Quote from: Voros;986711I know many here get their panties twisted if anyone deigns to say anything negative about the nerd subculture but I'd say the problem for much of the subculture is that it is so self-referencial and has so much reverence towards such a narrow range of cultural material (Star Wars, LotR, Marvel comics) that it chokes on its own tropes and constant fanservice.

Very true, particularly with an emphasis on new material and a glaring lack of knowledge of what came before, at least among people I've known. They know Star Wars, Star Trek, whatever the new hip sci fi show is, but haven't read any of their antecedents and for the most part just want to play out a sort of mimicry of what they liked in the TV show or movie...

That picture of Danny Trejo is awesome.  Is Machete Kills In Space out yet?

Quote from: Itachi;984772So, thoughts? Are there genres the tabletop medium can't really do? If so, should we accept this fact and move on, or is worth trying to find a way to do it?

I call BS on that. There's no genres that TTRPGs can't do.
There's genres that particular players can't do:). And that includes me, for the record - in my case, it's high fantasy and four-colour superheroes.

OTOH, I'm pretty positive that most SF RPGs I've played had these elements. Our Eclipse Phase campaign was chock-full of them...as well as of explosions.
How? The GM took the challenges of the setting's technology, and presented us with situations that would happen in the setting. Then we had to act on them.
In doing so, we had to take a stance.
Add to this that we had created rather different characters, and you'd see how it went. At one point, we remarked that Katya and Chand were basically opposites. He was an Indian psychochirurgist who felt most comfortable as an infomorph - he even had an advantage reflecting that - and his ideal solutions involved everything which didn't include him being there physically.

She was a gal who felt uneasy unless sleeved in a combat morph, and preferred physical pleasures, the kicking of butts - literally - and wanted to get an even stronger, even faster body...as long as it was organic. She didn't like the clanking masses, and would consider it a punishment not to have a body.

When we got to deal with the merged consciousnesses of several personalities, the differences in approach could not be ignored;).
The same can be told about the other SF RPG campaigns I've played. As a rule, RPGs are very good at following an important rule of storytelling: "Show, don't tell".
In fact, I wish more authors remembered it;).

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;985037But then one of the players cracks a joke to dispel the tension.

And the Referee nips the laughter into the mud;).

Quote from: Itachi;985066That's exactly the kind of premise I'm talking about. But how to create a game that natively goes for it by default? Aka each time the group sits down to play, the game rules/framework/instructions enforce exactly that?

You write a setting, not rules, that facilitates this experience. A game where all ships are STL and interstellar communication goes at the speed of ships would be one of those.

Quote from: DavetheLost;985181No, I do not agree that RPGs are only useful to facilitate stories involving action/adventure and nothing else. Quite the contrary.

Most RPG mechanics focus on action because that is the part of the game that most requires game mechanics to resolve. I can, and have, run four hour plus game sessions in which not a single die was rolled. No dice were required because the players were role playing, talking to each other in character, talking to NPCs, etc. I don't need mechanics for social interaction. I have live humans sitting at my table for that.

I agree.

QuoteYou also seem to miss that movies, novels, and RPGs are different media and work in different ways. Take the "Council of Elrond" scene in Lord of the Rings. As written it is a long piece of exposition delivered mostly by a single character in an extended monologue. In his movie Peter Jackson instead chose to show us the events being described by Elrond. He also chose to put many of them in a prologue scene at the begining of the movie. In an RPG the scene would be a GM reading a wall of text to his players until their eyes glazed over.

No, in an RPG it would be the GM spreading this information and luring the players to find it;). As you said, different mediums.

QuoteFurther RPGs do not have plots that must be followed by the characters. In RPGs all outcomes are uncertain until the GM decides or the dice are rolled.

Just like in life.
But RPGs can have plots, they're just unnecessary. (Depends on what you call "a plot", though).

QuoteCertain types of "stories" are better told in media other than RPGs. In fact RPGs are not a great medium for telling stories. They better at creating interactive, shared, freeform experiences. The stories are what happens after when the group talks about what happened.

I consider the re-telling of what happened to be part of the experience, so I'd disagree...but that would be too nit-picky even for me:D!

Quote from: AsenGAs a rule, RPGs are very good at following an important rule of storytelling: "Show, don't tell".

I agree so much that I invented my own for games: "Play, don't show".

Quote from: Itachi;987727I agree so much that I invented my own for games: "Play, don't show".

No need reinventing the wheel, you can use the storytelling variant without changes.

Nah, I think the distinction is important. "Show" as a label seems inapropriate for such an interactive media as games. In fact, I'm radical in this - when I play, whatever the game (be it videogames, RPGs, boardgames, sports, etc) I want to be actively playing and taking decisions as much as possible. Put me in a passive mode with your "showing" and I will feel like I'm wasting precious time.

YMMV, of course.

Quote from: Itachi;987754Nah, I think the distinction is important. "Show" as a label seems inapropriate for such an interactive media as games. In fact, I'm radical in this - when I play, whatever the game (be it videogames, RPGs, boardgames, sports, etc) I want to be actively playing and taking decisions as much as possible. Put me in a passive mode with your "showing" and I will feel like I'm wasting precious time.

YMMV, of course.

Playing and showing are the same thing in games, which is why the distinction is useless.

Well, this is just a pet theory of mine, so don't sweat over it ( ). Anyway, my logic is this...

I think "showing" as a word is still related to exposition, and implies that someone (or more than one) is taking a passive stance, which may be appropriate for media as Literature and Theather which are essentially about storytelling. "Playing" on the other hand implies a more continuous interaction and active stances between the parts involved, thus more appropriate for games (tabletop, videogames, boardgames, cardgames, etc). Usually the later prompts a decision or action by the participants, which I think is the key here, while the others not necessarily. Example:

- In tabletop RPGs:

tell: The GM takes 15 min verbally explaining why the orcs are a horrible menace to your village.
show: The GM shows the horrible acts of orcs in your village through the entire session (a kidnapped boy here, a slayed old man there, etc.) so you have a more tactile idea of the "horribleness" of the orcs.
play: The Orc killed your father. WHAT DO YOU DO? ( --> this prompts an immediate action or decision by the player!)

- in videogames:

tell: A wall of text (narrated of not) explains you this is a dangerous cyberpunk world.
show: An interactible cutscene shows you this is a cyberpunk world - you walk through a dirty street with neon signs above and junkies around asking money. You look up and see the sky is the color of television tuned to a dead channel, and it will rain any moment now.
play: A women in black trenchcoat approaches. "Follow me. NOW. your life depends on it!". She has chrome in their temples and looks menacing. WHAT DO YOU DO? (--> this prompts an immediate action or decision by the player!)

So, I think games will contain parts of the 3 choices above. But usually the later one will be more fitting to the medium, because when someone is playing a game usually he wants to be actively taking decisions (or shooting a ball, if it's basketball or something Lol). As Sid Meier once said, "A good game is a series of interesting decisions" and I agree with this. At least my time as a gamer (be it videogames, RPGs or football) seems to corroborate with this and gimme more fun the more I am on an active stance while playing. God knows how many times I wanted to quit a match of football because there was an individualistic player wanting the ball for himself, or a GM who was more interested in telling (and showing) us his story. Now there are exceptions of course. People who prefer being "told stories" will prefer the first and second choices (a railroader in RPGs, a story-based videogame, etc).


Edit: a casual goodle search shows some sources also got to this conclusion (Tv Tropes, an interesting article, a Gamasutra article). So it's not so off base as I thought. I swear I never looked the concept before at google.

Hmm, I wonder if thematic mechanics like seen in Pendragon couldn't be considered a stance of "play don't show". After all, it's another way to explore stories, but different from the "tell/show" it directly taps on the "play" part and prompts some kind of interaction, in a way exclusive to this media.

Sorry, man, I think that the difference between "show" and "play" is largely hair-splitting:).
Show: "You reach the village, or what's left of it. The stench of unburied bodies is permeating the ruins, and there's enough bodies here - even the livestock has been murdered. Further left, you see the charred remains of those who were burned on slow fire, those that were flayed, and those who got honey smeared over them before being buried in an ants' nest - meaning there's orc infestation...As you can guess, the supplies you were hoping to find here, are nowhere in sight. What do you do?"
Play: "The orc kills your father, cutting his throat and laughing in delight while the old man starts drowning in his other blood. What do you do?"
What's the difference, other than the fact that one is an act you witness, and the other is you coming across the traces of pretty much the same act?
Yes, you might argue that one exists. To me, that's splitting hairs;).

The only distinction that isn't hair-splitting is if the GM "tells" by essentially making scenes in story-like fashion that are intended to give exposition but give the PCs no real opportunity to interact meaningfully in the sense of being able to change things. That is, exposition-by-railroad.

That's total shit.