Trechriron, I hope you enjoy the game. It looks super fun. Even if the "sex moves" might take some getting used to.

Quote from: Peregrin;457773Most play, even in trad games, takes the form of a sine wave between engaging with the mechanics (something you have to do from your own perspective) and your character's.

I actually started my first draft of that post addressing this, then figured it was too obviously a red herring. Or maybe a dead parrot.

Every dish on the menu has some ham in it, and we quite happily eat egg, toast, taters and ham. Maybe we could do with a bit less ham, but "not so much ham in it" is not exactly the salient point of what is on offer!

No, it is the SPAM about which the Vikings at the next table are interminably singing, which is annoying, but not as annoying as the big lumps of SPAM someone insists on serving. SPAM is at least partly a sort of ham-related lardy substance, but even genuine ham fat is not what we are wanting more of.

No, what is proposed is that we should have SPAM in place of the eggs, toast and taters that are what we really want for breakfast.

I can play a role in a role-playing game without knowing about "mechanics". Indeed, I have done so many times! The Game Master can handle all that accounting.

Theoretically, I can suppose the possibility of so playing a "story game".

In practice, every story game I have encountered puts a premium on players manipulating the abstraction directly.

Quote from: Phillip;457861I can play a role in a role-playing game without knowing about "mechanics".

In practice, every story game I have encountered puts a premium on players manipulating the abstraction directly.

Bingo

Quote from: boulet;457355and criticize AW for what it's made of rather than preconceptions.

Well, no-one has yet rebutted or presented an argument against points i made in post 184.

Quote from: Dan Davenport;457632My two cents:

From a player's perspective...

• RPGs are first-person.
• Storygames are third-person.

Pretty much, yes.  Though the Storygame swine will often try to claim otherwise.

RPGPundit

Quote from: Phillip;457766**Independently of the developments that became D&D, there were Diplomacy games in which "press" took on the character of statements defining the world in which "moves" happened, introducing an intricate collaborative unfolding and interweaving of histories and biographies, in ways perhaps making them "story games".

I think that aspect of Diplomacy (which I usually enjoy) is definitely a rudimentary form of role-playing. But it's nothing like a "story game", since, as many others in this thread have observed, often what separates a new-fangled "story game" from a traditional/classical RPG is that the mechanics interact directly with the fiction.

In Diplomacy, it doesn't really matter if I pretend to be King Leopold II in my messages; that is to say, it doesn't affect gameplay. If I write a long "in-character" message, but the guy next to me just sends back "Whatever. I'm taking Trieste, bro.", it doesn't affect the game. There's no feedback loop.

It's what many people have accused D&D4 of being: an awesome combat game, interspersed with bouts of freeform role-playing.

Quote from: BWAIn Diplomacy, it doesn't really matter if I pretend to be King Leopold II in my messages; that is to say, it doesn't affect gameplay. If I write a long "in-character" message, but the guy next to me just sends back "Whatever. I'm taking Trieste, bro.", it doesn't affect the game. There's no feedback loop.

I had in mind things in which development of the world becomes important in itself, another game and perhaps even the primary game.

Someone plays Gregory of Axphain, and introduces facts about Axphain that interact with facts someone else is establishing about Graustark.

At some point, this probably has something to do with movements of armies and fleets. Whether it does or not, though, there is certainly a "feedback loop" in the continuity of events in the shared story -- just as when authors collaborate on an anthology series such as Thieves' Word or Wild Cards or take turns writing comicbook issues.

The Ruritanians proclaim their intent to humiliate Upper Lower Middle Earth in the triennial Double Fanucci championship. You never heard of it? Well, now you have! It's the 38th, and no doubt some folks will 'remember' incidents from the long-running Ruritanian-Hobbit rivalry.

Six game-years later, it really is an established tradition, and an Association Board has published Revised Official Rules of Double Fanucci.

In case it really is still unclear, bringing by fiat a Triennial Championship into more than a century of previous existence is not role-playing, "free form" or otherwise, unless one's role is quite a magician indeed.

Quote from: Dan Davenport;457632My two cents:

From a player's perspective...

• RPGs are first-person.
• Storygames are third-person.

I'd question this.  Suppose you played something which is *only* about talking first-person in-character -- say discussing grief at a relative passing or about sharing experiences of childbirth.  I suspect that around here it would be called a story game rather than a traditional RPG.  cf. A Flower for Mara or The Mothers.  

A traditional RPG tends to have a lot of third-person description and out-of-character talk about mechanics or other metagame.

Quote from: jhkim;457976A traditional RPG tends to have a lot of third-person description and out-of-character talk about mechanics or other metagame.

And there may be Dark Troll jokes and cries of, "Get the GM a beer." So what?

A lot of stuff happens in a Football stadium that is not to the point of distinguishing the event as a Football game as opposed to Basketball or Polo. That does not prevent sensible and well informed people from being able to tell one from another.

"First person" versus "third person" is a rule of thumb, and a general characterization of the overall effect, and pretty recognizably points to the different purposes of the endeavors.

What are you trying to do in "A Flower for Mara" or "The Mothers"? Does it not centrally involve a narrator's and/or spectator's perspective from outside a given character's skin? Is that not why you think they would be called story games?

See, I think that if you understand enough to make that argument in the first place, then you should understand enough to identify the error yourself.

Quote from: Phillip;457982And there may be Dark Troll jokes and cries of, "Get the GM a beer." So what?

A lot of stuff happens in a Football stadium that is not to the point of distinguishing the event as a Football game as opposed to Basketball or Polo. That does not prevent sensible and educated people from being able to tell one from another.

I'm not saying it's impossible to distinguish different types of games.  I'm saying that the line of "first person" versus "third person" doesn't distinguish what you want it to.  

It's like saying that football is "that game played with a ball".  Of course you can tell the difference between football and basketball.  The problem is that the definition given for football is crappy.

Quote from: jhkim;457984I'm not saying it's impossible to distinguish different types of games.  I'm saying that the line of "first person" versus "third person" doesn't distinguish what you want it to.

You have provided no evidence of that. What do you make of the "From a player's perspective..." criterion in the statement to which you purported to be responding?

If you think that merely talking "in first person" is role-playing, then you are just making a very basic mistake that has been addressed repeatedly.

When Joe Cool the famous Hollywood movie star says his lines, that is not "playing a role-playing game". That is being an actor in a movie.

One can also "say the lines" for a character as an author in a story game, or a player in a wargame, or a stage magician telling by sleight of hand a story about the Queen of Hearts -- or simply as the reader of a book! -- without ever for one moment actually role-playing. Not, mind you, that such total exclusion of role-playing (or of anything else) is necessary to make something a (potentially very good) story game.

It's a question of what the game is chiefly about, of where the emphasis is, of what gets sacrificed for what and how often.

Why, after all, would you expect us to call those two games you mentioned story games? Do you really think we mean to deceive you when we call the distinction "from the player's perspective first person versus third person"? Or will you entertain the possibility that it makes eminent sense if understood in the sense meant rather than from a determinedly contentious and pettifogging interpretation?

Quote from: Phillip;457992You have provided no evidence of that. What do you make of the "From a player's perspective..." criterion in the statement to which you purported to be responding?

I'd agree with John that it's lacking. Lots of people prefer to describe their character's actions in the third-person and do so because they prefer to maintain a psychological distance from them. They prefer to see "Bob the Fighter" as a concept separate from themselves which they can analyze and/or interrogate. They are still focused on making decision as if the decisions were made by Bob, but they don't make those decisions from a first-person perspective.

There's a similar divide in acting theory.

Hey everyone, hopefully J Arcane has gotten enough enjoyment out of therpgsite over the last 20-odd months that my returning won't bother him too much, so!

This is a topic that gives lots of people lots of problems, and that is because they are trying to classify games instead of classifying play.  This runs into major problems because most games are extremely versatile and have lots of different valid ways to play them.  So it makes more sense to classify "story games" as those games played with an aim at creating a good story.  This includes a lot of D&D play, and a lot of GURPS play, and is not good at all for coming up with a label to stick on a book in a game store.  It is of no use to designers or retailers or people who are Deeply Concerned With The Direction Of The Hobby (or, as they are known to the rest of the world, fucking morons).  But this approach solves absolutely every definitional problem both story-game players and non-story-game players have trying to figure out what's going on.

This definition has thus been completely rejected by everyone, as they prefer to scream at each other or try to make money off each other than to resolve things and actually make progress in discussion.  So when you are reading this, be assured that nobody, absolutely nobody, is listening but you, and this post will go nowhere.  

But let's just use my definition for a little while and see where it gets us:

The first story game I ever played was D&D, and I suspect that it was the same for many people.  D&D is a phenomenal story game. Thousands on thousands of people have played it for decade upon decade, focusing on the creation of a fun story.  Let's take a second to look at why D&D is such an amazing story game.  There are two major story game mechanics in it: first, the distribution of characters to players and the players making decisions on behalf of characters. This is an extremely powerful story mechanic.  Character is the fundamental building block of story.  Without character, there can be no story.  And the most important thing about a character in a story is the decisions they make in the story.  This is 8th grade English, people!  Basically by giving characters individually to the players and saying "you are in charge of this character's decisions", you are giving the players a massive story Lego set and saying "go nuts, build a story".  

The second story mechanic in D&D is the DM, who decides and adjudicates (with the assistance of the rules) the consequences of the characters' decisions.  Character choices can't exist in a vacuum, they must have concrete consequences in the world they inhabit.  By giving the rest of the world over to a single person, a single voice, D&D gives the DM the other piece of story-building.

There are lots of other story-supporting things in D&D: a vivid set of character capabilities, for example. And the supplements had extremely great stuff for story-building: interesting worlds ripe with conflict that the characters would struggle against, and so on.  

That D&D can be played for the story should not be a surprise to anyone who ever looked at, heard of, or thought about Ravenloft, Birthright, Al-Qadim, Dragonlance, or the Forgotten Realms.

Naturally this is not the only way to play D&D, there are other approaches that are just as valid. And I'm not a statistician or anything so I don't know what's more prevalent. But I know tons of D&D play, all editions, has been aimed at story. Any definition of story games that excludes this play is a diseased, stunted definition, to be discarded with great haste.  It leads to people saying if you played Dragonlance, or certain modules, you weren't playing D&D, trying to differentiate between Action Points and a d20 roll, and other such angels-on-pins madness.  Let's instead celebrate that D&D's such a versatile, well-made game (across many editions) that it can easily accommodate many different approaches in a satisfying way, and use my definition to talk about D&D play that aims at story.

Similarly, you can play Dogs in the Vineyard with no real concern for story, treating each town as just the latest in a sandbox full of problems and deploying your character's resources to bull over the problems.  (I've seen this happen, there's a very interesting rules effect of the game that supports this type of play, though it's not discussed in the text.)  The number of sandbox Vampire games I've seen is tremendous.  However, there's no question that Vampire works to support story-oriented play. (By the way, "story-oriented play" is just a shittier way of saying "story gaming".)

I've also seen Primetime Adventures handled more as a means of simulating TV show pacing rather than the creation of an original TV-show-style story, right down to looking at a pile of fanmail in the middle of the table and saying "none of the fans like anything on this show, we're cancelled."

I'm also baffled to hear Universalis called a story game because much of the play of Universalis I've experienced isn't story in any normal sense of the word "story". That's not to say that it isn't a fun game, but many groups use it primarily as a collaborative setting creation system, with characters briefly appearing, acting, then disappearing again as interest turns elsewhere.  There's nothing about that which is like a story at all, Universalis play absolutely need not be shaped by character decisions even to the extent that D&D is.

There are some games that are very difficult to play with a different approach than the designer intended, yep.  Not all games are infinitely flexible. But when we talk about story gaming, we should be talking about play, not what's written on a page somewhere.

Anyway, there you go, back to shooting yourselves in the thread, sorry to have solved your problem so easily. P.S. Storygamers don't like this definition either.  But surely it can't be ME that's wrong?!