I think it's best to be forthright.

I was not thrilled with the use of a term evocative (back in the '70s) of 'est', "encounter groups" and the like. However, "fantasy role playing" came quickly into currency -- and some such distinction was necessary.

It just would not have been very helpful to go on billing these new games as "Rules for Fantastic Medieval Wargames Campaigns Playable with Paper and Pencil and Miniature Figures".

wargames --> role playing games --> story games --> ??

I'm not sure how important it would be for buyers. Some effort at highlighting the innovative/odd/controversial elements would be better than none, instead of pretending that baseline assumptions don't exist.

The introductions of various RPGs certainly could also be better. I don't think there are as many which are truly ambiguous about "story" and the GM's role as "narrator" or "director", as is made out in Forge ideology, but I've seen games that either state very clearly that the intention is to experience a virtual environment, or which describe different GMing approaches as options.

What would truly help is not waltzing into discussions and pretending that a commonly-perceived distinction is "imaginary". I'm not saying you're doing that, Peregrin, but the word brings to mind many other occasions, with other posters. It's not like people's reasons for preferring trad games haven't been adequately articulated.

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;456965What would truly help is not waltzing into discussions and pretending that a commonly-perceived distinction is "imaginary". I'm not saying you're doing that, Peregrin, but the word brings to mind many other occasions, with other posters. It's not like people's reasons for preferring trad games haven't been adequately articulated.

Sorry.  I meant "imaginary" as in "We are establishing this line through dialogue with differing perspectives and opinions", rather than a scientific line whose position you can measure objectively.

I also understand why people prefer trad games.  I play them too.

What I'm questioning is why repeatedly discussing this line is important.  If it's a commonly perceived distinction, then it shouldn't be a big deal.  I don't need to tell people that ducks quack, people know, and people know a duck when they see one.  And if it's not an easily perceived distinction with lots of grey areas, then placing a line is only a matter of applying one's own perceptions and experiences, and it'll change with every single person.

Claudius believes the line is clear, and if it's clear it can be placed objectively.  I don't believe the line is clear, so I'm arguing that placing it is arbitrary and ultimate useless except in extreme cases which are easily recognizable independent of where the line is placed along whatever continuum you want to come up with.

Quote from: Peregrin;456958That has nothing to do with story-games and everything to do with liking or not liking a specific technique, regardless of whether it's an RPG or a story-game.

Wrong all around!

It has absolutely everything to do with my wanting role-playing, not story-telling, when something is billed as D&D. The specific technique is an anti-role-playing technique, a pro-story-telling technique.

QuoteThe advancement system is based on skill use.  But the use is restricted to tense or dramatic situations only, and so they have to be carefully moderated.  If you go into CoC or any BRP rolling for lots of crap, you're going to end up with character advancing more quickly than they should.

Never mind the suggestion that it takes some extraordinary explanation -- in fact, about 150 words -- to make clear that one should not be rolling for "lots of crap" (such as routinely Climbing a ladder or Searching for where the newsboy has tossed the morning paper).

Why do you think it would make a big difference?

You get only one experience check per skill per adventure, regardless of how many times you use it!

If your skill is at 80%, then it could go up after a single check but on average it takes five.

I don't see in the CoC rules book (Second Edition) any indication of how quickly characters 'should' get better at doing what they do. I can only wonder what great difference you imagine it makes, such as to warrant calling checks each session for the skills successfully used that session 'abuse'.

Bennies are a meta-mechanic, but not necessarily a story-telling mechanic.  

As for CoC, my own experience with new RPers and GMs is that not making that clear leads to players pestering for all sorts of skill checks for all sorts of unrelated skills, especially lower-rated ones they want to see increased (which will go up more often than not).  Having textual authority to back up limiting those roles helps stem that sort of behavior, and helps new GMs judge when a skill is appropriate to use rather than just giving into players bugging them.

But that's another topic entirely.

Quote from: Peregrin;456968Claudius believes the line is clear, and if it's clear it can be placed objectively.

The end points of the spectrum are well-defined. Also, these are genres defined by actuality, not exercises in set theory. What I mean by that is: in reality, there are relatively few edge cases. Even fewer if you have three colors. And finally, a line can be subjective and still clear.

Also, communities form around common categories or "maps of the world". Just because they're subjective doesn't mean they aren't comprehensible or that preferences arise from "tribalism", as opposed to the other way around.

In short it makes sense to want to focus on a certain "center of gravity" even if the edges are a bit fuzzy. Personally I couldn't care less if "story games" are shunted off to Other Games or kept in the main forum, but it's tiresome to have to keep returning to first principles whenever someone brings story-game criteria into a discussion of RPGs--particularly if they don't even acknowledge doing so.

Makes sense.  If people here want to draw the line for their own benefit, I can't stop them.  I try to avoid discussing a game with even a minor amount of "story" mechanics in purely RPG discussion here, so it's not going to affect me much.  I usually stick around for the sole fact that most people here have experience with games I'm interested in, but have relatively  little actual play experience with (Classic Trav, OD&D, CoC, etc).

Quote from: Peregrin;456981Makes sense.  If people here want to draw the line for their own benefit, I can't stop them.  I try to avoid discussing a game with even a minor amount of "story" mechanics in purely RPG discussion here, so it's not going to affect me much.  I usually stick around for the sole fact that most people here have experience with games I'm interested in, but have relatively  little actual play experience with (Classic Trav, OD&D, CoC, etc).

Again, I don't have an axe to grind as far as drawing a line and jackbooting all the storygames to the other side.  However, I don't like pretending there is no difference.  There is a difference and it is substantive.

What really starts problems is when Pundit decides to kick a game to another forum.  Do I think he should kick storygames with a strong RPG element over there?  I probably wouldn't, but Pundit is Pundit, so Hot War gets booted and people go apeshit and say that classification of rpgs is toxic.  Nope.  Classification of rpgs is game theory.  What Pundit does is what is or isn't toxic.

Talk about Burning Wheel, Riddle of Steel, Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying if you want Peregrin.

However, if you start talking about how to change the sex moves in Apocalypse world to better fit a Game of Thrones hack, expect the thread to get moved.

I wouldn't expect anything else.  

And personally I'd probably put BW in the story-games category, going by the criteria here.  It has a lot of trappings of a trad game (explicit skills with ratings, armor, wounds, equipment, etc.), but if you were rip the core of the game out and see how it runs, it's pretty obvious it's nothing like D&D or RuneQuest.  But, that's all IMO, and stuff.

I still play plenty of trad games when I can, though.  I've got an OD&D game (GMing) and a Mutants & Masterminds campaign (playing) coming up.  Just right now health/work and the fact that a lot of people I play with are busy with college are limiting factors.

Quote from: Fifth Element;456918Role-playing games are what I play, while storygames are what they play, where "they" refers to some group you are trying to disparage.

Given the number of people who describe their own games as "story games", I find this implausible.

Quote from: CRKrueger;456921Which means, as I've always said: Storygaming comes from bad GMing.  People get railroaded into constantly having the GM run or otherwise constrain their choices and so they look for some other game.

This is probably true for some people. Personally, I enjoy story games because I specifically enjoy the dynamic of group storytelling. It scratches an almost entirely different itch for me than a roleplaying game.

Quote from: Peregrin;456968What I'm questioning is why repeatedly discussing this line is important.  If it's a commonly perceived distinction, then it shouldn't be a big deal.  I don't need to tell people that ducks quack, people know, and people know a duck when they see one.

From what I've seen, the line is very clear to roleplayers but a lot of story gamers don't see it. As I mentioned in my long post, I hypothesize that this is because you can use roleplaying mechanics as crude narrative mechanics but you can't do the opposite.

The fact that those people can't see the distinction, however, doesn't mean that the distinction isn't crystal clear and pretty easy to distinguish for those who do see the distinction. Similarly, just because some people are color blind doesn't mean colors don't exist.

To continue that metaphor: I don't think the existence of "green" negates the usefulness of distinguishing between "blue" and "yellow".

Curious, would you consider FATE a role-playing game?  

The reason I ask is because Pundit claims it can be run completely trad, but I see a large difference in behavior at a table playing anything AD&D --> 3e/WoD/Whatever and a table using FATE.

Phil here also seems to think any meta-mechanic automatically makes a game a story-game, or not-a-role-playing-game, or something.

While my own opinion of what makes something a story-game or not doesn't match a lot of posters' here, going by the general opinion here I know exactly where I'd draw the line.  I see a lot of inconsistency among different cliques, though.  Maybe that's due to some misconceptions about how certain systems are supposed to operate, but I don't know.

Quote from: Peregrin;457000Curious, would you consider FATE a role-playing game?  

The reason I ask is because Pundit claims it can be run completely trad, but I see a large difference in behavior at a table playing anything AD&D --> 3e/WoD/Whatever and a table using FATE.

Phil here also seems to think any meta-mechanic automatically makes a game a story-game, or not-a-role-playing-game, or something.

Yeah, basically Pundz enjoys a what's widely considered to be a borderline storygame but can't admit it, so we have hair-splitting discussions about the difference. Any criterion you put in place is going to capture at least a few games considered RPGs or storygames on the "wrong" side. BW / Burning Empires and FATE 3.0 are about the limits of what I can take in terms of PC control over narrative development.

IMHO, looking at rules is the wrong way to go identifying storygames. The real difference is one of culture. The Forge and storygames crowd play RPGs a certain way, and trad gamers play them a different way. RPGs like BW are on the border, and can be played either way, depending upon how you approach them.

I think Pseudoephedrine nails it here:

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;457004IMHO, looking at rules is the wrong way to go identifying storygames. The real difference is one of culture. The Forge and storygames crowd play RPGs a certain way, and trad gamers play them a different way.

I'd add, though, that there is also a culture that considers trad rpgs and storygames as basically the same thing, and finds arguments like the one going on in this thread very similar to this:

QuoteBrian: Excuse me. Are you the Judean People's Front?

Reg: Fuck off! We're the People's Front of Judea

I just hate all these people who force me to play games I don't like. They're the same people who destroy all my previous D&D products everytime a new one comes out, forcing me to play whatever bullshit they come up with next. Curses!

Quote from: Zalmoxis;457040I just hate all these people who force me to play games I don't like. They're the same people who destroy all my previous D&D products everytime a new one comes out, forcing me to play whatever bullshit they come up with next. Curses!

Have you bothered to read the thread at all? Wait, the answer is obvious, nevermind.