Quote from: Pariah74;565889Whether my games have too much narrative to be considered an RPG is of so little importance to me, I find the whole debate mind boggling. Who gives a fuck?  

You didn't catch that shut-in podcast of someone reading the pundit's posts to Bach, did you? There are some seriously mentally disturbed people out there who for some reason appear to have congregated around this hobby, and try to cause things to get as unpleasant as they are likely to get on the internet (which can be financially expensive unpleasant, cf the Mongoose dogpile) for anyone that doesn't bow down to their particular flavour of sociopathic psychosis.

The debate is long over, such as it was, all that remains is mopping up the stragglers.

Quote from: CRKrueger;565914The fact that some adventures created for a RPG are actually railroads following a set plot simply means some module authors suck.  

That and module designers need to accommodate the vast majority of GMs out there who wouldn't have the experience or the time to make modules their own.

Rather than trying to hardcode sandboxes into the game, and in the process making it into something different and entirely more useless, I suspect most people do exactly what Pariah74 did, and just played along with however the group dealt with it. Which, to most, would be the rational response.

The only thing missing might be a disclaimer at the start of each module saying "more experienced DMs please feel free to make of this what you will", and probably module writers felt that was too obvious to bother with.

I don't know, the whole shared narrative thing seems to be the result of a bad experience with a DM a handful of people had, which has been leaped upon by whatever gang of internet hobos happens to come across it and ridden into the ground.

Quote from: CRKrueger;565914That, however, has very little do with the core differences in experience between an RPG and Storygame. The whole railroad issue is a deliberate sidetrack, whoever tries to use it, because it is completely beside the point.

100% agree, and that would be Silva.

The only thing I can really say is that in my short time coming back to 3e/Pathfinder gaming, I've had two GMs in a row either railroad, or make comments along the lines of "This story I'm writing is going to be so awesome" or "Why aren't you guys role-playing more I planned out this session for serious role-play" when it was obvious the players, with me being the only experienced D&D player at the table, and the rest new players who were obviously discouraged for being scolded for not playing correctly, just wanted to bash orc skulls and do piss-take jokes while chugging down cola and beer.

I have encountered that attitude at nearly every LGS I've been to.  In fact I've encountered far more pretentiousness about what RPGs are for among trad GMs than anywhere else, with the idea, not that the GM is a referee or judge, but that the GM is literally a dispensary of creative thought and story-telling in order to entertain the players, rather than everyone at the table contributing equally to doing cool things and having fun.  A lot of these people will insist that their method of GMing is correct, the "right" way, "real role-playing", etc.

Those are people I meet all over.  At LGSs, game clubs, IRL acquaintances and parties, not people I meet on the internet on a tiny-ass forum.  From my perspective, the Forge and most online forums aren't even a blip on the subcultural radar, but the adventure-path mindset and the idea that the GM is going to tell you their story is so pervasive that the best I can do is run some Basic or Trav or story-games or whatever else and hope a few people are interested enough to try a game where they actually have some agency, whether via their character only, or being able to influence the narrative.  Just something so that they can maybe enjoy playing a game rather than listening to a dude talk and plow your through their pre-planned scenes for four hours.

So for me, the subculture of GM-as-storyteller is way more real and problematic than the supposed threat of indie/story-games.

Quote from: Peregrin;565949The only thing I can really say is that in my short time coming back to 3e/Pathfinder gaming, I've had two GMs in a row either railroad, or make comments along the lines of "This story I'm writing is going to be so awesome" or "Why aren't you guys role-playing more I planned out this session for serious role-play" when it was obvious the players, with me being the only experienced D&D player at the table, and the rest new players who were obviously discouraged for being scolded for not playing correctly, just wanted to bash orc skulls and do piss-take jokes while chugging down cola and beer.

I have encountered that attitude at nearly every LGS I've been to.  In fact I've encountered far more pretentiousness about what RPGs are for among trad GMs than anywhere else, with the idea, not that the GM is a referee or judge, but that the GM is literally a dispensary of creative thought and story-telling in order to entertain the players, rather than everyone at the table contributing equally to doing cool things and having fun.  A lot of these people will insist that their method of GMing is correct, the "right" way, "real role-playing", etc.

Those are people I meet all over.  At LGSs, game clubs, IRL acquaintances and parties, not people I meet on the internet on a tiny-ass forum.  From my perspective, the Forge and most online forums aren't even a blip on the subcultural radar, but the adventure-path mindset and the idea that the GM is going to tell you their story is so pervasive that the best I can do is run some Basic or Trav or story-games or whatever else and hope a few people are interested enough to try a game where they actually have some agency, whether via their character only, or being able to influence the narrative.  Just something so that they can maybe enjoy playing a game rather than listening to a dude talk and plow your through their pre-planned scenes for four hours.

Do you think the solution in your railroad-happy social circle is to gut the roleplaying experience or to educate people on the correct way to GM? There are lots of different ways to do it badly, I'm sure someone has made a list or ten in our list obsessed hobby, railroading is only one of them. Will we attempt to use the rules as a hammer to deal with all of these potential behaviours?

Quote from: Peregrin;565949So for me, the subculture of GM-as-storyteller is way more real and problematic than the supposed threat of indie/story-games.

GM as storyteller is not the problem. People making oft repeated mistakes, often in all honesty, while GMing is the problem.

I didn't say story-games were a cure-all, did I?  I did include running Basic and Traveller, ie, sandbox/explorative games, ie procedurally traditional RPGs, in there, didn't I?  Also, I wouldn't consider it gutting if it's fun, no?  The point is to help folks appreciate an experience where they are not passive players or as a GM to give players more chances to be creative.  This is something that can be extrapolated from the experience of playing games that encourage active participation -- the explicit rules aren't the cure, but the act of play is.

Also, hello, I said at lots of LGSs.  Like, halfway across my state.  People I'm never going to game with more than once.  That doesn't constitute an isolated social circle.  I wouldn't even consider most of those people in my social circle.

This isn't a few people I personally hang out with making a fudge-up here or there or misinterpreting GM advice.  This is a whole generation (or more) of GMs raised on bad ideas about what makes games as a medium tick.

Quote from: Peregrin;565952Also, I wouldn't consider it gutting if it's fun, no?  The point is to help folks appreciate an experience where they are not passive players.

Snooker is fun, but I don't call it roleplaying. And hey, shared narrative games are no cure for that either, in fact if you have a social circle like yours, it only makes the problem a lot worse.

I still remember that circus over on the purple nurple where an entire gaming session was spent trying to bully and intimidate a player into giving up one of her characters' secrets, the gall of her. The cretin who started the thread got plenty of support, too.

So in fact you could say shared narrative games, to give them their proper title, only exacerbate the problem.

Quote from: Peregrin;565952I didn't say story-games were a cure-all, did I?  I did include running Basic and Traveller, ie, sandbox/explorative games, ie procedurally traditional RPGs, in there, didn't I?  

Also, hello, I said at lots of LGSs.  Like, halfway across my state.  People I'm never going to game with more than once.  That doesn't constitute an isolated social circle.  I wouldn't even consider most of those people in my social circle.

Oh you certainly did your best to leave no box unchecked. I'd say maybe one in five of the hundreds of people I've encountered even vaguely resemble what you're talking about, and even than its rarely malicious. Perhaps you're projecting a bit?

Quote from: LordVreeg;565792then you have not read one damn word about creating an open Sandbox that I, Ben, Estar, and others have written.  It has nothing to do with controling outcomes and everything to do with playing from within the role of the character in a setting vs. sharing the narrative control.

Or, to put it another way..play in my game (or at least respond intelligently) before you tell me what I am doing.

Yeah, fine, I run my D&D as a sandbox too, but don't pretend for a second it's how the majority of D&D players play.

For most people, D&D is about replicating high fantasy literature. There's a reason why sandbox play is part of something called the "Old School Renaissance" - it's because for decades the standard way most DMs ran their D&D campaigns was to come up with a plot arc, pre-planned encounters and locations, and usually a big bad villain at the heart of it for the players to defeat.

As I said in my earlier post, you can blame 2nd edition, or Dragonlance, for that, but it's been the way the majority of "traditional" games have been played for at least 23 years. And the same could be said of pretty much any traditional game, I'd imagine.

Quote from: Peregrin;565949Those are people I meet all over.  At LGSs, game clubs, IRL acquaintances and parties, not people I meet on the internet on a tiny-ass forum.  From my perspective, the Forge and most online forums aren't even a blip on the subcultural radar, but the adventure-path mindset and the idea that the GM is going to tell you their story is so pervasive that the best I can do is run some Basic or Trav or story-games or whatever else and hope a few people are interested enough to try a game where they actually have some agency, whether via their character only, or being able to influence the narrative.  Just something so that they can maybe enjoy playing a game rather than listening to a dude talk and plow your through their pre-planned scenes for four hours.

So for me, the subculture of GM-as-storyteller is way more real and problematic than the supposed threat of indie/story-games.

You've hit the nail on the head, for me. As far as I'm concerned, indie/story-games true "old school games" have more or less the same fundamental philosophy: giving the players agency. In OD&D the players have agency because they can go where they want, and do what they want, within the world the DM has created. In a story game - Dogs in the Vineyard, say - the players have agency because they can control the 'narrative' within certain strict limits.

The approach is different, but at root it comes from the same desire: to get away from the all-controlling GM who pre-plans everything and wants to "tell you their story", which in my view probably constitutes the vast majority of GMs in the hobby.

I think the problem is that you have to have actually played traditional RPGs in the way they were supposed to be played (i.e. sandboxy) and also have played story games properly on their own terms (i.e. without paranoid delusions) to realise that they have this core similarity.

Quote from: The Traveller;565953Snooker is fun, but I don't call it roleplaying. And hey, shared narrative games are no cure for that either, in fact if you have a social circle like yours, it only makes the problem a lot worse.

We'll see.

QuoteI still remember that circus over on the purple nurple where an entire gaming session was spent trying to bully and intimidate a player into giving up one of her characters' secrets, the gall of her. The cretin who started the thread got plenty of support, too.

So in fact you could say shared narrative games, to give them their proper title, only exacerbate the problem.

I don't post on tbp much, and I never saw that thread, so I don't have any good context for what you're talking about.

QuoteOh you certainly did your best to leave no box unchecked. I'd say maybe one in five of the hundreds of people I've encountered even vaguely resemble what you're talking about, and even than its rarely malicious. Perhaps you're projecting a bit?

It doesn't have to be malicious to be a problem.  And yes, a majority of the GMs I've had have railroaded or run games heavily guided by GM plot despite any actions the players took (basically allowing player 'freedom', but fudging when it resulted in something that could derail their set-pieces or their overarching idea for where the game should go).  Not some.  Not half.  Most.  And there are a number more who I just steered clear of because I knew I wasn't going to have fun listening to them tell me their great story.

Also, I could attempt to 'educate' them, but most people don't take kindly to being told that the way they believe is the right way is the wrong way.  The least offensive way to show them, IMO, is to run classic RPGs or other games, and, as I said above, allow the experience to speak for itself.  If you think story-games are so dissimilar that it's harmful to include them in that list of potential games, I can't do much for you, because I don't agree.

Quote from: Benoist;565750I play caps and poker and watch porn with the same people folks! I'm fairly well placed to say: ITS THE SAME FREAKING HOBBY GUYS.

Which story games have you actually played, Benoist? Just out of curiosity. I mean, you speak with such authority about them.

Quote from: Peregrin;565957We'll see.

I don't post on tbp much, and I never saw that thread, so I don't have any good context for what you're talking about.

We have seen. The only answer to "what's worse than a bad GM" is "five bad GMs".

Quote from: Peregrin;565957It doesn't have to be malicious to be a problem.  And yes, a majority of the GMs I've had have railroaded or run games heavily guided by GM plot despite any actions the players took (basically allowing player 'freedom', but fudging when it resulted in something that could derail their set-pieces or their overarching idea for where the game should go).  Not some.  Not half.  Most.  And there are a number more who I just steered clear of because I knew I wasn't going to have fun listening to them tell me their great story.

I'm a little confused as to why your anecdote should hold any more weight than my anecdote.

Quote from: Peregrin;565957If you think story-games are so dissimilar that it's harmful to include them in that list of potential games, I can't do much for you, because I don't agree.

If you think shared narrative games actually address the problem, I feel likewise.

Besides, its easy to educate people once you approach them correctly, with respect and patience.

Quote from: The Traveller;565960We have seen. The only answer to "what's worse than a bad GM" is "five bad GMs".

Hah.

QuoteI'm a little confused as to why your anecdote should hold any more weight than my anecdote.

I didn't say it did.  In fact I prefaced the last sentence of my original post with, "For me..."  I don't think expressing an opinion based on my own experiences would invalidate your opinion or experiences.

QuoteBesides, its easy to educate people once you approach them correctly, with respect and patience.

Tabletop RPGers, IME, are unusually dogmatic, whether you're talking about the Forge or someone who sees themselves as a GM above all else.  When two people are having a conversation with one of the LGS owners in your area about how much better Pathfinder is at telling stories than 4e, there's not a whole lot of logic going on there -- it's prettymuch just discussing religion at that point.

In that sort of situation, IMO it's better to teach by example and let them see for themselves.  Maybe you don't agree with the menu I've written up, but it's what I'll use.

Quote from: The Traveller;565942You didn't catch that shut-in podcast of someone reading the pundit's posts to Bach, did you? There are some seriously mentally disturbed people out there who for some reason appear to have congregated around this hobby, and try to cause things to get as unpleasant as they are likely to get on the internet (which can be financially expensive unpleasant, cf the Mongoose dogpile) for anyone that doesn't bow down to their particular flavour of sociopathic psychosis.

The debate is long over, such as it was, all that remains is mopping up the stragglers.

Not this hobby...they're called assholes. They exist everywhere, and in every community. They're just assholes, whatever their motivation.

You accept their existence, ignore them and move on.

You don't become an asshole to fight the assholes.


I don't think the debate ever existed, except in some backwaters of the internet. I have been a gamer and into gaming for over 25 years and I have never even heard of the term "swine."

I came to this board because I am interested in finding a message board where people discuss roleplaying games with some semblance of sanity...but the longer I stay, the less I think this place is any different from most message boards.

Oh well. Have fun guys.

Quote from: Peregrin;565949So for me, the subculture of GM-as-storyteller is way more real and problematic than the supposed threat of indie/story-games.

I agree. I was chatting with a very experienced GM just last week about how to avoid this very thing.

Quote from: Pariah74;565996Not this hobby...they're called assholes. They exist everywhere, and in every community. They're just assholes, whatever their motivation.

You accept their existence, ignore them and move on.

You don't become an asshole to fight the assholes.


I don't think the debate ever existed, except in some backwaters of the internet. I have been a gamer and into gaming for over 25 years and I have never even heard of the term "swine."

I came to this board because I am interested in finding a message board where people discuss roleplaying games with some semblance of sanity...but the longer I stay, the less I think this place is any different from most message boards.

Oh well. Have fun guys.

TheRPGPundit has this wannabe Hunter S. Thompson thing going on - that's where "swine" comes from.

There are some weird paranoiacs on this site who I think fail to realise how moronic and bizarre their views are. They're attracted to the "swine" idea in the same way that all conspiracy theorists come to believe what they believe - it's because they have nothing going on in their lives and need to invent something to be passionate about. If you steer clear of them you'll find a lot of good discussions here.

EDIT: In actual fact, I'll rephrase that and say that you don't need to steer clear of them per se, because they often know a lot about games and have good ideas. Just don't get drawn into trying to think you can talk sense to them.

Quote from: Pariah74;565996Not this hobby...they're called assholes. They exist everywhere, and in every community. They're just assholes, whatever their motivation.

You accept their existence, ignore them and move on.

You don't become an asshole to fight the assholes.


I don't think the debate ever existed, except in some backwaters of the internet. I have been a gamer and into gaming for over 25 years and I have never even heard of the term "swine."

I came to this board because I am interested in finding a message board where people discuss roleplaying games with some semblance of sanity...but the longer I stay, the less I think this place is any different from most message boards.

Yep. That reflects my experience too.