JDCorley, that may be an interesting aside -- but it's not really the issue in this thread.

Are you really still unclear on what the issue is?

If so, please read again my last post and try again to think it over.

Quote from: Phillip;458945JDCorley, that may be an interesting aside -- but it's not really the issue in this thread.

Are you really still unclear on what the issue is?

If so, please read again my last post and try again to think it over.

Um...you said there are currently two approaches to story gaming, the Forge "narrativist" way and GM railroading. You yearn for a third way. (I didn't think you really cared about story in games? But cool!)

I think there already exist a wide variety of many, many methods and mechanics that can help with story gaming that do not fall into either of these categories.

Quote from: JDCorleyMy wife really likes a story approach, but she absolutely hates making decisions outside the head of her character.

What is the "story approach" she likes?

Just what relevance do you think that has to what we're actually talking about in this thread?

See, there are actual referents that are the real subject here, prior to and independent of whatever ways you may personally choose to fling around the word "story". The conversation was started without you, and is not about you. We have not granted you the power to dictate terms to us!

Quote from: JDCorley;458915But many games constrain inputs to where you can only approach the game one way? In that case the approach and the product are pretty synonymous.

You do agree with my point then.

That this is mostly true of single player games due to the extremely wide range of human interaction? Cool!

Quote from: Phillip;458958What is the "story approach" she likes?

She likes aiming at story when she plays a roleplaying game! She likes having a character who makes dramatically interesting decisions in a pressing situation. You know, normal story stuff. Dialogue, action, motivations, conflicts.

QuoteJust what relevance do you think that has to what we're actually talking about in this thread?

Because the OP asks what story gaming is and I answered it! Glad I could help everyone out!

Quote from: Phillip;458917The brief description of Once Upon a Time does not at all put me in mind of the "story games" at issue here.

(etc.)

Nice resume, which I'm going to use as a jumping-off point.

One problem that's cropped up in this thread is that people are getting hung up on the definition of "story game", and so we have for example John Kim's allegation in post 405 that the class of so-called "story games" is too diverse to characterize.

But that is irrelevant.

The question here isn't "what is a story game", it's "what is an RPG"? Even if there are multiple classes of "story games", it doesn't matter at all if they have "nothing" in common, if they're all commonly not-RPGs.

(Now someone is going to forget the rest of the thread and say "you can't draw a line, here's an edge case". My response: this has already been addressed, you need to read the whole thread, or at least my posts, of which there are only a few, before you comment on this post.)

If I begin by saying that conveyances aren't cars, because conveyances float while cars roll, you might say no, there are boats that float and airplanes that fly, and they have nothing to do with each other. And not only that but cars are a kind of conveyance. But the point is that if I'm having a discussion about cars then bringing up boats and airplanes is beside the point. So are rockets, when my definition of a car is a vehicle whose primary mode of propulsion entails use of an internal engine to turn wheels, and which is balanced at rest on at least three wheels. ATVs, golf carts, sixteen-wheelers, rocket-cars, and sail cars are all interesting edge cases that can be included or not by refining the concept, but that doesn't change the fact that "car" has a specific center of gravity towards or away from which you can move.

So don't be distracted by claims that "story games" can't be defined precisely. Instead you only have to present the qualities of an RPG, and note that the farther something deviates from those qualities, the less it's an RPG and the more it's something else, whatever that is.

Quote from: Géza Echs;458701I've been turning this over in my head, and I think my initial response would be to ask for some expansion or clarification of your central thesis. To whit: if RPGs are to narratives as lived experiences are to narratives, in what way are RPGs and lived experiences functionally equivalent but not equivalent equivalent? This isn't a Socratic trap, for what it's worth. I'm honestly curious about how you can illuminate this point.

What I mean is that the eVents are equivalent in how they relate to a narrative based on them. There are various ways in which, because the events are imaginary, they are not equivalent that I don't think are relevant to the situation. For example I don't claim there is a moral equivalence between robbing an imaginary merchant in a game and robbing a real merchant in real life.

Quote from: Géza Echs;458701If your argument (as I understand it) is that there is this equivalence between RPGs and lived experience such that their relationship to narrative is the same, I would first wonder about what, in your eyes, is the meaningful distinction between how we treat events in RPGs and how we treat events in lived experience, how we can understand that distinction if there is one, and if there is no distinction how we can reconcile the fact that we treat the two functionally differently.

There is still going to be a difference between how we relate to an imaginary event vs. a real event, and between the difference between an account of an imaginary event vs. an account of a real event; this doesn't in my opinion change the relationship between the real event and the imaginary event. Consider the example of a dream : most people would not treat the events occurring during a dream with the same kind of weight as events occurring during waking life. But that does not make a dream and a narrative recounting what happened in the dream the same thing. The dream instead has a comparable relationship to an account of that dream as the events in an RPG has to an account of those events.

Quote from: Géza Echs;458701Equally, isn't the treatment of a fictional world as though it were real (for differing values of "real", qua Carroll above) a necessary function of all narrative? This would follow from Coleridge's formulation of suspension of disbelief, it seems to me, and coincide with how we actually interact with fictions in the first place. Again, the fact that there are differing values of "real" in play should not be disregarded, but it strikes me that the engagement with a world presumed to be real in some sense is an aspect of the relationship between readers / viewers and texts in general and not just players and RPGs in specific.

Well, opinions differ on how treatment of the fictional world as though real as a necessary function of narrative - what can you treat as real in a "Pale Fire," for example, but I don't think this is directly related to how one treats RPG events as "real." I am not talking about suspension of disbelief, or immersion or anything like that, I am talking about how the player interacts with the imaginary the immediate process of playing the RPG. I think at its most reduced, it works like this.

GM : says what the player character percieves.
Player : Says what he wants to try to do.
GM : Says what the player character percieves as a result.
(repeat ad nauseam)

I do not think that this coincides at all closely with how we interact with a fictional narrative like a book, movie, recited story, etc., even if there is a child listening to the recited story calling out "i want to hear about the prince fighting a giant!" Nor do I think it's particularly coincident with two coauthors hashing out what would be the best shape of a narrative they are working on, even if some mechanical rules are added to their authorship process. Note that I have not ascribed any particular "mechanics" to the RPG process I described above.

I'm going to get back to this reduced process I sketched out above in a second...

Quote from: Géza Echs;458701Of course, I do take your point about the relationship of narrative write-ups to RPG gaming sessions and think it's an important one. But what it makes me immediately think of is oral fictions and improvisation versus the written record of those oral experiments. Certainly the fact that the written record is more what we would recognize as a "traditional" narrative form doesn't preclude the shared oral improvisation from also being a narrative form, albeit non-traditional? I admit that I'm struggling for examples here, outside of non-specific references to poetic experiments, free-form storytelling, and the like, so please forgive me. It seems to me that in RPGs there is an emergence of shared narrative that can be encapsulated in written form a posteriori that is not equivalent to lived experience being recorded in written form due to the inherent distinction between the two in reception and reaction, and though there is certainly a difference between narratives emerging from RPG play and constructed narratives describing said play, the difference is more one of form than it is one of substance. I'm not convinced we could or would engage with RPG sessions, in "adventures" and "campaigns" involving plot and characterization in all persons, tenses, and modes both free indirect and direct as we do without it being some form of narrative expression (however non-traditional or outré).

I hope that all makes sense. I'm struggling with a rather arrogantly obtuse French critic today and so my frustration levels are high and my coherence is perhaps not what it could be.

I think I follow you, but I still do not agree that there is a fundamental distinction between the relationship of RPG events and narrative based on those events vs. real events and the narrative based on those events. As I see it, if three friends go on a camping trip, a shared narrative will inevitably emerge; the accounts will tend to differ, but thas is the case in the accounts of RPG events as well. The RPG itself is in my opinion more comparable to the camping trip itself - the RPG in this sense is a camping trip, merely a camping trip into an imaginary space.

 I think you find yourself struggling for examples because the RPG form is actually fairly unique in that rather than creating narratives per se they play out events that are the basis of narratives; this unique aspect is one of the reasons I find RPGs so interesting, but the result of this unusual aspect is that it has traditionally proven hard to describe quite what RPGs are to someone who has never played one before. Various loose comparisons to other forms like stories have made for passable elevator pitches, but pushing that loose comparison as essential is more confusing than informative- just look at the ever changing uses of the word 'story' in a quagmire of a thread like this.

I'm going to try to clarify how I see it - this is what I mean about basis. Lets take two roughly comparable narratives, Pausanias' Description of Greece and the Travels of Sir John Mandeville. They are fairly similar in form and arguably in contemporary audience reception; roughly speaking, Description(A) is roughbased on Pausanias' journey(B) in a real space and Travels (X) on "Mandeville"'s journey (Y) in an imaginary space. Travels has a journey as its basis, but an imaginary one. A:B :: X:Y and what the RPG events are, is (Y), not (X).

Now I'm going back to that process I described earlier - here is a thought experiment based on that process (one could actually enact it with a little ingenuity) You have a "Player" and a "GM." Each has a phone. The GM has a small maze built on a table, and a little marionette currently set in the center of the maze. The GM calls the PC on the phone and describes what is in front of the marionette. The player tells the GM where to have the marionette go. The GM describes the marionette's situation. This is already an RPG - the physical practicalities of the marionette and the maze prove de facto rules. The GM facilitiates the PC's interaction with the marionette's space in the person of the marionette. All the normal RPG does is make the already abstract maze and marionette purely theoretical, but the player plays the game in the exact same way - he need not even know there is a maze and marionette there, any  more than he necessarily knows the exact rules the GM is using.

There are rules that are much less clunky, but the process is fundamentally the same as D&D, etc. There can be artistic "expression: or at least craft in the descriptions the players and GMs make of their actions, but there can be artistic "expression" in a house an architect has built, or in the way a graceful person moves through that house. It's even possible to take actions in an RPG that you think might "make for a better story," but you can do that in real life too, though it might not pan out well - you could tag a water tower for the thrill of it, or so that you can tell the story of how you did it. But this is why I don't think it's helpful to consider a player's agenda here, and prefer to look at that process.