very much, for example.)

That doesn't exactly validate the original model, but the broad point- that people differ enough in motivations that no single activity (even disguised as 'role-playing') is going to be fun for all of them, seems pretty valid to me.

.

Max_Killjoy

2018-01-24, 04:32 PM

They are. The related questionnaire rates you to varying 'percentages' across all four categories, with a total of 200%.

Some more recent (http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/motivations.pdf) formulations (https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/134842/personality_and_play_styles_a_.php?page=3) have turned up dimensions that I think match up reasonably well with, say Extraversion, Agreeableness and Openness within the Big 5 personality model (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchical_structure_of_the_Big_Five). And there's likely to be a lot of self-selection among people who play games in the first place (low-extraversion, low-openness, high-conscientiousness individuals aren't likely to show up very much, for example.)

That doesn't exactly validate the original model, but the broad point- that people differ enough in motivations that no single activity (even disguised as 'role-playing') is going to be fun for all of them, seems pretty valid to me.

.

The Wikipedia article, particular the X and Y axis diagram, make it seem more "category" than "independent sliding scales", at least to me, so I might have misunderstood that part of it.

kyoryu

2018-01-24, 06:46 PM

That doesn't exactly validate the original model, but the broad point- that people differ enough in motivations that no single activity (even disguised as 'role-playing') is going to be fun for all of them, seems pretty valid to me.

Yeah, that's pretty much a given.

Darth Ultron

2018-01-24, 09:24 PM

In an RPG, some players (including GMs) are fine with nothing but what's said at the table, but for others that almost immediately begins to feel like an old west movie set with building facades held up by angled 2x4s, and nothing inside behind the window dressing.

Agreed here.

Speaking of the "stage" terminology, that reminds me of something that RPG theory seems very vulnerable to -- people mistaking RPGs for something else that they has parallels with.

True. Just look at everyone getting all wacky about the word ''Story''.

Yes, in all fiction the Story is set in stone and can not ever be changed. This is true of books and movies and TV shows and plays and such. But a RPG Story is more like a Mad Lib or a Choose Adventurer Book, and those still are only close as RPG's are unique.

HidesHisEyes

2018-01-24, 09:48 PM

"Collaborative storytelling" certainly exists as a thing-- something like Fiasco is a very different beast than even a narrative-oriented RPG like Fate. I'd argue that the crucial distinction is in how attached players are to their characters--not just emotionally, but mechanically, functionally. In an RPG, players take the role of one discrete individual, and can primarily shape the world at large through their direct actions. By contrast, in a collaborative storytelling game, there is a lot more freedom--players can take control of NPCs and random quirks of fate. But they're also not so much "games" as "guided brainstorming tools."

A secondary distinction might be player goals-- in an RPG, you're making choices mostly with success in mind, or at least what your character would percieve as being the "right" choice. By contrast, in a CSG you'll often screw your own "character" over in the name of creating a more interesting overall narrative.

...actually, the whole distinction of "player" verses "GM" is a pretty good indicator that you're playing an RPG, not a CSG.

That's a really good explanation of the difference between the two things. Clearly they can overlap in places - FATE has elements of CSG in the form of game mechanics. You can do CSG stuff but only if you spend points.

My big personal "fight me" thread hinges on my insistence that D&D in particular shouldn't include any CSG elements whatsoever no matter how narrativey you like you D&D games.

Cynthaer

2018-01-25, 06:24 PM

And that's fine and dandy for anyone that's going to sit down at one of your tables.

But if that player then comes to sit down at a table I'm DMing, I might have to unteach them. Because they've been given a specific gist, and now they have to learn that it's only the gist for a specific subset of TRPG play style.

Conversely, I might teach them that for this very first game, I want them to pretend their character is just them with some special abilities, and to interact with the world.

I might teach the player about to sit down to a heavily battle mat based & dungeon of the week game of D&D, it will be primarily a miniatures combat game where you delve into dungeons and kill things.

Or I might teach them this game or that game, at my table, is primarily about improvised method acting. Pretending to be someone you are not.

I might teach the players in a game of Paranoia that the point of the RPG at my table is to personally experience (ie the player) the terror your character is feeling of everyone else being out to get you if your character doesn't get them first, and not knowing enough about anything. Also, you've just been executed for knowing that much.

So, here's where I think your concern is disproportionate to the danger.

For a new player, and I would say most players, nothing you just described is incompatible with the general image they have for a "collaborative storytelling game". This is primarily because the distinction of "true storytelling games" as opposed to "role-playing games" only has meaning to a relatively small group of people who are deep into the tabletop gaming hobby to begin with.

It's the same reason I would have no problem describing Fate Accelerated to a new or casual TTRPG player as "sort of like D&D, but..."

To anybody who knows much about TTRPGs, Fate Accelerated isn't very much like D&D at all. Character creation is completely different, it's not tied to a fairly specific default setting, there's no concept of races or classes, you don't have multiple pages of stats and modifiers and skills and powers, combat looks nothing alike, and one of the central mechanics revolves around rewriting portions of the story in real time.

But! Both games involve a group of people sitting at a table, with one person controlling the "world" and the rest controlling individual characters (each of which has a character sheet with their personal stats). And during the game, those players dictate their respective characters' actions and role some dice according to the game mechanics and then see what happens next.

In the wide world of "things commonly understood to be 'games'", imprecise phrases like "storytelling games" or "like D&D" have a lot less baggage for the average person than they might for you or anybody else who's deep into the internal arguments that occur within the hobby.

The thing is, new players aren't coming from writing workshops. They're coming from video games and board games. That's their point of reference.

The point of saying "collaborative storytelling" is to shift their mental image of a "game" away from Carcassone, World of Warcraft, and League of Legends, and into something where the gameplay is cooperative, their choices aren't bound by the limits of the game mechanics, and the end goal isn't to "win" by accomplishing some standardized goal.

These players aren't going to jump straight to "creative writing exercises" because that's not part of most people's life experience.

Related: I know I keep posting this, but nobody so far has actually acknowledged it, so I'll include it again. I believe that my reasoning above is precisely the reason that all the mainstream TTRPG publishers very specifically describe their games as "storytelling games" and put a great deal of emphasis on the story aspect.

It is not because they want or expect their players to act in ways that make scripted, novel-like character arcs or whatever, or to abandon characterization in favor of a "better story". It's because they also are trying to speak to people familiar with video games but not TTRPGs:

From the 4e Player's Handbook:
"A roleplaying game is a storytelling game that has elements of the games of make-believe that many of us played as children."

From the 5e Player's Handbook:
"Together, the DM and the players create an exciting story of bold adventurers who confront deadly perils."

From the Buffy the Vampire Slayer rulebook:
"Okay, in truth, a roleplaying game is about shared storytelling. You get together with several friends and create a tale."

The whole White Wolf/Onyx Path system uses the word storytelling interchangeably with roleplaying, as in the Chronicles of Darkness core book:
"Chances are you know what a storytelling — or roleplaying — game is already."

The Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game is about storytelling in worlds of swords and sorcery.

[...]

One player, however, takes on the role of the Dungeon Master (DM), the game’s lead storyteller and referee.

[...]

The game has no real end; when one story or quest wraps up, another one can begin, creating an ongoing story called a campaign. Many people who play the game keep their campaigns going for months or years, meeting with their friends every week or so to pick up the story where they left off. [...] Each monster defeated, each adventure completed, and each treasure recovered not only adds to the continuing story, but also earns the adventurers new capabilities.

[...]

Together, the DM and the players create an exciting story of bold adventurers who confront deadly perils. [...] The group might fail to complete an adventure successfully, but if everyone had a good time and created a memorable story, they all win.

Lord Raziere

2018-01-25, 06:33 PM

Cynthaer has the right of it, for most people a simulation game is one of those videogames you make to have sandbox fun in.

like Yandere Simulator: its supposed to simulate someone in high school trying to get their crush to love them through Yandere methods. most games invariably end up with the player screwing up, killing a bunch of people, then dying like some sort of anime high school skyrim.

saying its a storytelling game is signalling people "hey you can try to be like one of those epic fantasy stories you like with this, but instead of pre-planned things that you can't do anything about, you can make that story using whatever you can imagine! want to grow wings and chop Sauron's face in half with an axe? if your group is ok with it, go for it!"

Tanarii

2018-01-25, 06:52 PM

These players aren't going to jump straight to "creative writing exercises" because that's not part of most people's life experience.Actually, I expect that if you tell someone that a game is about collaborative storytelling, they're going to think it's about sitting around making up a story together.

Nothing about "collaborative storytelling" implies any of the alternative things I posted and you quoted, nor does it imply:
"Both games involve a group of people sitting at a table, with one person controlling the "world" and the rest controlling individual characters (each of which has a character sheet with their personal stats). And during the game, those players dictate their respective characters' actions and role some dice according to the game mechanics and then see what happens next."

Things that aren't inherently sitting around making up a story together:
- one person controlling the world and the rest controlling individual characters
- dictating actions and roll dice to see what happens next
- method acting or getting deep into a character that isn't you, the player
- the player actually experiencing the terror, fear, confusion, despair, or whatever else is super appropriate emotional response for a character in genre or specific game
- tactical battlemat play

Cynthaer

2018-01-25, 07:31 PM

Actually, I expect that if you tell someone that a game is about collaborative storytelling, they're going to think it's about sitting around making up a story together.

All I can say is that it didn't cause any confusion for me when I was starting out, and I've never seen it cause confusion for any other new player. I presume it's confused at least a few new players, statistically speaking, but that's unavoidable no matter what.

I can't help but notice that you've generally phrased your view in terms of how you expect new players to interpret this, while most of us have claimed that in practice it works out differently. Have you ever actually seen a new player get confused over this phrasing, or is it purely speculative?

And if it's the latter, do you think it's possible that most new players don't get the same mental image from the phrase that you do, even though it seems counterintuitive?

Nothing about "collaborative storytelling" implies any of the alternative things I posted and you quoted, nor does it imply:
"Both games involve a group of people sitting at a table, with one person controlling the "world" and the rest controlling individual characters (each of which has a character sheet with their personal stats). And during the game, those players dictate their respective characters' actions and role some dice according to the game mechanics and then see what happens next."

Sorry, I was drawing an analogy and perhaps confused my points.

First, I was highlighting those commonalities in reference to describing Fate as "like D&D", not describing both as "collaborative storytelling games". My point is that both are inaccurate from the perspective of a knowledgeable insider, but neither gives a false perception to newcomers.

Second I'm not saying that the phrase "collaborative storytelling game" implies any of the things you posted. I'm saying that the general idea it communicates to a new player doesn't contradict any of them, and you wouldn't need to "unteach" their preconceptions to get them to play that way.

I say this with some confidence, because what you described are by far the most common ways people play D&D, and there has not been an epidemic of confusion amongst the flood of new players playing 5e, despite the 5e PHB spending the entire introduction describing the game as a "storytelling game"!

The Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game is about storytelling in worlds of swords and sorcery.

[...]

One player, however, takes on the role of the Dungeon Master (DM), the game’s lead storyteller and referee.

[...]

The game has no real end; when one story or quest wraps up, another one can begin, creating an ongoing story called a campaign. Many people who play the game keep their campaigns going for months or years, meeting with their friends every week or so to pick up the story where they left off. [...] Each monster defeated, each adventure completed, and each treasure recovered not only adds to the continuing story, but also earns the adventurers new capabilities.

[...]

Together, the DM and the players create an exciting story of bold adventurers who confront deadly perils. [...] The group might fail to complete an adventure successfully, but if everyone had a good time and created a memorable story, they all win.

Tanarii

2018-01-25, 08:07 PM

I can't help but notice that you've generally phrased your view in terms of how you expect new players to interpret this, while most of us have claimed that in practice it works out differently. Have you ever actually seen a new player get confused over this phrasing, or is it purely speculative?

Second I'm not saying that the phrase "collaborative storytelling game" implies any of the things you posted. I'm saying that the general idea it communicates to a new player doesn't contradict any of them, and you wouldn't need to "unteach" their preconceptions to get them to play that way.

I say this with some confidence, because what you described are by far the most common ways people play D&D, and there has not been an epidemic of confusion amongst the flood of new players playing 5e, despite the 5e PHB spending the entire introduction describing the game as a "storytelling game"!Yeah actually, IMX there is often confusion among new players who think RPGs are about storytelling, or at least DMs telling stories. Not helped at all by people that claim that's RPGs are about collaborative storytelling.

The other common thing they think is that "roleplaying" means funny accents, or talky-time. That one comes from players who are roleplaying elitists, and is not helped by shows like Critical Role.

Personally I love what I call 'method acting', or pretending I am the character in the fantasy environment, plus specific personality traits that aren't me. But I don't think that's what RPGs are all about.

Thrudd

2018-01-25, 11:11 PM

Yeah actually, IMX there is often confusion among new players who think RPGs are about storytelling, or at least DMs telling stories. Not helped at all by people that claim that's RPGs are about collaborative storytelling.

I agree. Collaborative Story Telling is a misleading way to describe what goes on in the vast majority of RPGs to someone that knows nothing about them. The pedantics of defining those terms aside; I can't believe an uninitiated person would have an appropriate expectation going into, say, a game of D&D, having been told it was "collaborative storytelling". It's a set up for disappointment, or at least confusion- false advertising.

Cynthaer

2018-01-26, 02:12 AM

I agree. Collaborative Story Telling is a misleading way to describe what goes on in the vast majority of RPGs to someone that knows nothing about them. The pedantics of defining those terms aside; I can't believe an uninitiated person would have an appropriate expectation going into, say, a game of D&D, having been told it was "collaborative storytelling". It's a set up for disappointment, or at least confusion- false advertising.

Just to clarify, since this came up earlier in the thread too:

Nobody has proposed that "collaborative storytelling" is a complete, self-sufficient description of a TTRPG like D&D. The argument has always been that it is a useful descriptor to convey certain aspects of the game. Specifically, those aspects that differ from the types of video games or board games that new players are likely to be most familiar with.

Incidentally, do you think that the introduction section of the D&D 5e PHB/basic rules (http://dnd.wizards.com/products/tabletop/players-basic-rules) does a good job of accurately describing the game of D&D 5e?

Tanarii

2018-01-26, 10:10 AM

Incidentally, do you think that the introduction section of the D&D 5e PHB/basic rules (http://dnd.wizards.com/products/tabletop/players-basic-rules) does a good job of accurately describing the game of D&D 5e?
No. Not at all. In fact, that's a very old school 'module' way of running a game. No game I enjoy, nor most players I know will enjoy, has a DM ramble on and on telling his story in huge monologues like that. They keep descriptions short and snappy and to the point, otherwise they lose their players attention.

I'm a DM, and I zone out just trying to read the excessively overblown prose of many 'boxed text' module descriptions, trying to extract the necessary information the players will need when I'm running a game. The worst are TSR-era NPC monologues at the beginning of adventures. For example, Wrath of the Immortals is a snooze fest if you try and go btB boxed text.

And telling players "there's no winning" is a flat out lie, especially trying to pair it off with the 'don't worry if you die' mentality. Staying alive is one of the most common things many people consider winning in RPGs. As are various other kinds of 'challenge me'. "[H]aving a good time and creating a memorable story" might be winning for some people, but for others that's not enough.

Edit: really good old modules 'boxed text' was on point. Everything in it was information that could save your PCs life ... or a false flag that could cost it. You payed attention. Unfortunately somewhere along the way D&D lost its soul, and boxed text went from information you needed to keep your character alive, to trying to draw mental pictures in the minds of the players with words.

Max_Killjoy

2018-01-26, 10:22 AM

Tanarii

2018-01-26, 10:59 AM

"Staying alive' is often a good part of winning in real-life dangerous situations as well.

And yet characters acting with a modest sense of self-preservation is often seen as "metagaming" and "bag RP" by a certain sort of gamer...
It's seen as "bad RP" by some mechanical systems as well. Ones that give rewards for RPing in line with character traits that provide negative mechanical consequences, which can easily get you killed. Torchbearer or Paranoia for example.

I don't actually have a problem with that if the "winning" goal is explicitly not successfully keeping your character alive so you can RP or fill some other goal. But being told "you can't win" is just a turn off to a huge number of players. Instead the better thing to do is tell them what their goal is (short or long). In fact, that's one of the most important things left out of a session 0 for games.

Why are we playing this game? To experience the things our Pc is feeling, as a player? To keep our characters alive? To find fat lootz? To solve puzzles? To explore exciting places? To have interactions with NPcs? To create a story of epic heroes?

Jormengand

2018-01-26, 11:36 AM

Edit: really good old modules 'boxed text' was on point. Everything in it was information that could save your PCs life ... or a false flag that could cost it. You payed attention. Unfortunately somewhere along the way D&D lost its soul, and boxed text went from information you needed to keep your character alive, to trying to draw mental pictures in the minds of the players with words.

I wouldn't call that "Losing its soul" so much as "Putting the RP in RPG". What, so you just played D&D as a wargame and ignored the fact that it wasn't meant to be any more? Maybe that's why you don't like the idea of collaborative storytelling, because you're not playing RPGs to do the primary thing that RPGs are for.

Thrudd

2018-01-26, 11:40 AM

Incidentally, do you think that the introduction section of the D&D 5e PHB/basic rules (http://dnd.wizards.com/products/tabletop/players-basic-rules) does a good job of accurately describing the game of D&D 5e?

No, I do not think the 5e writers did a good job describing the game. Maybe it's the game they wish it was, but the actual mechanics don't bear that out. This has been the case for quite a long time, across multiple editions.

Max_Killjoy

2018-01-26, 11:49 AM

I wouldn't call that "Losing its soul" so much as "Putting the RP in RPG". What, so you just played D&D as a wargame and ignored the fact that it wasn't meant to be any more? Maybe that's why you don't like the idea of collaborative storytelling, because you're not playing RPGs to do the primary thing that RPGs are for.

Or there's the "shocking" third possibility already discussed at length in this thread:

"Storytelling" is not the defining aspect of what an RPG is, or the key element that separates an RPG from a wargame. Furthermore one can roleplay their heart out without even a mote of storytelling, collaborative or otherwise, occurring.

Thrudd

2018-01-26, 12:00 PM

Just to clarify, since this came up earlier in the thread too:

Nobody has proposed that "collaborative storytelling" is a complete, self-sufficient description of a TTRPG like D&D. The argument has always been that it is a useful descriptor to convey certain aspects of the game. Specifically, those aspects that differ from the types of video games or board games that new players are likely to be most familiar with.

Incidentally, do you think that the introduction section of the D&D 5e PHB/basic rules (http://dnd.wizards.com/products/tabletop/players-basic-rules) does a good job of accurately describing the game of D&D 5e?

Used in the form being proposed, the term is overbroad and therefore useless as a descriptor. Given the obvious and precise (aka useful) meaning, the term applies only to a select few TTRPGs.

Jormengand

2018-01-26, 12:26 PM

Or there's the "shocking" third possibility already discussed at length in this thread:

"Storytelling" is not the defining aspect of what an RPG is, or the key element that separates an RPG from a wargame. Furthermore one can roleplay their heart out without even a mote of storytelling, collaborative or otherwise, occurring.

Right, except that wasn't what was being discussed in that instance. What was being discussed in that instance was whether the players should have any mental image of the world their characters are supposedly being role-played in at all. Not to mention that by most people's definition of story, roleplaying does tell a story.

ImNotTrevor

2018-01-26, 12:50 PM

Max_Killjoy

2018-01-26, 01:34 PM

Right, except that wasn't what was being discussed in that instance. What was being discussed in that instance was whether the players should have any mental image of the world their characters are supposedly being role-played in at all.

So the below wasn't meant as a claim that the primary thing that RPGs is for is "collaborative storytelling"?
It wasn't meant as a claim that "collaborative storytelling" is what makes an RPG an RPG and not a wargame?

Maybe that's why you don't like the idea of collaborative storytelling, because you're not playing RPGs to do the primary thing that RPGs are for.

Not to mention that by most people's definition of story, roleplaying does tell a story.

As already repeatedly covered in detail on this thread, "a story could be told about it after the fact" is not equivalent to "tells a story".

Jormengand

2018-01-26, 01:45 PM

So the below wasn't meant as a claim that the primary thing that RPGs is for is "collaborative storytelling"?
It wasn't meant as a claim that "collaborative storytelling" is what makes an RPG an RPG and not a wargame?

As already repeatedly covered in detail on this thread, "a story could be told about it after the fact" is not equivalent to "tells a story".

He doesn't seem to like collaborative storytelling because he doesn't seem to like roleplaying, given his objection that it's "Sucking the soul" out of D&D. Roleplaying is the primary thing that RPGs are for.

And whatever you may think the definition of storytelling is, I'm afraid that it's one that a lot of people don't share, and linguistic discriptivism is a harsh master.

Max_Killjoy

2018-01-26, 02:03 PM

Roleplaying is the primary thing that RPGs are for.

Even that is stretching it a but unless one uses one of the broader definitions of "roleplaying"... as covered previously. Would have to go out to "making decidions for a character in an ongoing agreed set of circumstances" to not exclude legitimate whys and hows of playing RPGs. I'd say "in an agreed set of fictional circumstances", but some would mistake "fictional" for "storytelling".

Never mind that you seem to be conflating or equating "roleplaying" with "collaborative storytelling" in reading his statement.

And whatever you may think the definition of storytelling is, I'm afraid that it's one that a lot of people don't share, and linguistic discriptivism is a harsh master.

Asked and answered.

The thread has already covered why the term is not broadly applicable AND all the reasons why it's problematic internally to the "hobby".

Lacuna Caster

2018-01-26, 03:00 PM

He doesn't seem to like collaborative storytelling because he doesn't seem to like roleplaying, given his objection that it's "Sucking the soul" out of D&D. Roleplaying is the primary thing that RPGs are for.
I would say if you're defining RPG as an activity where you role-play and there are some rules attached, then yes, RP is trivially a necessary condition for RPGs. I don't know if that's exactly what it's for, however. Water Polo requires a ball, a net, and a swimming pool, but it doesn't exist for the sake of balls, nets and swimming pools.

As already repeatedly covered in detail on this thread, "a story could be told about it after the fact" is not equivalent to "tells a story".
I'm one of those 'death of the author' people, so I'm not particularly concerned with whether the players deliberately intended to produce a story. I think it's either there or not.

Max_Killjoy

2018-01-26, 03:12 PM

I'm one of those 'death of the author' people, so I'm not particularly concerned with whether the players deliberately intended to produce a story. I think it's either there or not.

To me, the important questions are why people game, how they game, and what they enjoy about it.

The divide (the gulf, the chasm, really) between intentional or incidental story is tangled up in those questions, and any assertion that a particular player is engaged in "collaborative storytelling" is an assertion about why they're gaming, how they're gaming, and what they enjoy about gaming.

Jormengand

2018-01-26, 03:54 PM

Even that is stretching it a but unless one uses one of the broader definitions of "roleplaying"... as covered previously. Would have to go out to "making decidions for a character in an ongoing agreed set of circumstances" to not exclude legitimate whys and hows of playing RPGs. I'd say "in an agreed set of fictional circumstances", but some would mistake "fictional" for "storytelling".

Never mind that you seem to be conflating or equating "roleplaying" with "collaborative storytelling" in reading his statement.

Asked and answered.

The thread has already covered why the term is not broadly applicable AND all the reasons why it's problematic internally to the "hobby".

I mean, in general, if you define the word to only mean what you want it to mean and not what anyone else uses it to mean, of course it won't be applicable to describe what they use it to mean. But that's no more the point than if I decided that because "Fast" means "Rapid", no-one can use it to mean "Immobile" (as in "Held fast"), it wouldn't be applicable to describe things which are immobile. But people do use it to mean that, so it is applicable in those cases. Similarly, whether you like it or not, "Story" has a meaning that you may not be familiar with but a lot of people clearly are. So does "Role playing" and "Collaborative" and all the other words you're claiming can only be used in one specific meaning. You can certainly insist that we're wrong to apply it in those cases, but you come off as a prescriptivist with a point to prove.

Max_Killjoy

2018-01-26, 04:07 PM

I mean, in general, if you define the word to only mean what you want it to mean and not what anyone else uses it to mean, of course it won't be applicable to describe what they use it to mean. But that's no more the point than if I decided that because "Fast" means "Rapid", no-one can use it to mean "Immobile" (as in "Held fast"), it wouldn't be applicable to describe things which are immobile. But people do use it to mean that, so it is applicable in those cases. Similarly, whether you like it or not, "Story" has a meaning that you may not be familiar with but a lot of people clearly are. So does "Role playing" and "Collaborative" and all the other words you're claiming can only be used in one specific meaning. You can certainly insist that we're wrong to apply it in those cases, but you come off as a prescriptivist with a point to prove.

Nope.

From a purely descriptivist point of view, the term "collaborative storytelling" does not describe what some/many gamers are doing.

At a very technical level it can be broadly applicable to playing RPGS if one pedantically breaks it down to the component words and applies the broadest possible meaning of each individual word, and then assumes that the actual term being discussed is applicable in that manner. But at that point it doesn't tell you anything about why, how, or what -- it has become a fluffword, without any actual meat.

Furthermore, we've already covered in detail how the term is loaded down with immense amounts of baggage from past contentious debates internal to the RPG community that it will never be free of (see, history of The Forge, etc) -- and how it is easily confused with specific types of games that overlap with, or are similar to, RPGs ("storytelling games", "storygames", etc).

Some gamers are sitting down to actually collaborate in telling of a story -- that is their intent, and that is what they are actively doing. More power to them... the more gamers gaming, the more types of games available, the more types of campaigns going on, and the more fun being had playing games, the better.

But there are plenty of other gamers who are not sitting down at the gaming table to tell a story, and definitely not collaborating to do so.

All of this has been covered in the thread already, you're just repeating arguments that others have already made more than once, and you're getting responses that have already been given more than once. Your position has already been refuted repeatedly. The discussion has long since passed by the points you want to assert.

Jormengand

2018-01-26, 04:38 PM

Nope.

From a purely descriptivist point of view, the term "collaborative storytelling" does not describe what some/many gamers are doing.

But it does, because people are using it to mean that and that's how language works. The reason I'm repeating these arguments is that I don't think very much of the way that you've ostensibly "Addressed" them.

And the best part is, I predicted early on that this would turn into a massive debate between two sides both hellbent on arguing that their way of using language - language which is defined by its speakers - was the one true way. And guess what! That's what happened!

Just, please, accept that something can be collaborative storytelling by some definitions and not others, and that either phrase has a meaning, just a different meaning dependent on the speaker.

Lord Raziere

2018-01-26, 04:52 PM

This discussion is to starting to remind me of the min-max/optimization definition debate, but in reverse. I don't think they're at all different.

Personally I say either both terms omni-apply or they don't, I don't care which, just as long as there is no double standard between optimization and storytelling definitions.

Max_Killjoy

2018-01-26, 04:56 PM

But it does, because people are using it to mean that and that's how language works. The reason I'm repeating these arguments is that I don't think very much of the way that you've ostensibly "Addressed" them.

And the best part is, I predicted early on that this would turn into a massive debate between two sides both hellbent on arguing that their way of using language - language which is defined by its speakers - was the one true way. And guess what! That's what happened!

Just, please, accept that something can be collaborative storytelling by some definitions and not others, and that either phrase has a meaning, just a different meaning dependent on the speaker.

What I am doing when I play a character in an RPG is not collaborative storytelling. I am not telling a story, nor am I collaborating to tell a story. There are many other gamers who would say the same thing, and they would be right. THEY get to define why they game, how they game, and what they enjoy about gaming. YOU do not get to define their reasons for gaming, their methods of gaming, or their experience of gaming for them.

The most telling part of this entire "discussion" is that one side is saying "You can describe what you do as collaboratively storytelling if that's what you enjoy, but that's not what I'm doing when I play and not what I enjoy"... and the other side is saying "I'm collaboratively storytelling and so are you -- even if you don't think you are, even if you hate the idea, even if that ruins gaming for you, that's still what you're doing".

This has been explained in this thread repeatedly, in far more depth that I'm bothering with right now.

Jormengand

2018-01-26, 05:01 PM

The most telling part of this entire "discussion" is that one side is saying "You can describe what you do as collaboratively storytelling if that's what you enjoy, but that's not what I'm doing when I play and not what I enjoy"... and the other side is saying "I'm collaboratively storytelling and so are you -- even if you don't think you are, even if you hate the idea, even if that ruins gaming for you, that's still what you're doing".

Yes, some people do things which they don't think they're doing! And further, some people have a definition that's different from yours, so it can entirely both be doing collaborative storytelling and not collaborative storytelling, just like I can be fast as in rapid which means that I'm not fast, as in immobile. So yes, what you're doing is collaborative storytelling. It also isn't collaborative storytelling. But that doesn't mean that it's meaningless any more than the word "Fast" is. It's just that under certain definitions, what you're doing is storytelling, even if it emphatically isn't under other definitions. You can say you don't like those definitions, but they're still there.

Max_Killjoy

2018-01-26, 05:03 PM

Yes, some people do things which they don't think they're doing! And further, some people have a definition that's different from yours, so it can entirely both be doing collaborative storytelling and not collaborative storytelling, just like I can be fast as in rapid which means that I'm not fast, as in immobile. So yes, what you're doing is collaborative storytelling. It also isn't collaborative storytelling. But that doesn't mean that it's meaningless any more than the word "Fast" is. It's just that under certain definitions, what you're doing is storytelling, even if it emphatically isn't under other definitions. You can say you don't like those definitions, but they're still there.

Purple monkey dishwater down cheese sky mortification elk whipsaw bland, gorblepork.

Florian

2018-01-26, 05:05 PM

Yes, some people do things which they don't think they're doing! And further, some people have a definition that's different from yours, so it can entirely both be doing collaborative storytelling and not collaborative storytelling, just like I can be fast as in rapid which means that I'm not fast, as in immobile. So yes, what you're doing is collaborative storytelling. It also isn't collaborative storytelling. But that doesn't mean that it's meaningless any more than the word "Fast" is. It's just that under certain definitions, what you're doing is storytelling, even if it emphatically isn't under other definitions. You can say you don't like those definitions, but they're still there.

Seems hard to accept that the thing with a motor, four wheels and a steering wheel is a car, not a bike, not a trike and especially not a boat.

Jormengand

2018-01-26, 05:12 PM

Purple monkey dishwater down cheese sky mortification elk whipsaw bland, gorblepork.

Clevvah, verr clevvah. Yu hav discvvri tah, wen u chagne lagnuga to teh ponti taht et ees ni langa usfel foar commnacat'n, tehr ees nu ponti. But that doesn't mean that language can't be changed in a way which allows people to communicate different concepts from you via the same words, which is happening in both the case of "Fast" and "Story" but for some reason we accept that it's okay for "Fast" (and other brilliant ones like "Sanctioned") but you don't accept that that's fine for people to use "Story" in a way that you, personally, are not familiar with. It doesn't stop people communicating with things that you don't recognise as having those definitions, hells, it doesn't stop me communicating with neologisms that I make up on the spot, something that I regularly do with people who have enough understanding of language for me to make a new one and for them to get what I mean.

God, you must hate vernaculars and dialects.

Max_Killjoy

2018-01-26, 05:12 PM

Seems hard to accept that the thing with a motor, four wheels and a steering wheel is a car, not a bike, not a trike and especially not a boat.

Under Jorg's assertion, someone could keep talking about driving their "ship" to work every day, and anyone who thought they meant that they take a water vehicle to work every day would be at fault for not understanding that person's "other definition of ship" was referring to a land vehicle with four wheels, a motor, and a steering wheel.

Jormengand

2018-01-26, 05:16 PM

Under Jorg's assertion, someone could keep talking about driving their "ship" to work every day, and anyone who thought they meant that they take a water vehicle to work every day would be at fault for not understanding that person's "other definition of ship" was referring to a land vehicle with four wheels, a motor, and a steering wheel.

Conversely, while we're sparring with scarecrows, no relationship that people wish would happen in their favourite anime is a "Ship" on the basis that it doesn't float when you put it in the sea.

Tanarii

2018-01-26, 05:42 PM

Max_Killjoy

2018-01-26, 06:11 PM

The core divide here is about what's important.

Is technical pedantry about individual words important -- or are understanding and clarity important?

Again, by engaging in technical pedantry regarding the individual words "collaborative", "story", and "telling", and then stitching the broadest meanings possible together, once can create a way for "collaborative storytelling" to be a broad enough to technically apply to most gaming. Yay for you, I guess.

However, the meaning is by that point so broad and so open that it tells you NOTHING about what's actually going on internally or at the table for a significant segment of RPG players. It tells you NOTHING about WHY they game, NOTHING about HOW they game, and NOTHING about what they experience and enjoy at the gaming table.

There's a critical question right there at that yawning divide between "telling a story" and "events occur that a story could be told about" that the ultra-broad meaning of "collaborative storytelling" completely ignores, and that the "story happens no matter what" argument completely ignores. There's a huge difference between sitting down to play an RPG without "story" in mind, and sitting down to play an RPG with the deliberate intent of "telling a story", and conflating the two is deliberately dismissing a portion of the gaming community as either non-existent, or too stupid to understand their own motives and enjoyment.

This if further compounded by multiple issues, both within and without.

First, the use of "collaborative storytelling" outside the gaming community to reference things that are not RPGs at all. Story circles, collaborative fiction workshops, improv, etc, all are referred to at times as "collaborative storytelling". We already struggle in RPG discussions with the way that some people try to conflate RPGs with these other activities as if RPGs are identical to those activities (see also, fiction writing, wargames, and other similar but distinct activities).

Second, the close similarity to "storygames" or "storytelling games" (http://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/6517/roleplaying-games/roleplaying-games-vs-storytelling-games) -- which occupy a somewhat overlapping but not identical space to RPGs -- ends up causing conflation and confusion within the gaming community.

Third, there's the baggage -- and it goes back to before The Forge, even. Way way back, it starts with someone asserting that the only good way to game is to focus on "the needs of the story".

http://whitehall-paraindustries.com/Theory/Threefold/rpg_theory_bad_rep.htm

"Originally r.g.f.a was a typical advocacy group on Usenet where someone could scream that RuneQuest was better than D&D and get immediate foes claiming the reverse. In short, it was a dumping ground for flamewars. This changed however as the group membership abandoned exchanges about which game was better instead talking about characteristics of gaming itself. Rec.games.frp.Advocacy in effect became the first noticeable RPG Theory group online.

Into this enter one David Berkman (one of the authors of Theatrix). Berkman advocated a style of play based around 'what was good for the story', not what the mindless dice or needs of simulation would call for. 'Advocated' as in 'this is the best way, any other way is stupid' type of advocating.

This was unacceptable to other members of the forum, those who based their gaming upon the desire to recreate a internally consistent game world that would allow deep immersion role-play. In such a campaign, even examining the 'plot', let alone altering it in the name of ‘improvement', was an ice cold bath dumped upon their life passion."

But The Forge cranked it up to 11, and tried to snap off the dial.

https://refereeingandreflection.wordpress.com/2014/12/22/remembering-the-forge/

If you don't understand why this is such a contentious issue and why the problems inherent in calling it all "collaborative storytelling" will never be explained away via pedantic definitions and postmodernist lingusitics wankery, you really need to read and understand the history covered by those two linked articles.

The core matter here is that other people don't game for the same reasons you do, other people don't game the same way that you do, and other people don't have the same experience when game that you do -- and calling it all "collaborative storytelling" is inevitably and unavoidably ignoring those differences.

You do not get to tell other people why they game, how they game, what the do and do not enjoy about gaming, or how they experience gaming -- and when you call what all RPG players do "collaborative storytelling", that is exactly what is happening.

Max_Killjoy

2018-01-26, 06:15 PM

Personally I define roleplaying at the broadest sense as "making decisions for an imaginary character in the imaginary environment." Which has nothing inherent to do with storytelling.

That's far closer to a neutral, non-exclusionary definition of "roleplaying", and you're correct, it has nothing to do with storytelling.

To make it an RPG, IMO, requires a couple of other basic elements.

Tanarii

2018-01-26, 06:28 PM

That's far closer to a neutral, non-exclusionary definition of "roleplaying", and you're correct, it has nothing to do with storytelling.Thats exactly what it supposed to be, and it also suffers from the "so broad it starts to become meaningless" syndrome to a large degree. But for the reverse reason: I coined it (or possibly stole it) to point out that many kinds of "roleplaying" under a broad umbrella, and a preferred subset of Roleplaying is not One True RolePlaying.

Not to tell people that insist they are not roleplaying that they actually are roleplaying. If they tell me they aren't and my definition is too broad and doesn't really apply to what they're doing because that's not their goal, more power to them. I'm not going to insist they are actually Roleplaying anyway.

Also note I said "nothing inherent to do with storytelling". It's possible to make decisions for what your character does based on an underlying narrative, or with the goal of generating an entertaining storytelling. It's not supposed to exclude story. It just doesn't require storytelling.

To make it an RPG, IMO, requires a couple of other basic elements.Oh, there are plenty of other elements to roleplaying games. I was only talking about a broad possible definition of the roleplaying element, and how I personally view it.

Darth Ultron

2018-01-26, 06:41 PM

What I am doing when I play a character in an RPG is not collaborative storytelling. I am not telling a story, nor am I collaborating to tell a story. There are many other gamers who would say the same thing, and they would be right. THEY get to define why they game, how they game, and what they enjoy about gaming. YOU do not get to define their reasons for gaming, their methods of gaming, or their experience of gaming for them.

Yup, I'm one of Those Gamers.

kyoryu

2018-01-26, 06:54 PM

Max_Killjoy

2018-01-26, 07:24 PM

Aliquid

2018-01-26, 09:04 PM

Exactly, and that's the point I've (again) been trying to get across.

And I thought most of the participants on the thread had at least said "that's an understandable position" even if they didn't agree with it in part or whole, some number of pages back.most people would stop arguing with you if you stuck to this point, rather than getting sidetracked on the meaning of the word “story”.

If someone says “but you are telling a story” don’t fall for it... just say

“Maybe I am by your definition of ‘story’, but that doesn’t change the fact that the phrase is misleading and not useful for describing RPGs”.

Then go into detail about what it is misleading, not why it is “wrong”

Don’t even dismissively say “your overly broad definition of ‘story’” or suggest their use of the word is wrong, because then people will still fixate on that specific topic... which really isn’t the issue.

95% of the people posting here agree that your style of play and reason for playing is totally legit.

Cosi

2018-01-26, 11:05 PM

It is basically nonsense to describe a group of people producing a sequence of fictional events as "not collaborative storytelling". You are collaborating on a story. The assertions to the contrary are word salad. Also reflective of a deeply warped understanding of reality where it is impossible to do something that has significance you don't appreciate, or for the same thing to mean different things to different people.

What I am doing when I play a character in an RPG is not collaborative storytelling. I am not telling a story, nor am I collaborating to tell a story. There are many other gamers who would say the same thing, and they would be right. THEY get to define why they game, how they game, and what they enjoy about gaming. YOU do not get to define their reasons for gaming, their methods of gaming, or their experience of gaming for them.

The most telling part of this entire "discussion" is that one side is saying "You can describe what you do as collaboratively storytelling if that's what you enjoy, but that's not what I'm doing when I play and not what I enjoy"... and the other side is saying "I'm collaboratively storytelling and so are you -- even if you don't think you are, even if you hate the idea, even if that ruins gaming for you, that's still what you're doing".

It seems like you need to do more than just assert "that's not what I'm doing". Like, we'd all agree that it would still be correct to describe what you were doing as "playing a RPG" even if you insistent you weren't doing that, right? By that same logic, it seems at least conceivable that you could assert that something was a synonym for "playing a RPG", and if you wanted to claim you weren't doing that you would need to present an argument about how those things weren't equivalent.

Tanarii

2018-01-27, 01:02 AM

most people would stop arguing with you if you stuck to this point, rather than getting sidetracked on the meaning of the word “story”.
Hey, that (and the rest I truncated for space) is some good advice at this point. :smallbiggrin:

Florian

2018-01-27, 07:17 AM

Personally I define roleplaying at the broadest sense as "making decisions for an imaginary character in the imaginary environment." Which has nothing inherent to do with storytelling.

Personally my preferred subset of roleplaying is "making in-character decisions for my imaginary character in the imaginary environment."

Which still has nothing inherent to do with storytelling. I personally view it as similar to something a method actor does in terms of deeply getting in character, but not the communicating a tale part. Because I'm making actual decisions for what my character does. Not deciding what should happen to my character based on underlying narrative.

Basically, you're skipping the first step and solely focus on the second step, which seems to be the cause of all this confusion on the topic.

The first step is a group of people meeting up to play a game together where everyone plays one character and participates in the game by describing what that character does. You work together to play the game, so it is collaborative and the method is by telling stories about what happens.
There is simply no game when no-one provides the fictional content to interact with and no-one choses to act upon that.

You're focusing too much on the second step, how you chose to participate in the game and interact with the fictional content. The "Illusion" I mentioned earlier is that you're participating in a game and you are handed content to interact with, even if you want to handle things "as natural as possible", you still narrate all the actions and contribute to the overall fiction.

Jormengand

2018-01-27, 07:20 AM

Here's the thing.

There may be some definition of "collaborative gaming" that is, indeed, universally true and applicable.

That's irrelevant.

Because the image that it conjures up in the minds of many (perhaps most?) people is something very different, and something that many RPGers would argue is explicitly not what they are doing. So whether they are technically doing that doesn't matter. Insisting on this does not improve clarity for others, and comes off as aggressive, and possibly offensive or condescending to others.

As such, "all RPGs are collaborative storytelling" is not a helpful statement.

Contrariwise, however, saying "Not all RPGs are collaborative storytelling" could equally be an unhelpful statement if it makes people think that not all RPGs have to do with the broader definition of storytelling. Just as what you're doing may not be narrow-definition collaborative storytelling (hereafter NDCS) and people used to NDCS will get confused if someone who uses broad-definition collaborative storytelling (BDCS) refers to what Max is doing as "Collaborative storytelling", so will people used to BDCS get confused by Max's insistence that roleplaying games aren't about CS. Insisting that it's CS - as in, BDCS - will confuse people who naturally think of CS in terms of NDCS, but insisting that it's not CS, as in not NDCS, will equally confuse other people. That's just a drawback of linguistic ambiguity in general, and not the exclusive fault of people who use BDCS.

(Here, NDCS is Max's and a couple of other posters' definition where it's only a story if you're telling someone what happened post facto for the purpose of the story, while BDCS is almost everyone else's definition where a story is a story no matter whether it's describing events that are happening right now or will happen and where the very act of role-playing, just like the very act of writing, creates one.)

Florian

2018-01-27, 08:15 AM

That's irrelevant.

Nope. It´s a basic statement on how to play a roleplaying game. Someone needs to describe the fictional content and someone else must interact with it and the result of the interaction will become part of the fictional content in turn. That's how it works and is the fundamentals of it, else you have no game.

Max_Killjoy

2018-01-27, 08:15 AM

Contrariwise, however, saying "Not all RPGs are collaborative storytelling" could equally be an unhelpful statement if it makes people think that not all RPGs have to do with the broader definition of storytelling.

Then you've missed part of the point entirely.

That broader definition of "storytelling" is part of what makes it unhelpful in the first place.

It's similar to the utter nonsense that calls brushing your teeth before going to bed or taking a shower in the morning as "a ritual" -- it might be pedantically, technically accurate, by a very broad meaning of "ritual", but that very broad meaning strips "ritual" of any specificity or utility as a word, and misrepresents what's going on with the actual act of showering or brushing teeth -- particularly if someone is doing it for purely functional reasons.

Nope. It´s a basic statement on how to play a roleplaying game. Someone needs to describe the fictional content and someone else must interact with it and the result of the interaction will become part of the fictional content in turn. That's how it works and is the fundamentals of it, else you have no game.

And here's where someone goes back to deliberately conflating "shared fictional content" with "telling a story", which is why many of us who are not collaborating to tell a story when we play an RPG stopped using the words "fiction" and "fictional".

That the events of the campaign are taking place in a secondary world, and the secondary world and the events there in need to be sufficiently agreed upon and communicated between the participants in the gameplay, does not automatically make the gamplay into storytelling. It CAN BE storytelling, if that's what the players want, but it does not HAVE to be. If someone is not there to tell a story, and they are not collaborating to tell a story, then they are not engaged in "collaborative storytelling".

Accuse me of getting caught up in definitions, but here we can see clear evidence of what that's in reaction to -- every time we give ground on the definition of a word and start using other words, the "story uber alles" zealots start the cycle over with an assault on the meaning of those other words instead. So if I refuse to give ground on words any more and argue definitions relentlessly, it's 100% in response to the fact that it's never, ever ever enough for the "story uber alles" zealots.

Going back to the days of the Usenet debates, and through the days of The Forge, the "story uber alles" zealots have been trying to define everyone else, or at least their experiences and enjoyment completely out of the hobby and the community, and push their agenda as the OneTrueWay of RPGs. Sometimes it's because they don't care as long as they get what they want out of gaming, and sometimes it's because they really believe that if everyone just accepted their OneTrueWay then everyone would be happier and games would be better.

And yes, if you're insisting that you know the why, how, and what of other people's experiences better than they do, if your theories leave no room for variation or differences, if you can't let go and accept that not everyone wants the same things you do and that this doesn't make them somehow defective or mistaken or ignorant... then you're being a zealot.

Stop trying to negate or purge other people's reasons for gaming, their approaches to gaming, their experiences of gaming, and their enjoyment of gaming.

Florian

2018-01-27, 08:29 AM

Then you've missed part of the point entirely.

The broader definition of "storytelling" is part of what makes it unhelpful in the first place.

The broad definition is "tell a story". Nothing more, nothing less. This is what you do when interacting with your fellow players (and gm) and add something to the ongoing narrative by declaring what your character does and describing it to them - you tell a story about fictional events and your fellow players act upon that.

Lacuna Caster

2018-01-27, 08:36 AM

Third, there's the baggage -- and it goes back to before The Forge, even. Way way back, it starts with someone asserting that the only good way to game is to focus on "the needs of the story"...

...But The Forge cranked it up to 11, and tried to snap off the dial.

https://refereeingandreflection.wordpress.com/2014/12/22/remembering-the-forge/
It's certainly true to say, as the article mentions, that the bulk of, ah, research and development at the Forge was concerned with Narrativist play and techniques, since RE and others considered this a rather neglected style of play as far as the major publishers were concerned. But I have never seen Ron write or say anything to the effect that 'Gamism and Simulationism are bad and inferior styles of play', and I don't know where you got that impression.

(He had plenty to say about the technical and social breaking-points of some popular G/S systems, particularly when they pretended to be Nar-focused and weren't, but that's another discussion.)

It is basically nonsense to describe a group of people producing a sequence of fictional events as "not collaborative storytelling". You are collaborating on a story. The assertions to the contrary are word salad. Also reflective of a deeply warped understanding of reality where it is impossible to do something that has significance you don't appreciate, or for the same thing to mean different things to different people.

The broad definition is "tell a story". Nothing more, nothing less. This is what you do when interacting with your fellow players (and gm) and add something to the ongoing narrative by declaring what your character does and describing it to them - you tell a story about fictional events and your fellow players act upon that.
Going back a bit (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?545883-Why-collaborative-storytelling-is-a-meaningless-phrase/page21&p=22770405#post22770405), I would say that if you're defining 'story' as 'a sequence of fictional events', then yes, it is trivially true to say that role-playing produces a story. Though, given there are such things as 'true stories', I don't know why such events would even need to be fictional, and at that point anything that ever happens is 'a story'.

The question is whether the intentions of the people playing, and/or anything about the game mechanics, encourages stories that are about something interesting. And what qualifies as 'interesting'.

.

Cosi

2018-01-27, 08:47 AM

The question is whether the intentions of the people playing, and/or anything about the game mechanics, encourages stories that are about something interesting. And what qualifies as 'interesting'.

I should hope that if you and four of your friends are getting together to spend several hours doing something whatever you choose to do is "interesting". I mean, if it's not, what's the point? Are the people who claim that what they're doing isn't collaborative storytelling contending that they spend their gaming sessions being bored because the events in those games don't interest them? If that's the case, why are they playing those games instead of doing something else?

Max_Killjoy

2018-01-27, 08:52 AM

The broad definition is "tell a story". Nothing more, nothing less. This is what you do when interacting with your fellow players (and gm) and add something to the ongoing narrative by declaring what your character does and describing it to them - you tell a story about fictional events and your fellow players act upon that.

Wrong. There is no inherent ongoing narrative, any more than real life is an "ongoing narrative". YOU might be telling a story or crafting a narrative, but that doesn't mean every other gamer is doing so.

Stop trying to negate other gamers' reasons for gaming, their approaches to gaming, and their experience and enjoyment of gaming (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showsinglepost.php?p=22790186&postcount=720).

Lacuna Caster

2018-01-27, 08:53 AM

I should hope that if you and four of your friends are getting together to spend several hours doing something whatever you choose to do is "interesting". I mean, if it's not, what's the point? Are the people who claim that what they're doing isn't collaborative storytelling contending that they spend their gaming sessions being bored because the events in those games don't interest them...
Of course it interests them. But their definitions of 'interesting' don't always sync up particularly well with the usual literary/dramatic criteria for what a 'good story' is. A slow-motion replay of an american football game may be captivating to the right audience, but it's reasonable to say the appeal is somewhat different from a teen romance novel or detective fiction.

Max_Killjoy

2018-01-27, 08:58 AM

I should hope that if you and four of your friends are getting together to spend several hours doing something whatever you choose to do is "interesting". I mean, if it's not, what's the point? Are the people who claim that what they're doing isn't collaborative storytelling contending that they spend their gaming sessions being bored because the events in those games don't interest them? If that's the case, why are they playing those games instead of doing something else?

Because it doesn't have to be "an interesting story", or a story at all, to be interesting to the people playing.

Lacuna Caster

2018-01-27, 09:02 AM

Because it doesn't have to be "an interesting story", or a story at all, to be interesting to the people playing.
Well... according to the definitions that Cosi is using, it does have to be 'an interesting story' in order to be interesting to the people playing. I just think that their definition of 'story' is too broad to be usefully descriptive, and if you're using it to define RPGs for the uninitiated it might give a misleading impression, depending on the system and the player's understanding of the word.

Max_Killjoy

2018-01-27, 09:06 AM

their definition of 'story' is too broad to be usefully descriptive, and if you're using it to define RPGs for the uninitiated it might give a misleading impression, depending on the system and the player's understanding of the word.

And that's what some of us have been saying for many pages now. At the point "collaborative storytelling" becomes "technically true" of all RPG gaming, it's also rendered almost meaningless -- and that it is also misleading along multiple fronts.

Cosi

2018-01-27, 09:17 AM

Of course it interests them. But their definitions of 'interesting' don't always sync up particularly well with the usual literary/dramatic criteria for what a 'good story' is. A slow-motion replay of an american football game may be captivating to the right audience, but it's reasonable to say the appeal is somewhat different from a teen romance novel or detective fiction.

Yes, different stories have different appeals. Mad Max Fury Road does not have the same appeal as Dilbert which does not have the same appeal as The Hobbit which does not have the same appeal as Romeo and Juliet which does not have the same appeal as a Sherlock Holmes collection. I literally do not understand what point you are trying to make.

Because it doesn't have to be "an interesting story", or a story at all, to be interesting to the people playing.

What kind of gaming are you trying to describe? What are you talking about when you say that something "isn't a story"? Do you mean a hack-and-slash dungeon crawl? Because I think that things like John Wick would indicate that "a bunch of fight scenes with the exact minimum amount of plot necessary to understand those fight scenes" totally qualifies as a story.

And that's what some of us have been saying for many pages now. At the point "collaborative storytelling" becomes "technically true" of all RPG gaming, it's also rendered almost meaningless -- and that it is also misleading along multiple fronts.

I think the problem you have is that you are misunderstanding what people mean when they describe RPGs as "collaborative storytelling". The point is to provide a term for the action of playing a RPG, so that we can better understand how to make RPGs good and enjoyable. For example, the collaborative storytelling perspective would suggest that part of making an effective RPG is providing a mechanism for synchronizing players' expectations about creatures and objects in the world so different people can make action declarations to interact with the same things in a coherent way.

Lacuna Caster

2018-01-27, 09:26 AM

Yes, different stories have different appeals. Mad Max Fury Road does not have the same appeal as Dilbert which does not have the same appeal as The Hobbit which does not have the same appeal as Romeo and Juliet which does not have the same appeal as a Sherlock Holmes collection. I literally do not understand what point you are trying to make.
My point is that describing RPGs as 'collaborative storytelling', given your definition of 'story', doesn't actually describe anything worth paying attention to. If you want to accurately convey the appeal of a particular RPG, you'll need to tighten your definition or risk false advertising.

I would argue that on a certain level, Mad Max and The Hobbit and Shakespeare actually have a good deal more in common than they would with weather reports or badminton matches. But we can't discuss that until you agree that there are some things the word 'story' doesn't usefully summarise.

Max_Killjoy

2018-01-27, 09:32 AM

It's certainly true to say, as the article mentions, that the bulk of, ah, research and development at the Forge was concerned with Narrativist play and techniques, since RE and others considered this a rather neglected style of play as far as the major publishers were concerned. But I have never seen Ron write or say anything to the effect that 'Gamism and Simulationism are bad and inferior styles of play', and I don't know where you got that impression.

(He had plenty to say about the technical and social breaking-points of some popular G/S systems, particularly when they pretended to be Nar-focused and weren't, but that's another discussion.)

Based on some of his writings back then, I'd say that there are some things RE understands about those who might say "sim is as close as your 3 choices get", and some things he grossly misunderstands.

Going beyond RE, there was a wing of The Forge who asserted that "sim" doesn't even exist.

Going back a bit (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?545883-Why-collaborative-storytelling-is-a-meaningless-phrase/page21&p=22770405#post22770405), I would say that if you're defining 'story' as 'a sequence of fictional events', then yes, it is trivially true to say that role-playing produces a story. Though, given there are such things as 'true stories', I don't know why such events would even need to be fictional, and at that point anything that ever happens is 'a story'.

The question is whether the intentions of the people playing, and/or anything about the game mechanics, encourages stories that are about something interesting. And what qualifies as 'interesting'.

.

Saying that an RPG session or campaign would produce events about which a story could be told, is no different from saying that real life might do the same, and it's trivially true.

The problem is that this is not the same as setting out, in-session or in-campaign, to deliberately craft a story.

There's a huge gulf in fundamental approach to the game that's being papered over for various reasons... it appears that for some, it's important that the term "collaborative storytelling" be applicable to all gaming for purely technical, definitional reasons.

And it appears that for some, it's just that damn important to make all RPG gaming "about story" even if it means ignoring and erasing any experience of gaming that doesn't fit their theory.

Max_Killjoy

2018-01-27, 09:48 AM

I think the problem you have is that you are misunderstanding what people mean when they describe RPGs as "collaborative storytelling". The point is to provide a term for the action of playing a RPG, so that we can better understand how to make RPGs good and enjoyable. For example, the collaborative storytelling perspective would suggest that part of making an effective RPG is providing a mechanism for synchronizing players' expectations about creatures and objects in the world so different people can make action declarations to interact with the same things in a coherent way.

"Synchronized player expectations about creatures and objects" is not "collaborative storytelling". This gets right back to the insistence that communicating about fictional elements is "storytelling", which is just as useless and unhelpful as insisting that all communication is "storytelling", or that all of real life is "narratives".

Coherent interactions, synchronized player expectations about creatures and objects and events and the basic "physics" of the world, rules and setting coherence, etc -- those are all things at the core of how I approach gaming.

But for the umpteenth time, I am not telling a story, and I am not collaborating with anyone else's attempt to tell a story, and therefore, I am not engaged in collaborative storytelling. I do not think about, care about, or engage in story when I am playing my character in an RPG. My character is not worried about "story" as they go about their day and deal with whatever they have to deal with, and I am not worried about "story" at any point in playing my character. There is no effort made to craft a compelling or interesting story. Tropes, archetypes, and arcs are utterly ignored or even rejected outright. I refuse in total any attempt to decide, construct, or analyze my character or the events of their "life" as a narrative.

Florian

2018-01-27, 10:12 AM

Wrong. There is no inherent ongoing narrative, any more than real life is an "ongoing narrative". YOU might be telling a story or crafting a narrative, but that doesn't mean every other gamer is doing so.

Stop trying to negate other gamers' reasons for gaming, their approaches to gaming, and their experience and enjoyment of gaming (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showsinglepost.php?p=22790186&postcount=720).

You are a player participating in a game based on "exploration" and you are handed content to explore and rules to help you do so. What you apparently don´t get is that everything there is, it´s there for exploration and to provide joy while doing so, no matter what it is.

Lacuna Caster

2018-01-27, 10:18 AM

Based on some of his writings back then, I'd say that there are some things RE understands about those who might say "sim is as close as your 3 choices get", and some things he grossly misunderstands.

Going beyond RE, there was a wing of The Forge who asserted that "sim" doesn't even exist.
The thing is, according to some analyses of the relevant theory, I can kind of see where that's coming from.

When I was reading through that essay you linked, one thing that struck me was that Story Before should not, strictly speaking, be particularly compatible with any of the three creative agendas. In a way, I can agree with that, in that I'm not sure imposing a pre-planned storyline adds particular value to any of the creative agendas, although I'd consider it more directly in conflict with Nar priorities than others.

However, I suspect that if you took baseline Simulationism, removed the railroading, and injected some effort at modelling character psychology, you'll often get something that's at least looks similar to 'low-pressure Narrativism' from the outside, in that a bona fide story emerges. Since I don't think railroading has anything to do with simulation, and character psychology does, you could argue that Sim and Nar might 'merge' under those conditions, or at least that shifting that way is pretty common.

Now, I know RE did not agree with that analysis, and he has a lot more experience than me, and there are certainly plenty of habitual Sim-inclined players who would, like yourself, disagree with that position. But it could be an understandable mistake.

I think this discussion is getting a little too tense, though. Perhaps it might be helpful to cool off for a while?
.

Max_Killjoy

2018-01-27, 10:40 AM

You are a player participating in a game based on "exploration" and you are handed content to explore and rules to help you do so. What you apparently don´t get is that everything there is, it´s there for exploration and to provide joy while doing so, no matter what it is.

None of that has anything to do with collaborating to tell a story.

Fictional world, doesn't equate to or necessitate story.

Exploration, doesn't equate to or necessitate story.

Shared expectations, doesn't equate to or necessitate story.

Communication, doesn't equate to or necessitate story.

Character, doesn't equate to or necessitate story.

Stop trying to negate other people's reasons for, methods of, and experiences of, playing RPGs.

Max_Killjoy

2018-01-27, 11:04 AM

The thing is, according to some analyses of the relevant theory, I can kind of see where that's coming from.

When I was reading through that essay you linked, one thing that struck me was that Story Before should not, strictly speaking, be particularly compatible with any of the three creative agendas. In a way, I can agree with that, in that I'm not sure imposing a pre-planned storyline adds particular value to any of the creative agendas, although I'd consider it more directly in conflict with Nar priorities than others.

However, I suspect that if you took baseline Simulationism, removed the railroading, and injected some effort at modelling character psychology, you'll often get something that's at least looks similar to 'low-pressure Narrativism' from the outside, in that a bona fide story emerges. Since I don't think railroading has anything to do with simulation, and character psychology does, you could argue that Sim and Nar might 'merge' under those conditions, or at least that shifting that way is pretty common.

Now, I know RE did not agree with that analysis, and he has a lot more experience than me, and there are certainly plenty of habitual Sim-inclined players who would, like yourself, disagree with that position. But it could be an understandable mistake.

Re-reading this (http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/15/), it does seem that RE keeps expressing doubt that Simulationism can really be a thing, a disbelief that there really are those players who aren't engaged at all in either of the other two Agendas. On one hand, I say, duh, yeah, that basic assumption of absolutist exclusivity between the Agendas is a core fault in your approach -- you're trying to drive apart when it's the overlapping space where RPGs live; on the other hand it does seem to show a certain skepticism towards the very existence of "Sim".

"The Hard Question
Well, here it is. Before getting bent out of shape, remember that each mode is gonna get one of these.

Role-playing is a hobby, leisure activity. The real question is, what for, in the long term? For Simulationist play, the answer "This was fun, so let's do it again," is sufficient.

However, for how long is it sufficient? Which seems to me to vary greatly from person to person. Is the focus on Exploration to be kept as is, permanently, as characters and settings change through play? Some say "sure" and wonder what the hell I'm talking about, or perhaps feel slightly insulted. Or, is Drift ultimately desirable? Is play all about getting "it" to work prior to permitting overt metagame agendas into the picture? Some might answer "of course" and wonder why anyone could see it otherwise.

So! Is there an expected, future metagame payoff, or is the journey really its own reward? Is Simulationist play what you want, or is it what you think you must do in order, one day, to get what you want?

I judge nothing with these questions. I think that they're important to consider and that answers are going to vary widely, that's all. "

Which comes across as "Are you sure? OK, are you really sure? For certain?"

[QUOTE=Lacuna Caster;22790363]
I think this discussion is getting a little too tense, though. Perhaps it might be helpful to cool off for a while?
.

Things tend to get tense when people are trying their damnedest to invalidate and negate your experiences of something you really enjoy.

What's going on in this thread, still, with a couple of posters, is exactly the same thing that's been happening going back to those Usenet debates ~2 decades ago -- the effort to assert that "story" is what makes RPGs what they are, that "story" is the essence of RPGs, etc. The next step has always, inevitably, inexorably, been the assertion that what separates a "good RPG" from a "bad RPG" is "more story" and "supports narrative" and "decisions that support the best story are encouraged over other decisions", and that those who "embrace story" are "better gamers" than those who ignore or reject story.

Tanarii

2018-01-27, 11:23 AM

Basically, you're skipping the first step and solely focus on the second step, which seems to be the cause of all this confusion on the topic.

The first step is a group of people meeting up to play a game together where everyone plays one character and participates in the game by describing what that character does. You work together to play the game, so it is collaborative and the method is by telling stories about what happens.
There is simply no game when no-one provides the fictional content to interact with and no-one choses to act upon that.
You were doing so well right up to the bolded part, at which you jumped the shark.

You're directly quoting my style of play and telling me it, and my reasons for it, are not valid. And instead I'm playing your way.

So let's try a modified version Aliquid's advice here, since it's applicable.

Maybe I am by your definition of ‘story’, but that doesn’t change the fact that the phrase is misleading and not useful for describing the way I play RPGs.

Lacuna Caster

2018-01-27, 11:23 AM

Things tend to get tense when people are trying their damnedest to invalidate and negate your experiences of something you really enjoy...
Max, with respect, you're gone long past the point where this particular style of argumentation is going to convince anyone who isn't already convinced. I'm gonna bow out for the moment, but I will just say that I, certainly, am not trying to invalidate your preferences, and as someone who has strong Sim inclinations myself I never felt that Ron was either.

In fact, I might just suggest that you go talk to him. I mean, be polite, obviously, but he's not that hard to contact on a variety of channels, and if you really feel this strongly that he's somehow done the hobby a disservice, perhaps you should convey your perspective directly, with some first-hand examples of play?

.

Tanarii

2018-01-27, 12:00 PM

I'm gonna bow out for the moment, but I will just say that I, certainly, am not trying to invalidate your preferences, and as someone who has strong Sim inclinations myself I never felt that Ron was either.
Hold up. You're defending a guy who's views on "story" led him to say that playing certain kinds of RPGs causes developing players mental harm ("brain damage")?

Edit: okay, that came out wrong, too attack-y. Sorry about that. It's not about you. The important part is that kind of indicates that he doesn't think very straight on this subject, and is competely willing to try to invalidate other people's experiences, let alone preferences.

Florian

2018-01-27, 12:16 PM

Hold up. You're defending a guy who's views on "story" led him to say that playing certain kinds of RPGs causes developing players mental harm ("brain damage")?

That guy was not wrong by pointing out that "Challenging" and "Fair" are not really on the same page.

Rhedyn

2018-01-27, 02:38 PM

I've heard of GNS theory. Where ttRPS are explained in needing Game, narrative, and simulation aspects.

The game's crunch should be fun.
The rpg should support development of a narrative.
The rules should simulate enough aspects to be immersive.

Individual players' low tolerance for each element is different.

I've personally found that people who throw around ”collaborative storytelling” phrase tend to just be an ass to anyone who bothers to learn rules, while at the same time being bad at story telling.
Like guys, if you are playing Pathfinder, 3.5, or any version of D&D, the rules are part of the "collaborative story". You thinking your guy should be able to spin in the air and kill something in one blow, just doesn't matter. The rules prevent it. Think of a different narrative. "Why is this low op character **** at combat? Come on guys let's House rule the whole system rather than just build our characters right so we do cool things. It's way easier for me to bitch than crack open a rule book."
There are plenty of RPGs out there that are well designed for "the rule of cool". Don't try to force 3e to be that vehicle and stop acting like ignorance is some Hallmark of good role-playing.
But these same people hate rules, so the idea of "learning a system" scares them because they think it might turn them into a min maxer if they read a rule book. So they never learn about the system that they actually want to play. /Rant

RazorChain

2018-01-27, 02:40 PM

Me and my family were telling a collaborative story the other day; it was about a family that went out skiing and playing in the snow. Great times

Then me and some mates did some collaborative storytelling; the story was us fighting terrorists or being terrorists in a CS Go matches. Great times

Today I did some collaborative storytelling with my colleagues at work; the story was about us organizing and executing a private security contract. Great times.

I do a lot of collaborative storytelling. In fact I could just substitute it for other things like going skiing with my family, playing CS GO, going to work....and Roleplaying maybe?

Is there a reason for why we call it roleplaying games instead of collaborative storytelling? Is Roleplaying games a game about roleplaying a character or a game of collaborative storyteling?

Maybe next time I'll look in the shelves of my local gaming story I'll see D&D 5e Players handbook: Everything a player needs to create a character in the world's greatest collaborative storytelling game

Max_Killjoy

2018-01-27, 04:55 PM

Max, with respect, you're gone long past the point where this particular style of argumentation is going to convince anyone who isn't already convinced. I'm gonna bow out for the moment, but I will just say that I, certainly, am not trying to invalidate your preferences, and as someone who has strong Sim inclinations myself I never felt that Ron was either.

In fact, I might just suggest that you go talk to him. I mean, be polite, obviously, but he's not that hard to contact on a variety of channels, and if you really feel this strongly that he's somehow done the hobby a disservice, perhaps you should convey your perspective directly, with some first-hand examples of play?

.

I know you're not doing it, and if it seems that I'm saying you are, I'm sorry -- but others are, and have been going back years.

kyoryu

2018-01-29, 12:01 PM

Nope. It´s a basic statement on how to play a roleplaying game. Someone needs to describe the fictional content and someone else must interact with it and the result of the interaction will become part of the fictional content in turn. That's how it works and is the fundamentals of it, else you have no game.

I disagree.

If someone asks me "what's a roleplaying game?" I'll say "well, it's a game where the people playing the game pretend to be characters in an imaginary world, and describe what they do. Normally one player is responsible for figuring out how things turn out, and almost always we use dice to help figure out the results of actions."

I think that's a good description. It accurately describes the vast majority of roleplaying games, and hits on the things that are common.

If I say "oh, it's collaborative storytelling", I don't think I've done anything to help clear anything up at all, and have probably confused them more - I think, regardless of how technically accurate that is, it's going to create something in peoples' minds that's more similar to an improv group than anything. In addition, if people play less story-oriented games, I've created a situation where they're very likely to say "where's the story?"

Jormengand

2018-01-29, 12:36 PM

Then you've missed part of the point entirely.

That broader definition of "storytelling" is part of what makes it unhelpful in the first place.

It's similar to the utter nonsense that calls brushing your teeth before going to bed or taking a shower in the morning as "a ritual" -- it might be pedantically, technically accurate, by a very broad meaning of "ritual", but that very broad meaning strips "ritual" of any specificity or utility as a word, and misrepresents what's going on with the actual act of showering or brushing teeth -- particularly if someone is doing it for purely functional reasons.

But "Story" to mean "A sequence of fictional or historical events" isn't meaningless. "Ritual" to mean "A series of actions taken at the same time each day regularly" isn't meaningless. You just don't like them because they're different from the meanings you're using.

Drop the persecution complex - no-one's saying that what you're doing is NDCS. No-one's trying to argue that what you're doing is NDCS. No-one's saying that you're doing something you're not. But what you're doing is BDCS, even if you think that BDCS is a stupid definition for storytelling. No-one's saying that you're recounting a narrative description of events that took place in the past. They're only saying that you're describing actions, and that that is what they would call "Storytelling." No-one is saying your way of having fun is wrong. They are only and solely using different words to describe the same thing.

Tanarii

2018-01-29, 12:45 PM

Drop the persecution complex - no-one's saying that what you're doing is NDCS. No-one's trying to argue that what you're doing is NDCS. No-one's saying that you're doing something you're not. But what you're doing is BDCS, even if you think that BDCS is a stupid definition for storytelling. No-one's saying that you're recounting a narrative description of events that took place in the past. They're only saying that you're describing actions, and that that is what they would call "Storytelling." No-one is saying your way of having fun is wrong. They are only and solely using different words to describe the same thing.
Maybe I am by your definition of ‘story’, but that doesn’t change the fact that the phrase is misleading and not useful for describing the way I play RPGs.

Rhedyn

2018-01-29, 12:54 PM

Word definitions are pointless to argue. You can reach an understanding about how someone is using a word. You can't convince them that their definition is wrong.

Now if I ever meet someone who uses the term "collaborative storytelling" to mean anything other than "I hate understanding rules and want to feel superior to other people via my own ignorance" then I might care be more sympathetic to the play style they mean with those words.

Max_Killjoy

2018-01-29, 01:20 PM

But "Story" to mean "A sequence of fictional or historical events" isn't meaningless. "Ritual" to mean "A series of actions taken at the same time each day regularly" isn't meaningless. You just don't like them because they're different from the meanings you're using.

Drop the persecution complex - no-one's saying that what you're doing is NDCS. No-one's trying to argue that what you're doing is NDCS. No-one's saying that you're doing something you're not. But what you're doing is BDCS, even if you think that BDCS is a stupid definition for storytelling. No-one's saying that you're recounting a narrative description of events that took place in the past. They're only saying that you're describing actions, and that that is what they would call "Storytelling." No-one is saying your way of having fun is wrong. They are only and solely using different words to describe the same thing.

You seem to be insisting that only the person using a term gets a say in what it means, and that they need give no thought to what the term means to those reading or hearing the term, or its broader implications or any confusion it might cause.

That's a bit like claiming someone can call people "racists" (because they've decided that it means "person who drives", on the basis that racing a car involves driving it, so anyone who drives is doing what race-car drivers do, and that racist is to racing as horticulturalist is to horticulture), and that anyone who objects to being called a "racist" is the one in the wrong. After all, the person using the word means something completely harmless by it and for them there's no implication or insinuation of anything else, right?

If one gets to say that words mean whatever one wants when one uses them, and need to give any thought or concern to what the words mean to anyone else, then green ratchet austria totebag goofus garbunkle.

"Ritual" is a perfect parallel for what's going on with "collaborative storytelling".

"Ritual" strongly implies something done for symbolic or emotional reasons, even when it is devoid of objective efficacy. To say that someone is "engaged in a ritual" when they brush their teeth or take a shower is to say that they're doing so for symbolic or emotional reasons, rather than for practical effect, which is not a universally true assertion.

http://www.dictionary.com/browse/ritual

Note the common thread of all but one of the listed meanings. Note that the origin of the word is in the same Latin root as a "religious rite".

And what's not indicated there is that the use of the word "ritual" to mean "any practice or pattern of behavior regularly performed in a set manner" comes largely out of a dubious academic assertion that humans do repeated things (like brush their teeth or shower or eat at the same time every day) for symbolic or emotional reasons, or reasons of tradition, rather than for practical reasons. (IDK, maybe that's true of other people, but if it didn't do any good or if I'd wake up with fresh breath and a healthy mouth every day without brushing, I wouldn't waste time on it... and I have zero use for ritual or ceremony of any kind.)

To say that someone's behavior is "ritual" when they're doing it for purely practical reasons is to imply something that is not true or useful about their reasons for doing it.

Similarly, the assertion that RPGs are inherently "collaborative storytelling" came specifically and deliberately out of an attempt to elevate one approach to gaming and denigrate other approaches. It causes confusion both externally with non-RPG activities and internally between wildly different reasons for and methods of playing RPGs and related similar games. You cannot escape those implications of the term when you use it -- the term will never leave that baggage behind, ever.

You're using a term for all RPG gaming that only says something true and useful about some RPG gaming. I do not care and will never care if the term can be considered technically applicable via pedantic analysis of all possible meanings of the individual words that make it up. Every time someone says "all RPGs are collective storytelling", I will object and I will explain why they are wrong.