QuoteReally! So, the rest of us do not like that stuff in our RPGs, eh?

Nope! I said the opposite many times! Glad you asked!

QuoteYou essentially call us liars when we say that what we distinguish is what estar called "meta-game mechanics". You insist that what we really want to isolate from "traditional RPGs" are
-- dramatically interesting decisions
-- dialogue
-- action
-- motivations
-- conflicts.

Nope! Not at all, I have said nothing whatsoever about other approaches except that they're pretty great, and often use many of the same materials.

I've never said any of the things you accuse me of saying, not in any way, and everyone can see you are making it up.

Quote from: Phillip;459047'Prince Valiant is most like a "roleplaying" game, such as RuneQuest, King Arthur Pendragon, Call of Cthulhu and Dungeons and Dragons, but is even different from them. Prince Valiant is a storytelling game.'

Interesting! I'm no Prince Valiant expert, but it sounds like story gaming with Prince Valiant could be fun. It also sounds like it could be a cool sandbox game, so it's flexible enough to accommodate other approaches too.

Quote from: JDCorley;458994Soo...what you (Philip) seem to be saying is that you don't want to aim at the creation of a story when you play an RPG, even if you might tell a story about the events of the RPG afterwards. I agree and have always agreed this is a valid preference.  Nothing I've ever said has ever claimed anything about your preference!  You go on liking what you like.  Mote it harm none, do as you will.

All I'm saying is that there are other approaches that are different.  One such approach I call "story gaming".  

Without specific mechanics in a game to allow the player to add the elements of the story the player has in mind for his characters how is this any different from setting a goal for your character's development. If the player wants her character to marry a prince but there is no prince in the game how that going to work with GURPS, Runequest, D&D, etc? With Universalis and other games with meta-games she can spend tokens, make a roll, make a bid, etc, to add the prince to the setting so there is a prince to marry.

Otherwise what you are saying is no different any player with a strong idea of what they want to do with their character. And in general most referees are inclined to cater to such a player, if what they want works with the campaign and the other players.

I ran theme campaign where every player was a member of the city-guard, another where everybody was a mage, another still where everybody was a thief of some sort. I ran a campaign that was about just one mission. But none of this was any type of story gaming but rather some roleplaying with a dash of old style scenario setup the way wargames do.

You are not explaining nor are you contrasting the story approach to playing RPGs from any other approach.

For example I know of a style of play that I think of as the Dragonlance/Adventure Path style. Where you know beforehand that roughly a series of events are going to occur. The characters are not going to substantially change the broad sequence of events. What they do have control are the details of how the events play out. They control the exact path they take to the final endpoint of the Adventure Path.

A well designed Adventure Path will have many such possible paths so that no two groups will ever complete the Adventure Path in the same way. The individual adventures that make up the path can have beats. Slow times, easy challenges following an escalating series of encounters followed by a climax and then back to a slow time. An Adventure Path will have two or more cycles of these building to the final climax.

Many folks have fun with these. The main downside is that the quality of the campaign is highly dependent the story that makes up the adventure path.  Not only it has to be a compelling story but also be of interest to the players. The upside is that the prep is straightforward compared to other styles of play like sandbox, episodic, etc.

So again what is your Story Approach to gaming? Explain to all of us what we are going to see as referees and players when somebody is taking a story approach.

Quote from: JDCorley;459037This is why calling "story gaming" an approach rather than a label on a product is much more valuable.

Wrong. Stop trying to change the subject. We're talking games, not play styles.

Quote from: JDCorley;459037For example, the "players say what a single character says and does" rule can be used to great effect to produce a story, if that's what you want, but it can also be used for other reasons.

Whereas a mechanic that allows you to rewind a "scene" to play it all over again because the way it unfolded didn't please you as a player, or the way another mechanic allows you to place a door in the middle of a wall where there was none before, is a mechanic that is clearly intended to be used as a player controlling a narrative, or the game world as a device that conducts story. Just as you cannot rewind a "scene" in real life because there are no "scenes" to begin with and your life is not playing on a VCR, some role playing game mechanics break the 4th wall of immersion and cannot be rationalized from a character standpoint. When a game piles up mechanical elements of the sort with the clear aim, implicit or explicit, to compose narratives and create a 'story' as opposed to experience the game world from a first-person perspective through your character, I call it a 'story game'.

And just in case you want to rewind the conversation again and be boneheaded about this, it's already been established many times over several posts in this thread that, while for some games the distinction might be clear, in many other cases it will be a question of shades, somewhere between these two extremes.

But we went through that a zillion times already, JD. You know that by now.

Quote from: JDCorley;459037So trying to put a game that contains that rule into one category or another based on the presence or absence of that rule is fruitless.

No. You just gave an uncontroversial example and built it into some kind of rule. It's not the case. See my examples above. And that, my friend, is the whole point of the conversation.

Here's the section on "Games Versus Stories" in The Art of Computer Game Design by Chris Crawford (1982):

Quote from: Chris CrawfordAnother way to illustrate the role of interaction is to compare games with stories. A story is a collection of facts in time sequenced order that suggest a cause and effect relationship. Frequently, the facts presented are deliberately fictitious, because the facts of a story are intrinsically unimportant. Indeed, the entire concept of fiction ("an untruth that is not a lie") only makes sense when one realizes that the facts presented in the fiction are themselves unimportant. The cause and effect relationships suggested by the sequence of facts are the important part of the story. For example, we care not whether Luke Skywalker and the Death Star really existed. We saw that Luke Skywalker was good and pure, and that the Death Star was evil, and that Luke Skywalker destroyed the Death Star. The cause and effect relationship suggested by the story was that good overcomes evil. Thus, a story is a vehicle for representing reality, not through its facts per se, but through the cause and effect relationships suggested by the sequence of facts.

Games also attempt to represent reality. The difference between the two is that a story presents the facts in an immutable sequence, while a game presents a branching tree of sequences and allows the player to create his own story by making choices at each branch point. The audience of a story must infer causal relationships from a single sequence of facts; the player of a game is encouraged to explore alternatives, contrapositives, and inversions. The game player is free to explore the causal relationship from many different angles. Indeed, the player expects to play the game many times, trying different strategies each time. A story is meant to be experienced once; its representational value decreases with subsequent retellings because it presents no new information. A game's representational value increases with each playing until the player has explored a representative subset of all of the branches in the game net.

This does not mean that games are better than stories. Although stories trace only a single sequence of causal development, they do so with greater intricacy and detail than games. Detail is crucial to the creative success of a story, for it provides the texture, the feel of reality that makes a story compelling. The story writer unleashes a mighty swirling torrent of facts that sweeps the audience to its predestined conclusion. The game designer creates a complex network of paths cunningly crafted to show the player all possible facets of a single truth. In this respect, a story is like a statuette where a game is like a jewel. The statuette's value arises from the fineness of detail and intricacy of construction. A jewel, by contrast, has no detail; its faces must be absolutely smooth. The jewel's value arises from its ability to refract light into many different angles. A statuette is meant to be stationary; a jewel is meant to be moved. So too, is a story static where a game is dynamic.

Stories enjoy a particular advantage over the current generation of computer games: the element of surprise. A good story boasts an array of interesting plot twists. The storyteller leads us into a set of expectations and then cleverly inserts a new factor that creates a disjunction, a new and dramatically different situation. This process can be repeated many times during the course of the story. Among computer games, only adventures provide this element of surprise. Unfortunately, the surprise can only be created by limiting the player's freedom of action so as to guarantee that the player will encounter the surprise under the proper circumstances. After a while, all adventures begin to smell like primrose paths. The really exciting possibility offered by computer games is the prospect of formulating a plot twist in response to the player's actions, instead of merely dragging him down a pre-ordained primrose path. However, the ability to formulate surprise requires an ability to analyze the player's actions, deduce his expectations, and generate a believable plot twist that confutes his expectations without frustrating him. Artificial intelligence that advanced has yet to be created.

The same natural intelligence that conceives of both stories and computer programs is, however, up to the task. The power of imagination had in 1982 been providing, in human moderated adventures, endless surprises for more than a decade.

Quote from: Benoist;459101Whereas a mechanic that allows you to rewind a "scene" to play it all over again because the way it unfolded didn't please you as a player, or the way another mechanic allows you to play a door in the middle of a wall where there was none before, is a mechanic that is clearly intended to be used as a player controlling a narrative, or the game world as a device that conducts story.

Certainly not!

The first (rewind) is well-known as a method of teaching and exploring tactics. A game that had as its aim the goal of teaching and exploring tactics could gain a lot from using such a rule.  "Fuck, we lost again, let's try it this way!"  It's not necessarily a mechanic that can only be used to create story at all!  I'm surprised that you would be so dismissive of a tactical or strategic approach to a game, to throw aside such terrific tools that they could use so well, to demand that they only be used for stories!

The second (door where there was no door) is a collaborative mechanic that can also suit the goal of setting creation.  Universalis is a good example here. One way of playing the game explicitly supported in the book is simply never to zoom in on the character level for any significant decisions.  You can just create a highly detailed setting and bid and respond to other players' creations.  In world-creation games like this, a method of incorporating all players' inputs is a good method!  How dare you limit it only to story approaches!

QuoteJust as you cannot rewind a "scene" in real life because there are no "scenes" to begin with and your life is not playing on a VCR, some role playing game mechanics break the 4th wall of immersion and cannot be rationalized from a character standpoint.

Okay! Dividing mechanics that way is fine, though as you note there's plenty of borderline cases.  My experience is there's more borderline cases than there are clear divisions, but good luck with that if you think it will be helpful.

By contrast, either a player wants to make a story or they don't.  You don't have to worry about shades of grey. It's a good distinction. So my definition of story gaming works much better and more clearly than that mechanical distinction you're looking for.

QuoteNo. You just gave an uncontroversial example and built it into some kind of rule. It's not the case. See my examples above. And that, my friend, is the whole point of the conversation.

I'm glad you think all my examples are uncontroversial and totally normal! That's great!

Quote from: JDCorley;459110I'm glad you think all my examples are uncontroversial and totally normal! That's great!

See, if you want me to have serious exchanges with you, that's the kind of crap you need to stop. I tell you that your specific example is uncontroversial, and in your post it becomes "all my examples are uncontroversial." I never said that.

Quote from: estar;459089Without specific mechanics in a game to allow the player to add the elements of the story the player has in mind for his characters how is this any different from setting a goal for your character's development.

This is apples-and-oranges.  A story-gaming player might very well have character advancement in mind as part of their preferred way for a story to go.  Or they might not.  A non-story-gaming player might very well have character advancement in mind for their non-story goals too.  

Either player might have a very specific type of advancement in mind, or they might have a more general idea that could be satisfied in many different ways.

So the only way I can say it's different is that in one situation the player wants character advancement because they think it will make for a good story, and in the other, they don't.

QuoteIf the player wants her character to marry a prince but there is no prince in the game how that going to work with GURPS, Runequest, D&D, etc?

Okay, in those games, a GM decides whether there's a prince available to marry or not.  The story gaming player then decides how they want their character to respond to the situation they find themselves in.  "Why is there no prince to marry me?" she mutters, as she hammers another orc skull into oblivion.  Frustrated character ambition can be a cool element in stories!

But let's say the player really wanted there to be a prince to marry and the GM said "nope there isn't".  Are you asking if they might be dissatisfied with this situation? Yes, absolutely!  GMs are very important to games like that.  They have a big input into everyone's happiness, no matter what the goals of the players are.

Similarly with the non-story gamer.  Let's say someone is playing the game with intent to explore (instead of to create a story), and they particularly like social situations related to nobility.  Cool.  "I wonder what will happen when I marry a prince," they think.  GM says, "there's no prince".  "Aha, I've learned something new, cool!" says the player.  

But let's say the player really wanted to explore the situation of being married to a prince, and the GM said "nope, there isn't one."  They might very well be dissatisfied with the answer too.  "Dammit, there should be one!"

Those games you list are really flexible, they can accommodate story approaches as well as many others.

QuoteWith Universalis and other games with meta-games she can spend tokens, make a roll, make a bid, etc, to add the prince to the setting so there is a prince to marry.

True!  Universalis has a more collaborative aspect to it.  It gives up the singular vision/responsibility of a GM and makes the game world community property.  But in Universalis, if I have enough tokens, I can absolutely block you from creating a marriageable prince, or marrying them.  And if that's what you want, you can be stymied in the same way as the player in the other games. Or if you have enough tokens, you can force a prince into the setting to marry and I might be dissatisfied as my goal (whatever it is) is stymied.

QuoteOtherwise what you are saying is no different any player with a strong idea of what they want to do with their character. And in general most referees are inclined to cater to such a player, if what they want works with the campaign and the other players.

It's different insofar as their purpose is different and they might do different things about it, and satisfying one might be different from satisfying another?


(Description of Adventure Path snipped)

Great description!  Seems like a valid playstyle.  As you note there are some things it relies on like the quality of the modules/flexibility of the path.

QuoteSo again what is your Story Approach to gaming? Explain to all of us what we are going to see as referees and players when somebody is taking a story approach.

They will spend a lot of time talking or thinking about their characters' motivations to do what they're doing.  They will spend a lot of time trying to fit the events of a campaign together into a narrative (this can be hard if random shit comes in or if they don't yet understand everything that's happened).  They will dig around a lot looking for reasons why things are the way they are and why characters are doing the things they're doing. They will look for ways to express traits (not just capabilities) of their characters.  They will particularly gravitate towards challenges that aim directly at those traits.  When you ask them "why do you like roleplaying games", they will say "for the great story!" and smile.

Quote from: Benoist;459117See, if you want me to have serious exchanges with you, that's the kind of crap you need to stop. I tell you that your specific example is uncontroversial, and in your post it becomes "all my examples are uncontroversial." I never said that.

Okay! Thanks for scouring my posts and finding one uncontroversial example. Glad you like it!

The trouble, JDCorley, is that you seem to have no practical conception of what "telling a story" is!

If you had that, then you could understand how techniques can be more or less conducive to it.

Likewise, if you had a practical conception of "role playing", then you could understand how techniques can be more or less conducive to it.

That would hold whether or not your definitions of those concepts matched those operative in the context of this discussion.

If you were actually, even if only provisionally ("for the sake of discussion") on the same page as the rest of us, then words such as "story telling" and "role playing" could actually be useful facilitators of communication.

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;458972If 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.

I had that exact same analogy in mind at 10 o'clock this morning, but to be honest i found it more fun to follow Corley's shadow-puppet play.

Quote from: Phillip;459126The trouble, JDCorley, is that you seem to have no practical conception of what "telling a story" is!

If you had that, then you could understand how techniques can be more or less conducive to it.

Um...since I said that many techniques can be more or less conducive to it, I don't know where you get this idea?

Do you want me to say it a bunch more times? Got a favorite font you want it in?

QuoteIf you were actually, even if only provisionally ("for the sake of discussion") on the same page as the rest of us, then words such as "story telling" and "role playing" could actually be useful facilitators of communication.

Oh, no, I said in my first post I wasn't on the same page. I think pretty much everyone else is on the wrong page. My page is much better, as I've conclusively shown. Welp, thanks for the discussion!

Quote from: One Horse TownI had that exact same analogy in mind at 10 o'clock this morning, but to be honest i found it more fun to follow Corley's shadow-puppet play.

Glad you liked it! I'm sure you can see my definition avoids the grey areas Eliot's definition-metaphor-thing says his has? I don't know, I didn't quite follow the car rocket whatever thing he was talking about.

Quote from: Benoist;459101Whereas a mechanic that allows you to rewind a "scene" to play it all over again because the way it unfolded didn't please you as a player, or the way another mechanic allows you to place a door in the middle of a wall where there was none before, is a mechanic that is clearly intended to be used as a player controlling a narrative, or the game world as a device that conducts story. Just as you cannot rewind a "scene" in real life because there are no "scenes" to begin with and your life is not playing on a VCR, some role playing game mechanics break the 4th wall of immersion and cannot be rationalized from a character standpoint. When a game piles up mechanical elements of the sort with the clear aim, implicit or explicit, to compose narratives and create a 'story' as opposed to experience the game world from a first-person perspective through your character, I call it a 'story game'.

I notice that on its face, this makes "save points" in video games a story-gaming technique. Did you have that sort of thing in mind when you made this comment?

I see, however, that you are careful to say that a game must "pile up" narrative control mechanics before you will call it a "story game." This implies that there is some amount of such mechanics that may be present without a game falling into the story-game territory. Am I reading you right?

Quote from: Bill White;459161I notice that on its face, this makes "save points" in video games a story-gaming technique. Did you have that sort of thing in mind when you made this comment?

No, I did not have these sorts of things in mind, though it seems obvious to me that the medium of video games lends itself better to the enjoyment of 'story' and 'narrative' than traditional role playing games.

Quote from: Bill White;459161I see, however, that you are careful to say that a game must "pile up" narrative control mechanics before you will call it a "story game." This implies that there is some amount of such mechanics that may be present without a game falling into the story-game territory. Am I reading you right?

Yes. A game which would involve action points or hero points (such as RuneQuest or Arcana Evolved) doesn't instantly become a 'story game' in my mind, for instance. It's a matter of degrees, not either/or, with some extremes on both sides of the spectrum.

The ultimate litmus test comes at the game table: the more I have to break immersion to enjoy the game's mechanics and consider them from an author/editor's point of view, the less I can make sense of them in-character, the more annoyed I become at the game table, until I just mentally quit and go "that's it, this is not a role playing game. This is ... something else. That's not what I wanted to play."

Quote from: Sigmund;457319For me, it boils down to what the point of playing and how ya go about doing that is. I can tell you that the Story Games I have (Covenant, Lady Blackbird, and Darkening Skies) play very differently than any RPGs I've played before (quite a few). Some folks seem to think the only reason to catagorise them is to denigrate Story Games, but as far as I'm concerned that has nothing to do with it. I consider them different, but similar games and separating them makes it easier to discuss them and makes the most sense to me. I'll use my tactical Minis Game analogy again and say, although I can use Melee to roleplay, it is not a RPG. Neither is Lady Blackbird. It has characters, yes, and a setting too. Thing is, the whole point of playing as well as the specific things you as a player do and say, and the method used to arrive at different outcomes are all vastly different than any RPG I've played before. This is no more inherently bad than the rules and methods of Melee are. They're just different. I acknowledge and discuss that difference by calling RPGs "RPG" and Story Games "Story Game". There's overlap aplenty as it's a spectrum not a hard line (to me) just like the difference between Tac Mini Games and RPGs (frex Melee is TMG, but add in Wizard and In the Labyrinth and it's a RPG).

You might be different, but I've never in my gaming life sat down to play an RPG with the conscious goal in mind to create a story. I can tell stories about my playing of RPGs, both from the pov of me as the player and from the pov of the character I played the game with. That doesn't mean the point of playing the game, for me, was to create those stories any more than the point of using the toilet or making lunch is to create stories. The point of Covenant is to create a story, and the tools and methods included in the game are for the purpose of realising that point. Characters dont have stats and skills they use to interact with the game world. They have conflicts, edges, agendas, orders, truisms, consequences, etc.. that are used to build a collaberative story. The #1 rule of the game is "Respect what has already been narrated.", with the additional important rule that reads, "Until it's narrated, it isn't true". I've never seen rules like that articulated in a RPG, nor would I expect to.

:hatsoff:.