The only time in recent memory that I saw a player walk in a huff - it had nothing to do with gaming. One woman felt the other had been short or rude with her, while the other felt that her choice and style of piercings had been insulted or slighted.

Since I was the GM I had to play peracemaker. People made phone calls and e-mails - a month later they were both back at the same table gaming together again.


- Ed C.

Quote from: The Butcher;379144tl;dr RPGs are their own thing.

I am doing it right?

Yes.  The water got muddied a bit, the proper answer is that you are on the right track.

I think the actual issue is what concrete thing the OP is in reaction to.  

There are many RPGs and/or supplements that draw inspiration from and/or imitate other media.  The obvious are adaptations like WEG's Star Wars RPG, Marvel Superheroes, or Amber Diceless.  These are trying to emulate specific non-RPG source material - and their advice often has suggestions for making the game more like that source material.  

Is that a bad thing?  

If not, then what is the bad thing that we're talking about?

Quote from: jhkim;379219Is that a bad thing?

Well. Is it, in your opinion?

Quote from: jhkim;379219If not, then what is the bad thing that we're talking about?

That there might be an untapped potential for RPGs to explore new directions by trying to not endlessly emulate other media. Is there?

Quote from: Benoist;379220Well. Is it, in your opinion?

In my opinion, no.  I like Star Wars D6, Marvel Superheroes, and Amber Diceless.  I think they're all commendable RPGs, including their advice.  

In the same way, I like a lot of movies that are adapted from books.  The Graduate, The Maltese Falcon, High Fidelity, The Princess Bride, the Lord of the Rings films, The Silence of the Lambs, and many others.  

Quote from: Benoist;379220That there might be an untapped potential for RPGs to explore new directions by trying to not endlessly emulate other media. Is there?

There absolutely is such potential.  There is nothing wrong and plenty right with doing RPGs that aren't adapted from or inspired by books/movies/etc.  There's no conflict.  We can have great RPGs that draw on books/movies/etc. - and we can have great RPGs that do their own thing.  

I think that Paranoia is a good example of an RPG that is its own thing.  It has a very strong and definite feel, yet isn't adapted from any particular work or genre.   More recently, I just wrapped up a Lacuna campaign - which I think is also rather original, drawing on elements of role-playing.

In the context of the whole GNS debate, I think the problem a lot of people have with RPGs serving some kind of cathartic "literary" function isn't a matter of whether it emulates the style of other media so much as GNS-advocates have an overly narrow conception of "literature." I do think RPGs serve a kind of "literary" function for a lot of roleplayers and world-builders; it's just not the one that GNSers care about.

To be purposefully condescending, GNS-advocates adhere to what I would call the "AP English" view of literature as necessarily consisting of elements of actual life being turned into symbols to express broad, moral themes. This is what "literature" is for many people, but in reality, literature has a much broader scope, especially when you consider both realist and post-structuralist literary works.

To be less condescending but equally harsh, implicit in the GNS view that "simulationists" can't create meaningful fiction is the idea that abstract concepts and themes really only exist as abstract concepts and themes. They are not really present in life. Life, just like simulationist gaming, is a mish-mash of events that only take on literary or thematic significance when "edited" down to a more coherent sequence of events after the fact. This "editing", of course, is guided by an idea that selects only those scenes that serve its purposes.

The problem for me (and others who dislike heavy-handed symbolism in their art) is that this robs the ideas of both their cathartic and intellectual value. The ideas don't really have any relation to the world. They only use elements of the world to express themselves. The world itself is a meaningless heap of raw material consisting mostly of aimless drudgery.

In this sense, there's an element of nihilism (in the Nietzschean sense) to the GNS Narrativist. The world lacks value and importance until it is crammed into some higher form that can't actually be found within it. But if "narrative" is just intellectual wankery that uses elements of a world to symbolically express ultimately unrelated concepts... who the heck cares?

And this is precisely why a lot of 19th/20th/21st century literature doesn't use the theme-symbol model. Rather, it depicts "organic" worlds and characters in a naturalistic way to learn something about the nuances and conflicts within the chaotic mess of life. These works consciously refuse to present clearly defined "narratives" and moral positions, but they are often more emotionally and intellectually satisfying to the extent that they immerse us in something that primarily reflects actual life, not an abstract idea. A "story" still emerges, but it is often an inconclusive one; however, this inconclusiveness does not preclude any sort of "dramatic satisfaction." It's the difference between something like "The Grapes of Wrath" (a moralistic, symbol-laden travel story that focuses on ideas) and "The Road" (an ambiguous, naturalistic travel story that focuses on world and character).

And this is what I think really divides GNS-ers from people like me. It's not a question of whether "simulation" or "narrative" has more literary, emotional and intellectual merit. It's a question of whether you think a living, breathing world bears more significance and relevance than abstract ideas. It's a conflict between world-first and idea-first, or to be an even bigger pretentious ass than Ron Edwards, it's a matter of sand-boxers being existentialists at heart and story-gamers being Platonists at heart.

With that said, as a disclaimer, I don't play RPGs to glean insight into the nature of life and humanity. I play to explore worlds, and sometimes, this play yields something surprisingly interesting in the non-geekfest sense. At its best, I find free-form world exploration to be a richer and more vibrant experience than the ritualistic expression of abstract ideas found in "narrativist" play. At its worst, killing a kobold is still more fun than listening to some geek cry about some banal moral concepts.

Welcome, Emboldened Navigator.

In the context of the whole GNS debate, I think the problem a lot of people have with RPGs serving some kind of cathartic "literary" function isn't a matter of whether it emulates the style of other media so much as GNS-advocates have an overly narrow conception of "literature."

To be purposefully condescending, GNS-advocates adhere to what I would call the "AP English" view of literature as necessarily consisting of elements of actual life being turned into symbols to express broad, moral themes. This is what "literature" is for many people, but in reality, literature has a much broader scope, especially when you consider both realist and post-structuralist literary works.

To be less condescending but equally harsh, implicit in the GNS view that "simulationists" can't create meaningful fiction is the idea that abstract concepts and themes really only exist as abstract concepts and themes. They are not really present in life. Life, just like simulationist gaming, is a mish-mash of events that only take on literary or thematic significance when "edited" down to a more coherent sequence of events after the fact. This "editing", of course, is guided by an idea that selects only those scenes that serve its purposes.

The problem for me (and others who dislike heavy-handed symbolism in their art) is that this robs the ideas of both their cathartic and intellectual value. The ideas don't really have any relation to the world. They only use elements of the world to express themselves. The world itself is a meaningless heap of raw material consisting mostly of boring drudgery.

In this sense, there's an element of nihilism (in the Nietzschean sense) to the GNS Narrativist. The world lacks value and importance until it is crammed into some higher form that can't actually be found within it. But if "narrative" is just intellectual wankery that uses elements of a world to express ultimately unrelated symbols... who the heck cares?

And this is precisely why a lot of 19th/20th/21st century literature doesn't use the theme-symbol model. Rather, it depicts "organic" worlds and characters in a naturalistic way to learn something about the nuances and conflict within the chaotic mess of life. These works consciously don't churn out clearly defined "narratives" and moral positions, but they are often more emotionally and intellectually satisfying to the extent that we are immersed in something that primarily reflects actual life, not an abstract idea. A "story" still emerges, but it is often an inconclusive one; however, this inconclusiveness does not preclude any sort of "dramatic satisfaction." It's the difference between something like "The Grapes of Wrath" (a moralistic, symbol-laden travel story that focuses on ideas) and "The Road" (an ambiguous, naturalistic travel story that focuses on world and character).

And this is what I think really divides GNS-ers from people like me. It's not a question of whether "simulation" or "narrative" has more literary, emotional and intellectual merit. It's a question of whether you think a living, breathing world bears more significance and relevance than abstract ideas. It's a conflict between world-first and idea-first, or to be an even bigger pretentious ass than Ron Edwards, it's a matter of sand-boxers being existentialists at heart.

With that said, as a disclaimer, I don't play RPGs to glean insight into the nature of life and humanity. I play to explore worlds. At its best, I find free-form world exploration to be a richer experience than the ritualistic expression of abstract ideas. At its worst, killing a kobold is still more fun than listening to some geek cry about some banal moral concepts.

I've never ever met a storygamer I'd describe as a "platonist". Pretty much every one of them I've ever met has been a post-modernist relativist. In other words, an intellectual degenerate.

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPundit;379954I've never ever met a storygamer I'd describe as a "platonist". Pretty much every one of them I've ever met has been a post-modernist relativist. In other words, an intellectual degenerate.

RPGPundit

Well, implicit in my rant above is that story-gamers aren't as "edgy" or "revolutionary" as they fancy themselves to be. They may embrace artsy-sounding rhetoric and make classically Romantic forays into the "darkness of the human psyche blah blah," but fundamentally, they're actually hardened traditionalists trading in abstract cultural symbols as if they represented a higher truth than life as its actually experienced.

A genuinely "post-modern" game would consciously reject any kind of defined narrative structure or coherent, "stable" themes... the very essence of story-gaming. The only things I can think of that might qualify would be like Munchkin RPG or maybe something like "Gamist, Narrativist, and Simulationist Trying to Play Two Different Editions of GURPS at the Same Time: The RPG."

Quote from: EmboldenedNavigator;380037Well, implicit in my rant above is that story-gamers aren't as "edgy" or "revolutionary" as they fancy themselves to be. They may embrace artsy-sounding rhetoric and make classically Romantic forays into the "darkness of the human psyche blah blah," but fundamentally, they're actually hardened traditionalists trading in abstract concepts as higher truths.

I think you're really on to something here.

I do agree with the fundamental essence of the point; that they're hypocrites who are full of shit.

But traditionalists? I don't know, particularly when many of them want to destroy the very foundations RPGs are based on.
I suppose, yes, that they want to replace them with their own new hierarchies, so their deal isn't about some kind of post-modernist freedom-from-framework but rather a kind of maoist plan to destroy the old gods and put themselves in their place as tyrants.
That wouldn't make them "traditionalists", then; they may not be exactly post-modernists, and their claims to relativism are a lie (as are almost everyone's who claims to be a relativist), but they certainly want to destroy the existing concept of the RPG as we know it.

RPGPundit

Yeah, that's an important distinction. They're not "old school" in any RPG sense, but they're not quite avant garde revolutionaries either.

They're more like stuffy, Victorian colonialists looking to civilize the heathen "natives" of the hobby.

Quote from: EmboldenedNavigator;380318They're more like stuffy, Victorian colonialists looking to civilize the heathen "natives" of the hobby.

Pretty good comparison in that they might come from different types of media, look at RPGs while holding their noses, and try to "reeducate" gamers to make them "progress" on their way to "civilization". Yeah. Good comparison.

Quote from: RPGPundit;380300That wouldn't make them "traditionalists", then; they may not be exactly post-modernists, and their claims to relativism are a lie (as are almost everyone's who claims to be a relativist), but they certainly want to destroy the existing concept of the RPG as we know it.

I think that's the gist of what Emboldened Navigator was saying. The "traditionalist" label is a literary one, in that the "Story Now" cultists are actually advocating a very traditional narrative structure, as opposed to modernist and postmodernist writers (who did not necessarily adhere to any given model of narrative structure, and often wrote with no clear rhyme or reason).