Why collaborative storytelling is a meaningless phrase

[Max_Killjoy]

Okay, hold up.

Max_Killjoy. Buddy. Has this entire argument seriously just been because remembering it's make-believe just, like, takes you out of the moment?

Because most of us probably feel the same way! Getting really sucked into a game is fun! It's like watching a good movie—sometimes you just want to get drawn into what's on the screen, not think about it as a movie created by humans for money.

Granted, it can also be fun to create a story together while thinking of it as a story (see Fate, for instance), but there's a reason D&D and most popular TTRPGs have mechanics where you try something and then discover what happens (e.g., D&D skill checks) instead of explicitly narrative mechanics where you use resources to decide what happens (e.g., Fate's fate points).

What I'm not seeing is what this discussion has to do with any of that.

It's less that it bothers me to think of it as "make believe", and more that it literally and directly bothers me to think of it as "story".

But just like watching the Avengers for fun doesn't make it not a movie, the fact that you don't enjoy thinking about a game as a story doesn't make it not a story.

And I don't think it's reasonable to ask that an entire industry worth of storytelling game designers and players stop calling it "storytelling" just because you don't like thinking about it that way.

An actual storytelling game is another thing entirely, and often leaves the space in the Venn diagram that could really be called an RPG.

But this guy explains it far better than I can in a reasonable-length post. See also here.

And that's also part of why some of us cringe when an RPG is called a "storytelling game".