"Storygame" = Narrative "RPG", often without a GM, or where the Players (not the GM) are the final arbiter of what happens to the PC.

Quote from: ffilz;1053527I just hope that Story Games is NOT used in a way that lumps those games in with railroaded plot games where the GM (or the publisher) push their story line because that's a very different thing (and sometimes under the guise of a traditional RPG).

Ironic you said that because the railroad GM is perhaps the club used by the alternative (when they go negative which is no different than any other niche) beat over the head of traditional tabletop roleplaying games.

Last time I checked the story-games forum there were a fair bunch of threads talking about playing OSR games.

And this is why shoehorning games into categories like 'storygame' is a frustrating and meaningless pastime. It's the worst kind of word in that it seems to mean something when it actually doesn't, which is why most of the semantic wars over it are about establishing tribal lines rather than facilitating clear communication.

Quote from: estar;1053482One way I noticed to force a campaign to follow a particular narrative is constrain the options.

Of course.

Quote from: estar;1053482That the players only have a few options to choose form all of which are related to the narrative of the campaign.

You mean like Races, Classes, Spells, and Feats?

Quote from: estar;1053482In a D&D campaign this would be accomplished by a referee adjudicating in a way that most would call railroading.

Also all of the above.

Quote from: estar;1053482In Sorceror and Dog in the Vineyard, the mechanics are designed to narrow the scope of the campaign to a specific type of situation with a limited range of characters meant to deal with these situations.

Bullshit.

Quote from: estar;1053482Which is why these types of games don't have widespread appeal. They are so narrow that they have the same type of appeal as a adventure module or a campaign supplement.

Sorcerer is less focused and constrained than D&D.

Quote from: estar;1053482Again one can not look solely at the mechanics to determine what kind of game is being played in a given campaign.

The the designer failed, as mechanics are supposed to help the game be about what it's supposed to be about.

Quote from: estar;1053496I been pretty clear that is about focus not mechanics.

If the mechanics don't affect the focus, then they're useless as that's their entire purpose. Ditch that and you might as well just be flipping a coin.

Quote from: estar;1053496He presenting what in his view a cool place for for players to explore and wrote a set of mechanics to reflect the reality of the characters within that setting.

And if those mechanics had enabled players to dramatically edit scenes then the exploration aspect would have suffered, regardless of the intended focus.

Quote from: estar;1053496And what if the player doesn't want to play a sorcerer using just the original game? What if he doesn't want to deal with demons as his character?

You mean they don't want to deal with meaningful choices and dilemmas, which are what Demons are a metaphor for?

I guess find another game.

Quote from: estar;1053496Sorcerer could been something like that but it strips everything else out to the point is that the author only want the campaign to be about Sorcerers dealing with demons.

No, it ditches all the extraneous shit and distills the most meaningful elements. You're getting caught up on a literal interpretation of Demons and Sorcerers which never even existed in the original text.

Quote from: estar;1053514For games like Sorceror and Dogs in the Vineyard what makes them approach the boundary of storygames is that the range of outcome is compressed. Maybe not a particular outcome but a narrow range of narrative outcomes.

Both Sorcerer and Dogs have a wider range of outcomes than D&D, which again is highly constrained.

Quote from: TJS;1053537Last time I checked the story-games forum there were a fair bunch of threads talking about playing OSR games.

They're obviously trying to learn from more successful game publishers and GMs.

Quote from: estar;1053536Ironic you said that because the railroad GM is perhaps the club used by the alternative (when they go negative which is no different than any other niche) beat over the head of traditional tabletop roleplaying games.

Yea, so true... Railroading is certainly a club flailed wildly around...

Quote from: Anon Adderlan;1053541The the designer failed, as mechanics are supposed to help the game be about what it's supposed to be about.

Sometimes having mechanics for something gets in the way of that thing. Eg in-person character interaction where you talk as your character may be harmed by having social interaction mechanics. In a LARP you may actually want to hit people with your 'sword', not have the GM roll a die to see if you hit. In Prussian Free Kriegsspiel there are basically no mechanics, just referee adjudication based on his military knowledge plus a d6 randomiser where GM sets the odds based on that knowledge; and IMO that's often a good approach to various aspects of RPGs.

Quote from: Anon Adderlan;1053541And this is why shoehorning games into categories like 'storygame' is a frustrating and meaningless pastime. It's the worst kind of word in that it seems to mean something when it actually doesn't, which is why most of the semantic wars over it are about establishing tribal lines rather than facilitating clear communication.

I stated my opinion of what each category meant, why the boundaries are blurred and that the definition is just a center. And why the exercise is worth

You in contrast just throwing up your hands and say it just all meaningless and it all tribal.

Books on chess, chess strategy, and running chess tournament is have little use for running a tabletop roleplaying campaign. There may be one or two nuggets of useful information, but one has to wade to through a lot of irrelevant details. On contrast a work specifically written for tabletop roleplaying where the focus on playing a character interacting with a setting with their actions adjudicated by a human referee are far more useful. Between the two poles there is a spectrum where a work on gaming becomes more or less useful to running a tabletop roleplaying campaign.

My contention that works on running a campaign where on collaboratively builds narrative or story are not as useful to running a campaign where players interact with a setting as their character with their actions with their actions adjudicated by a human referee.

Quote from: Anon Adderlan;1053541You mean like Races, Classes, Spells, and Feats?

You mean Elf, Dwarf, Halfling, Gnome, Dragonborn, Human, Half-Orc, Tiefling, Half-Elf, Fighter, Wizard, Rogue, Cleric, Druid, Paladin, Barbarian, Bard, Warlock, and Sorcerer versus Human, Sorcerer?

Of course reducing everything to Stamina, Will, Lore with a dice pool mechanics that produces an abstract degree of success is much more flexible and clear than OD&D default of having the players describe to the referee what they are attempting and the referee looking at one or more the player's character six score to decide on what the result going to be.

Quote from: Anon Adderlan;1053541Sorcerer is less focused and constrained than D&D.

So the core rules support my choice for my character to become a pirate on the high seas and ignore all the demon summoning which is clearly a loser's game considering the cost to one's humanity?

Of course the fore mention system of defining character through Stamina, Will, and Lore coupled with the dice pool system could be adapted to anything. But wait I could do that with six ability score and a d20 roll high system versus a target number as well?

Quote from: Anon Adderlan;1053541Then the designer failed, as mechanics are supposed to help the game be about what it's supposed to be about.

In tabletop roleplaying game the mechanics supposed to reflect the reality of the setting or genre the game targets. Since we are talking about entire worlds the designer has to pick and choose what elements to detail so there is that. One may opt to have detailed mechanics for social interaciton and abstract combat while another opts for the reverse. In either case it the mechanics need to reflect some elements of the genre or setting. With genre the setting is still there but in far more generic sense. Which make it a genre in the first place.

Quote from: Anon Adderlan;1053541Ditch that and you might as well just be flipping a coin.

You mean like rolling a dice pool and creatively interpreting what the degree of success means?

Humor aside, I think one should go with the level of abstraction that works for them. Clearly how Edwards designed Sorcerer resonates with you and if you had a bunch of fun campaigns with it more power to you. But how Sorcerer abstract things is neither a virtue nor a sin. My criticism of Sorcerer is that it only used to present a setting where player play characters summoning demons.  A very narrow scenario, that demon invariably cost the character their humanity. That if one does something else to escape the referee is left with very little to go on and has some work to do.

In contrast Call of Cthulu it opted to use Basic Roleplaying and kept all the other elements of that system even though it didn't directly relate to its primary focus on the Mythos. It is far less work for the referee to continue the campaign if the player decide his character doesn't want to bat shit crazy from all the weird and horrible things they been dealing with and return to a more straightforward life as a Chicago gangster or a G-Man.

Quote from: Anon Adderlan;1053541And if those mechanics had enabled players to dramatically edit scenes then the exploration aspect would have suffered, regardless of the intended focus.

You mean like deciding that perhaps 10,000 gp is enough. That risking life and limb in dark forest and underground labyrinth is not worth the risk. Then opening a potion shop in City State and have the campaign continued from there. I done that several time in various Majestic Wilderlands. One campaign had a phase where the focus was on building a crossroad inn and then afterwards keeping it prosperous and their customers hale and healthy.

Quote from: Anon Adderlan;1053541You mean they don't want to deal with meaningful choices and dilemmas, which are what Demons are a metaphor for?

I was handling it much the same way back in high school in the early 80s using AD&D. Players learned to stop messing around with demons. As their aid nearly always managed to twist their plans into a morally repugnant outcome. Except I lived in the middle of a rural area and certainly didn't write as well as Edwards.

Quote from: Anon Adderlan;1053541No, it ditches all the extraneous shit and distills the most meaningful elements. You're getting caught up on a literal interpretation of Demons and Sorcerers which never even existed in the original text.

So I put my google fu to work and found the apprentice version of Sorcerer here on the Internet Archive. Which was a free download circa early 2000s.

https://web.archive.org/web/19990502221103/http://www.sorcerer-rpg.com:80/

From the first paragraph

QuoteIn this roleplaying game, each player creates and runs a powerful sorcerer in the modern-day world. Each character (PC) comes equipped with at least one demon he or she has bound and at any time may try to summon and bind more demons.

Seem pretty clear cut to me.

Was not able to find the mid 90s version that was posted for free. Probably buried somewhere on usenet. The stat system, the dice pool mechanism, can be used for other genres and setting or even gasp as the basis for a RPG with a broader focus. But in the case of Sorcerer it was used to present a narrow premise.

Quote from: Anon Adderlan;1053541Both Sorcerer and Dogs have a wider range of outcomes than D&D, which again is highly constrained.

I got 15 years of running (5 in the 80s and 10 from 2008) of running the Majestic Wilderlands using AD&D and OD&D that says otherwise.

Quote from: S'mon;1053577Sometimes having mechanics for something gets in the way of that thing. Eg in-person character interaction where you talk as your character may be harmed by having social interaction mechanics.

I'd say that's only true when the "thing" in question is not the main goal of the game. Like, if you cut combat and exploration rules out of D&D, you may as well play Lets pretend. On the other hand cutting out things like skill proficiencies/social mechanics/"Inspiration"etc. would be acceptable, because those are peripheral to the game's main themes.

Makes sense?

Quote from: Anon AdderlanAnd this is why shoehorning games into categories like 'storygame' is a frustrating and meaningless pastime. It's the worst kind of word in that it seems to mean something when it actually doesn't, which is why most of the semantic wars over it are about establishing tribal lines rather than facilitating clear communication.

Spot on. May I have this in my sig?

Quote from: Itachi;1053602I'd say that's only true when the "thing" in question is not the main goal of the game. Like, if you cut combat and exploration rules out of D&D, you may as well play Lets pretend. On the other hand cutting out things like skill proficiencies/social mechanics/"Inspiration"etc. would be acceptable, because those are peripheral to the game's main themes.

Makes sense?

If you cut out the exploration and combat rules of D&D, combat is still possible. In tabletop what characters can do is not defined by the rules but by the setting. The players can still choose to fight and rightfully ask the referee "What happens next." whether there are any formal rules for combat or not.

And it not as arbitrary as Let's Pretend either by your own example character level, attributes, and skills are still present to use as a foundation for a ruling.

I said in other threads on this site and elsewhere is that it hard to damage RPG so badly that a referee can't use it to handle what a players wants to do as his character within a setting. Even Dogs in the Vineyard and Sorcerer ultimately fails to do this because the fundamental interplay of players interacting with a setting as their characters with their actions adjudicated by a human referee is still preserved. Anything a character can do within the setting of Dogs in the Vineyard and Sorcerer is fair game despite the lack of rules both games have to anything outside of their narrow scope.

By omitting so much, Edwards makes it so much easier for a campaign to focus on roleplaying Dogs dealing with moral issues in the old west, or sorcerers struggling to retain their humanity while dealing with demons that hobbyist playing those RPGs wind focusing on what Edwards wants them to focus on.

Quote from: Itachi;1053602I'd say that's only true when the "thing" in question is not the main goal of the game. Like, if you cut combat and exploration rules out of D&D, you may as well play Lets pretend. On the other hand cutting out things like skill proficiencies/social mechanics/"Inspiration"etc. would be acceptable, because those are peripheral to the game's main themes.

Makes sense?

I don't agree, and I think the idea that you need rules for the main focus of a game is a Forgeist fallacy. A Braunstein type social LARP game might focus on social interaction & diplomacy, but only have mechanics for off-stage stuff like the results of mass battles, and peripheral stuff like one character trying to kill another. In these sorts of games the mechanics are used to quickly and easily resolve peripheral elements to allow focus on the important stuff.

Quote from: estar;1053617If you cut out the exploration and combat rules of D&D, combat is still possible. In tabletop what characters can do is not defined by the rules but by the setting. The players can still choose to fight and rightfully ask the referee "What happens next." whether there are any formal rules for combat or not.

And it not as arbitrary as Let's Pretend either by your own example character level, attributes, and skills are still present to use as a foundation for a ruling.

I said in other threads on this site and elsewhere is that it hard to damage RPG so badly that a referee can't use it to handle what a players wants to do as his character within a setting. Even Dogs in the Vineyard and Sorcerer ultimately fails to do this because the fundamental interplay of players interacting with a setting as their characters with their actions adjudicated by a human referee is still preserved. Anything a character can do within the setting of Dogs in the Vineyard and Sorcerer is fair game despite the lack of rules both games have to anything outside of their narrow scope.

By omitting so much, Edwards makes it so much easier for a campaign to focus on roleplaying Dogs dealing with moral issues in the old west, or sorcerers struggling to retain their humanity while dealing with demons that hobbyist playing those RPGs wind focusing on what Edwards wants them to focus on.

One thing to set the record straight... Dogs in the Vinyard is by Vincent Baker not Ron Edwards...
 
And yes, both of those games allow the player to have their character do anything that makes sense in the setting (and some things that may be on the edge of making sense). In DitV (the only one of the two that I've actually played), those things will just happen unless they drive into a conflict with another character in the game. Or they won't happen because they genuinely don't make sense ("I fly back home to Denver" won't fly in DitV...).

I see over on Story Games there is an attempt to make a definition for Story Game that starts to sound less like an RPG that either Sorceror of Dogs in the Vinyard, I have no exposure to the games that may be claimed under that definition, so it's hard for me to make much comment.

Frank

Quote from: S'mon;1053622I don't agree, and I think the idea that you need rules for the main focus of a game is a Forgeist fallacy. A Braunstein type social LARP game might focus on social interaction & diplomacy, but only have mechanics for off-stage stuff like the results of mass battles, and peripheral stuff like one character trying to kill another. In these sorts of games the mechanics are used to quickly and easily resolve peripheral elements to allow focus on the important stuff.

Vincent Baker actually talked some about the Fruitful Void. I wish he had expanded more on that concept, but the idea was that there were important bits of the game that were NOT directly covered by the mechanics, that there was something in between the mechanics. I think that concept might be relevant in understanding how D&D moved from a wargame to an RPG.

I also wonder if some of the resistance to "Story Games" comes from games trying to put that which makes a game an RPG to a given person into mechanics in a way that moves that "thing" out of the Fruitful Void?

Frank

Quote from: S'mon;1053622I don't agree, and I think the idea that you need rules for the main focus of a game is a Forgeist fallacy. A Braunstein type social LARP game might focus on social interaction & diplomacy, but only have mechanics for off-stage stuff like the results of mass battles, and peripheral stuff like one character trying to kill another. In these sorts of games the mechanics are used to quickly and easily resolve peripheral elements to allow focus on the important stuff.

Quote from: ffilz;1053627Vincent Baker actually talked some about the Fruitful Void. I wish he had expanded more on that concept, but the idea was that there were important bits of the game that were NOT directly covered by the mechanics, that there was something in between the mechanics. I think that concept might be relevant in understanding how D&D moved from a wargame to an RPG.

I also wonder if some of the resistance to "Story Games" comes from games trying to put that which makes a game an RPG to a given person into mechanics in a way that moves that "thing" out of the Fruitful Void?

I agree with S'mon - though to be fair to the Forge, the idea predates The Forge. I saw in many pre-Forge discussions that people think that if a game has 50 pages of combat mechanics and 1 about diplomacy, it is most about combat.

Here is Baker's 2005 thread about the "Fruitful Void", for what it's worth -

http://lumpley.com/index.php/anyway/thread/119

At the time, my first comment was:

QuoteI agree strongly with the sentiment.  Too often, I've seen people suggest that a game's meaning is about whatever is most obvious on the surface--and advise the same.  i.e. Want a game about faith?  Give PCs a "Faith" stat.  And so forth.  I think this sort of literalism is damaging to creation of new games as well as to understanding of old games.

This fruitful void stuff is interesting and related to what I was talking about, but not exactly the same (I think). They make the point I think that if your game has a Sanity or Honour stat then the game is not about sanity, it's about other stuff which may degrade or affect Sanity or Honour, use them as resources etc. But the focus of the game can't really be on questions of sanity or honour - or Humanity or Virtue etc. So games like Call of Cthulu, D&D Oriental Adventures, Vampire etc must be about something else, such as investigation, exploration, dungeon crawling, combat et al. You are more likely to see a Combat score for characters in a game about courtly intrigue than in a game about combat. A game *really* about combat may end up looking like a first person shooter computer game, or those old dueling flipbook things, where it's all about player ability. The more mechanics for combat resolution get added, the less about combat it actually is.

Likewise when a game has a score for Diplomacy Bonus (3e D&D) or Assassination % (1e AD&D), I think it's giving a strong signal that it is not about diplomacy or assassination.