Quote from: StuartIf you have a game about "telling great stories" - THAT should be the challenge of the gameplay.  Not how well can you manage resources, or how lucky you are at rolling dice.  How GOOD can you tell a story?  Are you a better storyteller than Joe? Can you as a group create a really good story?  The quality of the story is what should decide if you advance or not in the game... not how many hit points you have, what spell you choose, or whether you roll a '20' or not.

System does matter.  A lot.

Hell yes.

In my opinion, the best "story game" out there is Once Upon a Time, a card game put out by Atlas Games. It does not even slightly resemble an RPG, even though most of the designers are well aware of RPGs; one of them, in fact, was Andrew Rilstone, editor of Interactive Fantasy magazine, a periodical which made the Forge look like a bunch of stoned students sitting around talking about nothing. Amongst other things, there's no uneven distribution of powers, no exclusive ownership of story elements, and the gameplay hinges entirely on the players' ability to incorporate (or to manipulate each other into incorporating) the elements they require into the tale.

It's great, but like I said - it doesn't resemble an RPG even slightly.

If storytelling really is the be-all and end-all of RPGing, we'd all be playing Once Upon a Time. There have to be other, compelling factors aside from story drawing us to RPGs, otherwise why would we continue using what are actually very imperfect tools for storytelling? A 100% story-oriented alternative to traditional RPGs is already available in the form of Once Upon a Time, and it hasn't deplaced traditional RPGs in the slightest..

Quote from: RSDanceyHe's suggesting that playing an RPG and telling a story are not equivalent.  They are.

WIRED: You don't think those two are going to cross over at all?

GEORGE LUCAS:  No! Because by definition they're different - storytelling and games are two different  mediums.

(Wired magazine, 1997)

Say what you like about Episode 1-3, George Lucas has made an assload of money by figuring out what people want from stories.

Quote from: RPGPunditI think they play RPGs to "live out" stories, not to "tell" them. There's a fundamental difference there.
RPGPundit

THAT'S IT!!!

That's what I've been trying to say all this time.

In 36 years of gaming, I've collected some fun anecdotes... BUT I'VE NEVER COME AWAY SAYING "DAMN, DID WE TELL A COOL STORY!"

What's fun for me is that rush, that gasp of relief when the last enemy hits the ground and I've got one HP left.  I live for the tension, the cold sweat in my armpits as we try to get out of the situation, the bated breath as the mapper frantically tries to piece fragments of paper together to figure out where the damn teleporter maze just dropped us.

It's got fuckall to do with telling a story about Big Damn Heroes and everything to do with getting a chance to pretend to be a Big Damn Hero.

Everybody go reread Andrew Rilstone's ""All the Boys but my Johnny are Marching Out of Step"" right now.

Quote from: Old GeezerDefine, EXACTLY, OBJECTIVELY, and PRECISELY what you mean by "play RPGs to tell stories."

To be a successful RPG experience, the game must feature adventuring characters interesting to the participants (at least one; the person playing it), and those characters must face challenges which they resolve through their own actions (as opposed to being an audience for some other group of characters to face challenges).  The characters must change and become more complex over time.  Those changes must be a result of the challenges they face.  From time to time, those characters must resolve a larger issue confronting them within the game world either by dying, or succeeding in some task.

The transcript of that activity is a story.

If you remove:

Characters who adventure
Challenges
Change
Resolution

The game will fail and nobody will play it.

You will note that I purposefully structure this identically to the elements of Great Story:  Premise, Drama, Evolution & Pacing.  This is not an accident.  This is the "synonym" part of "playing RPGs" and "telling stories".

Ryan

Agreed Old Geezer.  That's it for me.  

I read Andrews essay, I'll say thatt strategy and tactics, problem solving in a combat sense, has always been part of the draw  for me though.  However I consider that part of the engrossment since I'll focus on tactics that make world-oreinted sense, not those that maximize loopholes or edge cases in thr rules.

Quote from: RSDanceyTo be a successful RPG experience, the game must feature adventuring characters interesting to the participants (at least one; the person playing it), and those characters must face challenges which they resolve through their own actions (as opposed to being an audience for some other group of characters to face challenges).  The characters must change and become more complex over time.  Those changes must be a result of the challenges they face.  From time to time, those characters must resolve a larger issue confronting them within the game world either by dying, or succeeding in some task.

The transcript of that activity is a story.

If you remove:

Characters who adventure
Challenges
Change
Resolution

The game will fail and nobody will play it.

You will note that I purposefully structure this identically to the elements of Great Story:  Premise, Drama, Evolution & Pacing.  This is not an accident.  This is the "synonym" part of "playing RPGs" and "telling stories".

Ryan

Certainly,

Characters who adventure
Challenges
Change
Resolution

is the draw.  The core of my view is the rules of self drescribed
"story teller" games pretty much kills the "Challenges" part for me.  IF I can say what is behind the door, it's not the "live it" challenge.  

But given the 4 criteria above, if Great Story comes from those 4 things then traditional RPGs have been doing this since day one.

Quote from: RSDanceyIf it turns out I am right, then I'll have some evidence to point to for advocacy beyond "I have this idea", which is all I've got right now.  If I am wrong, I'll have engaged in an intellectual pursuit interesting to me personally, and that will have been worthwhile no matter what.

I don't think this book will be sold to more than a couple of hundred people.  I don't think more than a couple dozen will try to implement the things in it.  I'd like to be surprised, but I'm a realist about these things.  So I don't think a couple of dozen people constitute a re-wiring of the hobby, and I certainly don't think it can be forced on anyone anyway.

Ryan

You more than anyone should be familiar with the power of an idea. We all saw one man's ideas (Rein·Hagen's, about Story-based gaming) completely transform the hobby (and industry) at one point, essentially "forcing" everyone who didn't like or agree with his ideas about how to game out of the hobby.
Then we saw a couple of other dudes' ideas (yours and Peter A's) wipe out that previous ideology and restore things to how they were before, in just one fell swoop.

The lynchpin was the state of D&D at the time. The first took hold when D&D was in a terribly weakened state and the people in charge of it were intellectually bankrupt. The second was heralded by a D&D revival and a new edition.

Its quite easy to "force" an idea on the gaming hobby. Just make D&D do it.

Of course, no one can put a gun to your head and  make you play a certain way. But see how much of what the Forgies or the Swine at RPG.net do right now is based on the fact that they feel "forced" into a corner by the fact that the majority of roleplayers today don't play the way these Swine wish they would?
I'm not so arrogant to believe that situation couldn't be reversed, and the pretentious minority could once again dominate the regular roleplaying majority. I almost gave up on Roleplaying the last time that happened. Not sure I'd be able to handle it again; so I'm going to do everything I can to stop it from happening.

RPGPundit

Quote from: RSDanceyFrom time to time, those characters must resolve a larger issue confronting them within the game world either by dying, or succeeding in some task.

Okay, what EXACTLY do you mean by this?

What kind of larger issue?

I still have my original player character from Greyhawk.  He's a wandering adventurer.  He never had been anything more.  I have had much fun playing him.  If I still lived in Lake Geneva, I would pick him up Thursday and play again.

What was his "larger issue"?  Or have I not been having fun all these years?  Or am I having fun being a "Failure"?

What you are saying does not match my experience.

Quote from: Old GeezerTHAT'S IT!!!

That's what I've been trying to say all this time.

In 36 years of gaming, I've collected some fun anecdotes... BUT I'VE NEVER COME AWAY SAYING "DAMN, DID WE TELL A COOL STORY!"

You're welcome.

Oh, and thanks, for bringing the 36 years to theRPGsite.

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPunditWhenever you set up a situation where a player can raise his hand and say "no, in fact, that DIDN'T happen" or "I've decided that instead, the NPC is going to do this...", you are essentially disempowering the GM, and taking away his sovereignty over the only thing he actually does in the game, control the world. What would be the fucking point of playing the GM then?

The GM has 3 executive powers.

He can say "Stop being a dick.  That doesn't happen."

He can say "No, that doesn't happen because it breaks the premise of the story".

He can say "No, that doesn't happen because it contradicts a previously established fact about the game world." (And he can shift into GM Stance and say: "And I don't have to tell you what that is.")

OR

He can say, "OK, if you want that to happen, here's what you will risk to make it so, and here's how you'll determine if you get to make that change or not." (I.e. "roll dice").

Plus all the god-game stuff, which some people seem to like.  A lot.

Ryan

Quote from: Old GeezerOkay, what EXACTLY do you mean by this?

From time to time, the characters must succeed at something larger than overcoming an immediate life or death challenge.  They must rescue the princess, escort the caravan to its destination, kill the dragon, purify the magic spring, put the genie back in the bottle, whatever.

I would go one step further:  I will say that if the players do not know what the "larger objective" of their story is for more than two game sessions, the group will start to lose interest in continuing to play, or will make up an objective regardless of DM intent.  That is, the drive to have such an objective is so powerful that the group will either get one, or dissolve.

Ryan

Well, the vast majority of the gaming I've done has been "Sandbox world" gaming.  So, players push that.

That's why I still maintain that "story" is an accidental byproduct at best.

Gary sat us down all those years ago and said "You are in the town of Greyhawk.  You have heard rumors of great treasure hidden in the ruins of the ancient castle outside town.  What do you do?"

And the rest is history.

That's the way I've always played.  "What do you do?"  And NOBODY has ever said "I want to tell a cool story."

YMMV.  You may even be right and I'm part of the small unrepentant miniatures wargamer minority.

But what you say about RPG and stories has no correlation to anything I've ever seen.

Quote from: RSDanceyTo be a successful RPG experience, the game must feature adventuring characters interesting to the participants (at least one; the person playing it), and those characters must face challenges which they resolve through their own actions (as opposed to being an audience for some other group of characters to face challenges).  The characters must change and become more complex over time.  Those changes must be a result of the challenges they face.  From time to time, those characters must resolve a larger issue confronting them within the game world either by dying, or succeeding in some task.

The transcript of that activity is a story.

The transcript is. The playing is not. Story is the byproduct, not the goal.

QuoteIf you remove:

Characters who adventure
Challenges
Change
Resolution

The game will fail and nobody will play it.

You will note that I purposefully structure this identically to the elements of Great Story:  Premise, Drama, Evolution & Pacing.  This is accident.  not an

I agree that the RPG game requires characters, challenges, change and resolution.  These things are all important, but they aren't what constitutes a Story.  They are all related to character; the character's origin, the character's challenge, the character's evolution, and the character meeting goals.

A story has all kinds of things that do NOT fit with RPGs. You continue to tiptoe around the issue of plot, of continuity, of story not being a rambling exercise but having events that fit into the predetermined plot, where you don't have characters suddenly die for reasons that serve no purpose to the plot, where characters only act in accordance with their role in the novel, etc etc.

I mean again, are you SERIOUSLY trying to claim that RPGs are akin to Novels? That they create story in that way? Because to most normal human beings, THAT is story. Novels, or a told tale, or a TV series, the medium varies, but the method involves a story with beginning, middle and end where the teller already knows all three before he starts (or at least where he does everything leading to that end, everything making sense, rather than the improv spontaneity you see in RPGs).

Again, my two main gripes with you right now are:

1. Your insistence on calling what you're talking about "story". Its not "story". Not in the sense of what normal people think of as story. Something with no plot structure (aside from premise) and no literary consistency (or no ability to maintain literary consistency) is not a story.
For an RPG to be a "story", you'd need to have everyone agree on how it ends first of all, at least in the general sense; you'd have to have no one allowed to do stuff that didn't actually relate to the plot or "enhance" the story in some way, and you couldn't have heros, villains, or major characters of other sorts being whacked by a random kobold.
In fact, you'd better remove dice altogether because rolling random possibilities in no way helps with the telling of a "good story", it hinders it in every way.

2. Your insistence that for what you're actually trying to do, that thing you keep mis-naming "story" (ie. creating more emphasis on characters and the importance of characters in the RPG), you have to for some reason remove power from the GM and turn everything into a fucking socialist collective, rather than figure out how to do it all within the landmarks of the highly successful regular GM-player relationship.

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPunditYou more than anyone should be familiar with the power of an idea. We all saw one man's ideas (Rein·Hagen's, about Story-based gaming) completely transform the hobby (and industry) at one point, essentially "forcing" everyone who didn't like or agree with his ideas about how to game out of the hobby.

So let's talk about that period, because I think it was incredibly instructive.  I promise not to use the term "brain damage", but I want to talk about some of Ron Edwards' analysis, which I think is spot-on right.

The central core of the idea that drove White Wolf to success was the pitch that its games delivered a more intense storytelling experience than D&D.  

I use the word "intense" on purpose.  Part of the allure of White Wolf was that it was pitched squarely at people going through the stages of becoming adults.  The bottom end was kids entering puberty, and the top end was people leaving college to start their "real lives".  A hallmark of this period of time is that people feel things more intensely than they do later in life.  Emotions become magnified.  And an outlet for those magnified emotions becomes a channel through which people can relieve themselves of the stress of having all that pent up emotion inside them.  White Wolf explicitly sought to provide that outlet.

And I use the word "more" on purpose.  The marketing message from White Wolf (including statements by its founders) often took the uber-position that D&D didn't tell stories AT ALL, and that a "new kind of game" was needed to do that, but we all know that was propaganda and not the actual beliefs of the people involved.  White Wolf evolved out of Lion Rampant, where the core team of Nephew, Tweet, Wiek & Rein*Hagen were experimenting with ways to use RPGs to tell stories differently than D&D told stories.  Their medium of larger exchange were APA zines and the very early internet.

This idea of "more intense storytelling" passed what my consulting partner Luke Peterschmidt & I call a "Blink Test" after the term coined by Malcolm Gladwell in the eponymous book.  In basic terms, that means that when presented with the idea, people instantly accepted it as true.  (The other odd, and important aspect of a Blink Test is that when you ask people afterwards how they reached the true/false conclusion, they are almost always wrong in their self-analysis.  This is a bug in the way the brain works, and it can be exploited once its nature is recognized.)

Once the player network started to "Blink Test" the White Wolf proposition, the follow on activity was to buy and play the resulting products.  And this is where things got really, really interesting.

Edwards notes, correctly, that other than some hand waving exposition, none of the White Wolf Storyteller Games actually presented any game content that was specifically designed to support the White Wolf proposition.  The worlds were interesting, the characters you could make with the games were really interesting, and the game mechanics were reasonably well designed (but not demonstrably better either simply as RPG rules, or specifically as RPG rules designed to generate more intense stories than other RPGs).

But people reacted weirdly to those games.  Because they were told they would get a more intense story experience, and because they clearly desired that, they tried to convince themselves that the White Wolf games actually were different than other RPGs.  Of course, one other interesting effect of the White Wolf marketing was that it reached and attracted an audience of people with very little prior RPG experience:  Women.  And of the men it attracted, it often attracted men who had not found prior RPG concepts interesting enough to learn anyway.  So you have this big population of people who are viewing the whole RPG experience through the lens of one game system, a game system which was marketed explicitly as delivering intense storytelling, and built a community of people who believed that was true, and told each other it was true constantly.

Of course, just because they believed it, and communicated it, didn't make it so.  And that's where Edwards' critique hits the mark.  He bought the value proposition, but didn't see how the product actually delivered on that proposition.  Because, in large measure, it didn't.  Instead of being a system-driven success, it was really a subject-matter success.  Playing Vampires turns out to have a whole potential player population who did not, and would not play Adventuring Heroes.

But Edwards still thinks the value proposition is, well, valuable.  What if you could actually make game mechanics that delivers a more intense story?  Since people already demonstrated that they want that, and are willing to pay money and dedicate time to doing it, it seems foolish not to attempt to actually succeed in the engineering of the product.

What we had for most of the 1990s was a disconnect in the industry which lead to a whole lot of dead-end products.  We had designers looking at White Wolf's success, saying to themselves "ok, I can do that", and then following that lead.  Following that lead even when it meant abandoning a formerly successful line of business.  The followup at FASA to BattleTech was Shadowrun.  The followup to Shadowrun was Earthdawn.  Nobody at FASA stopped the bus and said "hey, we seem to be really good at writing rules for combat games, why don't we focus on doing more of those kinds of games?"  Instead they said "let's do games where stories matter", and went bankrupt.  At TSR, you had people watching White Wolf and saying "we're fucking TSR, we can do better than some startup!"  So they did R.I.P.  (You know, the horror based RPG that they put into their catalogs, and pitched as their next big game, but never made?)  Oh, and they bastardized D&D by connecting it to a series of house-driven settings, where TSR NPCs were always more powerful than your NPCs, and TSR story decisions (often made in novels) were more important than the story decisions made at your game table.  And went bankrupt.

Ironically enough, White Wolf looked at the success of Vampire, and said "ah ha!  We have a winner", and did 3 versions of Werewolf and Mage, 2 versions of Wraith and Changeling, and one long string of Adventure, Aeon, and Trinity.  And nearly went bankrupt.

You can plot that path through just about any RPG company in the 1990s, except Palladium & Steve Jackson Games (both, notably, still alive & kicking!)

Ron Edwards' argument, which I agree with, is that these companies did not fail because people did not want more intense storytelling games.  They failed because the games they made did not deliver.  And worse, they often made more intense storytelling for the publishers at the expense of player fun.  There was a lot of intense storytelling done in the 1990s.  It just wasn't done by players.

What you had then was an industry that went crazy and ate itself.  Designer desires (to tell great stories) swamped player desires (to get tools to tell great stories).  What Ron Edwards is arguing, and an argument I join my voice to, is that designers who desire to give people tools to tell great stories may be a way out of the dumpster the whole field has crawled up into.

At WotC, we had a group of people who had the force of will to pick up D&D, and force it back into being a game people wanted to use to play.  But that was an exceptionally lucky thing, because Wizards could just as easily have tried to make it the uber-storytelling game in the White Wolf mode, with a massive metaplot and a supplement treadmill from here to eternity.  We made a lot of educated guesses, and we by and large guessed right.  But fixing D&D is only half the challenge.

Because this is not 1987, or 1997.  It's 2007.  And now we have a player network that has a whole bunch of people in it who want "more intense stories".  And we don't have a lot of games that actually deliver on that proposition.  And most of the games which do are thought experiments, and technology demonstrations from the fringe of the fringe, with tiny footprints of distribution, and a channel of communication that amounts to a handful of podcasts and one website.

So lets see what happens if we try to bring some of that technology out of the fringe, and hook it up with the biggest game in the business.  Worst case, in my opinion, is Ryan Dancey looks like a fucking idiot in public.  Again.  Best case, in my opinion, is that someone else picks up the ball and runs with it, and we get a whole new groundswell of games & players who make playing an RPG a central part of their lives.

What I don't see happening is an effect where the industry pulls out a .45 and shoots itself in the head again.

Ryan

Quote from: RSDanceyBecause this is not 1987, or 1997.  It's 2007.  And now we have a player network that has a whole bunch of people in it who want "more intense stories".  And we don't have a lot of games that actually deliver on that proposition.

Oh.

Okay, then.

That just means I'm an old school gamer; I don't give a fuck about 'more intense story'.

In 36 years of this hobby, with literally hundreds of different people, we have NEVER mentioned "story" before, during, or after our campaigns, some of which last for literal decades.

I now understand, thanks to your previous post, that the market has widened greatly.  I am still part of this market, but I am not part of your particular target segment.

Thank you for taking the time to explain things.  I appreciate it.

Carry on.  I'm off to kill some things and take their stuff.