Quote from: Effete on October 16, 2022, 01:52:14 PM

Quote from: Ratman_tf on October 16, 2022, 06:26:17 AM

Quote from: Effete on October 16, 2022, 02:46:13 AM
Counter-question: Who really gives a shit?

I do. Because as a GM, you're in the position of trying to craft a fun experience. Which leads to the question, "What is fun?".

Fun is a subjective experience, not something narrowly defined by a title.

I somewhat disagree. While it's a subjective experience, there are trends that show that many fun experiences are experienced by groups of people. Say, watching professional sports. I don't care to watch it, but there's a huge audience for it, and I feel safe in saying that a lot of people find watching professional sports fun.

Here's an easy one. Combat in RPGs is fun. I'm quite sure everybody here can find exceptions, or situations where combat was not fun. But that it's a common feature of lots RPGs, and a lot of effort has been put towards elaborating on that aspect of the game, and there's lots of examples of fun combat, I feel comfortable saying that combat in RPGs is fun.

QuoteI'm not particularly fond of romcom films, finding the tropes to be largely trite and predictable, but there were a few that I actually enjoyed. Ultimately, it's just unhelpful to list something as "X" and expect it to include a lot of what other things labled "X" include. Much more helpful to evaluate each individual thing by its own merits.

I don't find that helpful at all. You wind up with a huge list of individual things to sort though, which can easily become unwieldy.

QuoteYou can already see the biases taking form in the comments above, with claims of a "lazy" ruleset seemingly being used to claim the entire subgenre is not enjoyable, as if simplified mechanics are somehow automatically a bad thing. It's flawed thinking that smacks of Intersectionality: using superficial parameters to lump things together and pass broad judgments upon them. The flaw of Intersectionality is that it arbitrarily decides when to stop counting characteristics. Brought to it's logical conclusion, Intersectionality will ultimately arrive at the individual. Lables are merely a means to collate traits and form things into groups, but they are still arbitrary as they necessarily exclude any traits that don't make the list.

I cannot define what is fun for anybody but myself. Listing off traits such as simplified mechanics, a metacurrency function, and a player-driven narrative explains nothing about how a system actually plays. I can imagine how that particular collection of traits could both be either fun or utterly tedious based on my preferences and experiences. Don't get me wrong, lables have their uses, but they don't do much to explain anything beyond broad classifications. Beverages can be broken down into juices, sodas, beers, etc., but that doesn't describe how anything actually tastes.

What if I break down beverages by taste? Sweet, sour, tangy, savory, etc. You use classifications and labels to sort by a desired attribute.

I've gotten a lot of mileage out of trying to break down "fun", so I can more easily get to having fun playing RPGs. Many words have been typed and rules crafted to try to get at that fun. It's not a wiffly, ephemeral concept. It's one you can consider, and I think many GMs do, when putting together a game or scenario or at the table.

Quote from: rytrasmi on October 16, 2022, 11:44:58 AM
Eh, well, broadly speaking there are two kinds of stories: 1) The 3-act structure and 2) Rambling shaggy-dog stories.

Some games are designed to elicit stories in 3-act structure. Let's call them story games.

"But, as all DM's know, the rewards are great — an endless challenge to the imagination and intellect, an enjoyable pastime to fill many hours with fantastic and often unpredictable happenings, and an opportunity to watch a story unfold and a grand idea to grow and flourish."

The foreword to the DMG makes clear that eliciting stories is certainly among the things the game was designed for. Do you really think "rambling shaggy-dog stories" is something that would be listed as an example of the rewards being great?

As I said, these games pretty much have to be differentiated by method. You can debate how well AD&D 1E achieves the aim, but it is an aim that is most certainly on the table according to the foreword.

QuoteThey provide incentives to generate introduction, confrontation, and resolution. Sometimes this advice enters into non-story game territory, such as advice that every scene (or every room of a dungeon) in a traditional RPG should pose a narrative question to the characters or that we should track torches with usage dice.

This all falls under method. Although as someone who runs a "traditional RPG" and who believes that we're getting stories out of it, those latter two bits of advice made me throw up in my mouth a little.

I think a good dungeon crawl shouldn't be overly-packed. It needs room to breathe. Two storytelling purposes for empty rooms and corridors is they build suspense and it makes the audience (the players) genuinely curious about what's behind the next corner. And by the way, I didn't pick that up in a film class or some drunken old fart literature professor. I noticed it when playing through Appendix A. The content of the game led me to making better narrative choices.

As for tracking torches, this is one I learned from watching movies. If it's important to the story, it can't just come out of nowhere. That comes off as contrived at best, just plain confusing at worst. If torches are important, it needs to be established up front that we have torches. If torches running out is important, it needs to be established how many. Some action movie fans actually do count number of rounds fired and will criticize the movie if the reloads don't make sense. And you bet your ass players are going to do that if things are not going their way. And of course, the famous "Do you feel lucky, punk?" scene absolutely depends on getting this right. A person who normally doesn't count will count now. If it's a movie, some people will re-watch the scene to count. You can't do that in an RPG, but you can check your scratch sheet.

My point is not so much to rag on these ideas, though to me they are most certainly awful. The point it this has everything to do with taste and nothing to do with eliciting a better story. Some story-oriented players want to know how many torches and how many bullets. Some hack-n-slash players don't want to be bothered tracking that stuff.

QuoteSome games are great at generating rambling "stories" that would make terrible movies.

Just as a point of order, some books make terrible movies. That doesn't make them rambling stories. It just means each medium has their own strengths and weaknesses. In books, it's easier to cue the reader in on what characters are thinking. RPGs have a few natural advantages in storytelling that would be lost or would have to be adapted to make it into a movie. Like I mentioned above, about having to establish that we have torches. In movies, you need to see the torches, or at least have some dialogue referencing the torches. In an RPG, you don't have to make a show of it, because it's established simply be being on the character sheet.

QuoteThis kind of story only makes narrative sense to the players. Perhaps the story is honed over time in player memory. A long sandbox/dungeon crawl is remembered as a tighter more coherent story (the messy bits and loose ends being forgotten). You see this when players reminiscence about previous events in a traditional campaign. "Remember when we investigated the missing cattle, found this suspicious old guy, discovered he was a werewolf, and slayed him?" Yeah, okay, but what about the two-session distraction at the inn and the unnecessary detour into the abandoned quarry that only served to get so-and-so killed? Those scenes get left on the cutting room floor.

I think you're taking a particular experience, either real or imagined, and taking it as a given its universal. First, it's long overdue that I address the fact that, there's nothing especially challenging about creating a 3-act story. The reason it works is because it's consistent with how humans understand the reality around them. They are rather ubiquitous. They frequently happen naturally and without any conscious effort. When people tell jokes, they're generally telling small 3-act stories without even realizing it. I'm pretty sure every adventure I've ever ran has begun with an introduction, has led to a conflict, and has ended in some resolution. Not always ones the players wanted, but a resolution nonetheless.

Sandboxes seem to me to make for especially good, tight stories. It's precisely because the things the PCs do has to be things PCs really want to do, not what they're nudged into doing. And that means there's always an identifiable motive running throughout the escapade. The motive tends to keep the action on point. Through the motives, the elements of that part of the sandbox have a meaningful link to the players. Even if players get lost, if they have leads to follow up on in a meaningful way and if the sandbox itself is interesting, the sequence of events will be plenty exciting and logically connect to one another.

Although most DMs I've played with run tight stories, or at least tighter ones than mind, and would be inclined to prevent two-session distractions from happening.

QuoteComparing games/rules to decide a "better story" only makes sense if we know what a story is and how it's told. Story game are designed and intended to tell a story at the table with a minimum extraneous matter. Listening to someone re-tell a story-game story could actually be tolerable. Listening to a traditional RPG player re-tell a campaign would be mind-numbingly dull unless it's culled down to the essentials.

All of which is speculative on your part and without evidence. I say it's the exact opposite. I like Mythic a lot. But at the end of the day, I find random tables that give me the narrative meaning of the element and leave it to me to bring the specific details, as in Mythic, to be less useful than rolling on the Dungeon Dressing tables in the back of the 1E DMG, having them give me the specific details, and then leave it to me to figure out the narrative meaning within the context.

In other words, I'd rather be told "The bag contains a McMuffin" rather than "The bag contains the MacGuffin." But I imagine it's possible for someone else it might be just the opposite. It's highly subjective which methods work for which gamer, and less of an objective link between method and aim or outcome.

Quote from: Effete on October 16, 2022, 02:46:13 AM
Counter-question: Who really gives a shit?

Me. 

There's nothing inherently wrong with either type of game, but they're different, with different methods of play, different strengths and weaknesses, different ways of playing, and different techniques to make them work well.  If we're going to chat about games here, it's pretty important that we know what type of game we're talking about, as things that apply to one type won't apply to the other. 

And some folks don't care for the one or the other.  It's useful to know what type of game you're looking at upfront so you don't put time and effort into something you're not going to be interested in.

One can play a game of checkers on a chess board using chess pieces, but that does not make the game of checkers into chess. As such, being told that the game will be played using some combination of chess pieces and a chess board does not tell me anything about the game itself. If a game, whether one being played, or the rules of one, are not what I am looking for, I would like to know so as early as possible to avoid wasting everyone's time. Thus, labeling things clearly instead of obfuscating the contents is actually helpful.

I take a pen and paper roleplaying game to be a case of assuming the role of a character in a scenario and deciding how the character responds to the situation, declaring such either in character or narrating the character's response, having the outcome adjudicated by the GM, and the resulting set of circumstance narrated. This gameplay can be free roaming open world choose your own mission, or have an underlying 3 act structure with some missions being forced by circumstances while still being free to approach the problem in any appropriate manner. In either case, the story is a summary of the actions taken, not what is being played, but one has more prompts to have that summary become a satisfying story.

Alternatively, there is a game of taking turns, and with various levels of mechanical guidance, telling stories about pretend elves and trying to weave those player ramblings into an overall narrative. There is no making decisions and seeing how they turn out, as instead it is a matter of the player declaring how the characters decision played out based on mechanical guidance. The is no asking the GM what is on that dark corner, because if it has not been decided already, the player gets to decide what, mechanic permitting, the character finds there.

This line of thinking leaves me with with a sandbox or plot/story/narrative/guided roleplaying game and a story game.

To me its either some flavor of "would you like to tell the group what your pretend elf did" or "my pretend elf wants to... how does it turn out?" Games that mix the two will fundamentally have an rpg phase and a story-game phase, but the tow cannot occur simultaneously as they are mutually exclusive.

Quote from: Lunamancer on October 16, 2022, 09:20:01 PM
--lots of stuff--

I wasn't arguing with you. I much prefer traditional RPGs  and it's important to recognize that the kinds of stories that emerge from traditional RPGs are different from the accepted structures that are common in movies and plays. Not only to avoid unnecessary arguments with an overloaded word like "story" but also to understand the people at the table and what they want.

Quote from: Ratman_tf on October 16, 2022, 06:48:12 PM
I somewhat disagree. While it's a subjective experience, there are trends that show that many fun experiences are experienced by groups of people. Say, watching professional sports. I don't care to watch it, but there's a huge audience for it, and I feel safe in saying that a lot of people find watching professional sports fun.

Here's an easy one. Combat in RPGs is fun. I'm quite sure everybody here can find exceptions, or situations where combat was not fun. But that it's a common feature of lots RPGs, and a lot of effort has been put towards elaborating on that aspect of the game, and there's lots of examples of fun combat, I feel comfortable saying that combat in RPGs is fun.

Sure. I never said that "subjective" couldn't stem from popularity. But the fact that some people don't care about sports at all still means that those who ARE having fun are experiencing something subjective. Combat can be fun. It can also be boring or tedious. Sometimes, a fun combat can become tedious if it drags on long enough (i.e., the fun to be had has been exhausted and the player is ready to move onto something else).

I guess I'm just not sure which part of the sentence you disagree with. That fun is not something that can be narrowly defined? Because that must be true if you agree fun is subjective.

Quote
I don't find that helpful at all. You wind up with a huge list of individual things to sort though, which can easily become unwieldy.
...
What if I break down beverages by taste? Sweet, sour, tangy, savory, etc. You use classifications and labels to sort by a desired attribute.

Yes!

You don't need a huge list to describe something, just a list of its desired attributes.

QuoteI've gotten a lot of mileage out of trying to break down "fun", so I can more easily get to having fun playing RPGs. Many words have been typed and rules crafted to try to get at that fun. It's not a wiffly, ephemeral concept. It's one you can consider, and I think many GMs do, when putting together a game or scenario or at the table.

I don't disagree with this statement. I agree that words and rules can help players to create fun, but a mechanic, in and of itself, is neutral. Implemented one way, it can create fun; implemented another can kill fun.

Quote from: Mishihari on October 16, 2022, 09:26:25 PM

Quote from: Effete on October 16, 2022, 02:46:13 AM
Counter-question: Who really gives a shit?

Me. 

There's nothing inherently wrong with either type of game, but they're different, with different methods of play, different strengths and weaknesses, different ways of playing, and different techniques to make them work well.  If we're going to chat about games here, it's pretty important that we know what type of game we're talking about, as things that apply to one type won't apply to the other. 

And some folks don't care for the one or the other.  It's useful to know what type of game you're looking at upfront so you don't put time and effort into something you're not going to be interested in.

Yeah, I've pretty much said all of this already. You aren't refuting anything I've said. You've only taken one snippet of my post out of context and responded to that.

Try this...
Question: What is Story Gaming in your opinion?
Counter question: Who gives a shit?

The first few responses to this thread couldn't even agree with each other, so how helpful are those opinions really? That was the extent of my post. This isn't even a hill I'm willing to die on; I just figured I'd clear the air before someone else decides they want to try to read my mind instead of read what I wrote.

Quote from: Effete on October 16, 2022, 10:14:00 PM

Quote from: Mishihari on October 16, 2022, 09:26:25 PM

Quote from: Effete on October 16, 2022, 02:46:13 AM
Counter-question: Who really gives a shit?

Me. 

There's nothing inherently wrong with either type of game, but they're different, with different methods of play, different strengths and weaknesses, different ways of playing, and different techniques to make them work well.  If we're going to chat about games here, it's pretty important that we know what type of game we're talking about, as things that apply to one type won't apply to the other. 

And some folks don't care for the one or the other.  It's useful to know what type of game you're looking at upfront so you don't put time and effort into something you're not going to be interested in.

Yeah, I've pretty much said all of this already. You aren't refuting anything I've said. You've only taken one snippet of my post out of context and responded to that.

Try this...
Question: What is Story Gaming in your opinion?
Counter question: Who gives a shit?

The first few responses to this thread couldn't even agree with each other, so how helpful are those opinions really? That was the extent of my post. This isn't even a hill I'm willing to die on; I just figured I'd clear the air before someone else decides they want to try to read my mind instead of read what I wrote.

Huh.  Not actually sure what you're talking about.  You asked a question, which I answered.  The very clear point of your post was that the difference between rpgs and storygames is unimportant.  I gave the reasons why I disagreed with this.  I'm not sure what you imagined you said, but based on others' responses, everyone else understood your post exactly the same way I did.

Quote from: rytrasmi on October 16, 2022, 09:51:28 PM
I wasn't arguing with you. I much prefer traditional RPGs  and it's important to recognize that the kinds of stories that emerge from traditional RPGs are different from the accepted structures that are common in movies and plays.

Gamers have been using D&D for exactly this for a long, long time. They were doing it before the words "story game" got strung together. They were doing it before The Forge, Ron Edwards, and before the Storyteller system that kicked his puppy. They were doing it before the web browser. Before RPG theory was being pondered by people who didn't even understand regular game theory. It goes back even further than Dragonlance. They were doing it long enough prior to 1979 that it got mentioned in the DMG's foreword.

If you don't know how to get those results out of AD&D, that's fine. But that doesn't mean others haven't been doing it this entire time.

QuoteNot only to avoid unnecessary arguments with an overloaded word like "story" but also to understand the people at the table and what they want.

The actual gamers who show up at the game table don't have trouble understanding the word "story." And it's their meaning of story I'm deferring to. When the average gamer gets done with a session of traditional AD&D and says, "Wow, that was a great story," or when the average gamer is asked what they like about RPGs and says, "It's all about the story," they mean it in the same sense of the other stories they are familiar with, from what they see in movies and plays and comic books and fantasy novels.

If you want to understand what the people at the table want, it helps to speaking their language and understanding their perspective. Understand that, yes, they do call D&D a story, and yes, they do mean story like in the movies. No. They're not confused about it. They don't think story is a confusing word.

I agree with most of what has been said in this thread.

For me a storygame is where players co-op as the GM or there are no GM's or the story is what is most important and player actions and rules come second (if at all).

Not interested in those type of games.   A couple examples to me of what I would classify as a story game is: Fate, games that use the Powered by the Apocolypse system and even games like Amber Dicessless and Lords of Olympus.

Quote from: Lunamancer on October 17, 2022, 12:54:39 AM

Quote from: rytrasmi on October 16, 2022, 09:51:28 PM
I wasn't arguing with you. I much prefer traditional RPGs  and it's important to recognize that the kinds of stories that emerge from traditional RPGs are different from the accepted structures that are common in movies and plays.

Gamers have been using D&D for exactly this for a long, long time. They were doing it before the words "story game" got strung together. They were doing it before The Forge, Ron Edwards, and before the Storyteller system that kicked his puppy. They were doing it before the web browser. Before RPG theory was being pondered by people who didn't even understand regular game theory. It goes back even further than Dragonlance. They were doing it long enough prior to 1979 that it got mentioned in the DMG's foreword.

If you don't know how to get those results out of AD&D, that's fine. But that doesn't mean others haven't been doing it this entire time.

QuoteNot only to avoid unnecessary arguments with an overloaded word like "story" but also to understand the people at the table and what they want.

The actual gamers who show up at the game table don't have trouble understanding the word "story." And it's their meaning of story I'm deferring to. When the average gamer gets done with a session of traditional AD&D and says, "Wow, that was a great story," or when the average gamer is asked what they like about RPGs and says, "It's all about the story," they mean it in the same sense of the other stories they are familiar with, from what they see in movies and plays and comic books and fantasy novels.

If you want to understand what the people at the table want, it helps to speaking their language and understanding their perspective. Understand that, yes, they do call D&D a story, and yes, they do mean story like in the movies. No. They're not confused about it. They don't think story is a confusing word.

What are you on about, man? You're making this personal for some bizarre reason.

Quote from: rytrasmi on October 17, 2022, 09:18:28 AM
What are you on about, man? You're making this personal for some bizarre reason.

I haven't. Why are you taking personally the simple fact that one of the reasons people play traditional RPGs is to make movie-like stories and have been doing it for a long, long time?

Quote from: Lunamancer on October 17, 2022, 10:03:20 AM

Quote from: rytrasmi on October 17, 2022, 09:18:28 AM
What are you on about, man? You're making this personal for some bizarre reason.

I haven't. Why are you taking personally the simple fact that one of the reasons people play traditional RPGs is to make movie-like stories and have been doing it for a long, long time?

I don't take facts personally. You're being an arrogant twat:

"If you don't know how to get those results out of AD&D, that's fine."

Quote from: Effete on October 16, 2022, 03:25:02 PM

Quote from: the crypt keeper on October 16, 2022, 01:55:06 PM
What I give a shit about is being offered to play in a ttrpg and come to find out they are playing a story game. Story games are great for those who enjoy them, but story games seem to demand recognition as a ttrpg when clearly they are not. And the foundations of story games are built on the premise that until they came along ttrpg's were fundamentally broken and bad game design when in fact it the other way around.

Really? That was the founding principle? Or was it just born out of a desire for less-comprehensive rules to better cater the goal and play-style of the game?

Most game styles has a subset of fans who consider their games to be the One True Way, and that all other games are fundamentally broken. Since starting in online RPG discussion in 1991 or so, I encountered lots of One-True-Wayers for their games many years before The Forge and the Story Games forum. There are people who are fans of traditional RPGs who shit on various non-traditional styles, and fans of non-traditional games who shit on traditional RPGs like D&D. But most people don't give a damn about such flamewars and are happy to play different styles of games, whether traditional RPG, diceless like the Amber Diceless RPG, rotating GM like Ars Magica, storytelling like Fiasco, etc.

Also, there was a genre of story games years before The Forge - like Once Upon a Time (1993), Theatrix (1995), along with John Tynes' Puppetland (1997) and other games. The Forge didn't start the genre - it just gave a central place for designers to meet and discuss.

Quote from: rytrasmi on October 17, 2022, 10:32:18 AM
I don't take facts personally. You're being an arrogant twat:

"If you don't know how to get those results out of AD&D, that's fine."

I acknowledging the fact that different people have different experiences, and your response is to say I'm being an arrogant twat? But you don't take facts personally?

When you make universal claims about peoples experiences, you're confessing those are your experiences. You volunteered it. I have no problem that you see things that way. I'm not going to argue your experience. I literally think that's fine. I've given you nothing to pick a fight about, and yet you have.