In general, the things that bug me most are when people lash out at other styles of play with no idea how they work.

I sometimes hear critiques of traditional games such as D&D from story gamers. At least they have played D&D, but they often assume that the way they played (usually badly) is the only possible style. On the other hand, I sometimes hear critiques of story games which sound nothing like my experience of them.

Approaches to "story" differ hugely. In particular, there are modules with a strong storyline that are arguably railroading. (A number of games and lines focused on these - starting with Dragonlance, and including games like Deadlands and Torg.)  However, there are also games that emphasize story but have no pre-planned plot (and indeed make such plotting impossible by switching control and/or random elements).

Quote from: Vargold;981090That said, I'd rather spoon out my eyeballs than play a great many "story games"--they're usually far too focused for my tastes. But let's be honest and acknowledge the gap between something like Barbarians of Lemuria and Fiasco or Grey Ranks. That characters in the former have Hero Points to influence the dice, soak deadly damage, and sometimes arrange for a bar in the prison cell to be loose doesn't make that game a molly-coddling indulgence in omnipotence or poison to all immersion.

OK, I can understand Fiasco and Grey Ranks being poison to immersion - but it seems completely off-base to suggest that they are molly-coddling indulgence in omnipotence. In both games, your characters are extremely likely to come to die - with lots of failure in getting there.

Quote from: jhkim;981149OK, I can understand Fiasco and Grey Ranks being poison to immersion - but it seems completely off-base to suggest that they are molly-coddling indulgence in omnipotence. In both games, your characters are extremely likely to come to die - with lots of failure in getting there.

That's on me. "Molly-coddling indulgence in omnipotence" is an opinion I've seen labeled at games like BoL which eschew the zero-to-hero model; "poison in immersion" was Fiasco and Grey Ranks. I shouldn't have conflated the two.

Quote from: Vargold;981130Sure. But that was not what was being sold to us at Waldenbooks in 1980. We had to make sense of what was given to us in those boxed sets, and they were not very good about making their core assumptions transparent to eleven-year olds. I looked at the Holmes set and AD&D (which I learned to play from high schoolers who were self-taught) and assumed that this was all about being Fafhrd *and* the Mouser *and* Conan *and* Ged on a team.

They didn't sell books on mythology?

Because I read the story of Heraclese when I was about nine.  Also Orion.  And, as mentioned before, Beowulf.

For that matter, Tom Thumb, a story I read at a much earlier age.

Quote from: rgrove0172;981131Failure is always a possibility, cant say I would want to play a game without it either. Having mechanism whereby getting slaughtered turns into being imprisoned or left for dead and that sort of thing is quite different and welcome. Its certainly well represented in heroic fiction.

Heroic fiction is not heroic role-playing gaming.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;981152They didn't sell books on mythology?

Because I read the story of Heraclese when I was about nine.  Also Orion.  And, as mentioned before, Beowulf.

For that matter, Tom Thumb, a story I read at a much earlier age.

I can't remember what mythology I had read by 1980. Probably some Greek and some Norse, but the latter would have been coming to me primarily via Marvel's Thor. As for Beowulf, he was soloing wilderness hexcrawls while still a neophyte.

Quote from: Vargold;981158As for Beowulf, he was soloing wilderness hexcrawls while still a neophyte.

I don't think you'll find that in the actual poem.

Quote from: Voros;980689So kids playing pretend aren't playing a game?

Nope.

This is really the crux of the matter. Some people (myself included) have an allergic reaction to bullshit. When someone invites me to play a GAME, be it cards, chess, Monopoly, Axis & Allies, Squad Leader, World In Flames, D&D, Traveller or whatever, I expect that the play and the outcome are not preordained. If it is, then I've just been baited and switched into something fake and fixed and I'm going to be pretty pissed off. I don't watch pro wrestling for the same reason. If you find that unreasonable, you'll really be surprised at how hostile sports fans can get if there's so much as a hint that the fix is in. Maybe if the "storygamers" (a strange term, given how little most of them know about story or games) referred to their games as RPGE...

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;980634The vitriol came about because storygamers were led by Ron Edwards, who said that bad gaming (by "bad" he meant D&D) caused actual brain damage; when asked to clarify, he said it was just like child sexual abuse. So the nastiness was instigated by storygamers. Until that guy came along, storygamers were regarded by the rest of us as like diceless gamers (to whom they are closely related) - odd, but harmless.

Then we got tired of the pretension. Nobody was just gaming, they were exploring important themes, and so on. Like the "game" We All Had Names, which is about being Jews dying in the Holocaust. Masturbatory virtue signalling, and all that.

I must be sheltered, lucky or both since I have no idea who Ron Edwards is. Apparently you do, and you have my condolences.

Quote from: Voros;980593Really no One Way Truism on K&KA?

A quick search over there and I found this recent thread where all 5e and O/D, B/X and BECMI playersare thrown under the bus, leaving 'pretty much just us.' If that isn't textbook One Way Truism what is?

Not only that, but for years members of that site were constantly trying to play backseat mod on other sites like Dragonsfoot and even the official D&D forums. Now that a couple of members of the K&K Klan are mods at DF, there are predictable results.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;980735Of course, I personally think that modules were the worst thing that ever happened to D&D, so that is the background radiation of my opinion.

I don't think the problem is with the modules themselves, but with bad DMs who use them as-is without much thought. It's like someone just dumping a jar of Prego on some noodles and calling it spaghetti, when anyone with a sense of taste uses it as a starting point and adds to it.

Quote from: Dumarest;981179I don't think you'll find that in the actual poem.

Dude goes for a swim in the monster-filled ocean as his very first heroic feat (since prior to that he's come across as a lazy slacker--the reason why Breca challenges him to the swimming contest and why Unferth taunts him in Heorot). I'm going to call that "soloing a wilderness hexcrawl."

Quote from: VorosSo kids playing pretend aren't playing a game?

Quote from: Elfdart;981184This is really the crux of the matter. Some people (myself included) have an allergic reaction to bullshit. When someone invites me to play a GAME, be it cards, chess, Monopoly, Axis & Allies, Squad Leader, World In Flames, D&D, Traveller or whatever, I expect that the play and the outcome are not preordained. If it is, then I've just been baited and switched into something fake and fixed and I'm going to be pretty pissed off. I don't watch pro wrestling for the same reason. If you find that unreasonable, you'll really be surprised at how hostile sports fans can get if there's so much as a hint that the fix is in. Maybe if the "storygamers" (a strange term, given how little most of them know about story or games) referred to their games as RPGE...

This doesn't make any sense.

I agree that the play and outcome are not pre-ordained in a game. And, indeed, there is no pre-ordained play or outcomes in essentially all the story games that I play -- Fiasco, The Play's the Thing, Polaris, Microscope, Once Upon a Time, etc.  Usually, there is an even greater variety of outcomes than in a traditional RPG session. i.e. When I'm DMing my D&D5 game, I go into a session knowing roughly what the dungeon is and/or what opponents the PCs will be facing. They might win or lose, or negotiate an unexpected result - but I know that there isn't going to be a volcanic eruption in the middle of the fight. If I'm playing Polaris, then volcanic eruptions, solar eclipses, or all kinds of other shit can happen with no warning due to spontaneous escalation.

Hell, the same thing is true of kids playing pretend. When kids play pretend, they make stuff up. If you tell a bunch of kids playing pretend that really Hector is forcing everything to fit with his planned story, then they'll get pissed and tell Hector to play right.

People are sniffing up the wrong dress if they think that "preordained outcome" is the essence of storygames. You do find it in some, with the argument that the journey of the individual characters is the important focus. Examples:

My Life with Master (the Master will be overthrown in the end, but PCs may or may not die or have individual happy endings.)

Grey Ranks (I'm pretty sure the Germans will win.)

Polaris (play long enough and at least one character will--let's face it--turn to the dark side, and the civilization is doomed.)

But that isn't necessarily so--not in the case of Dogs in the Vineyard, although the GMing advice does encourage improvising within and between episodes to encourage a clash of values designed to bring about hard moral choices and/or PvP. I dislike that advice, but nothing forces it mechanically.

Many story games have pretty open narrative pathways (so to speak) but their story-gameness comes from frequent, unavoidable dissociated mechanics, like having incentives to fail in order to gain a bonus later. DitV is an example with the way Fallout works; some versions of Fate seem to have this; Burning Wheel I think has this in its advancement mechanic. There are a lot of other types of dissociation; the most famous of course is the D&D 4e Daily Powers. Many "social combat" systems (Dogs, BW again) are also at least borderline.

I'm still wondering why I'm supposed to care how strangers play games at their tables.

:rolleyes:

Quote from: Black Vulmea;981074...to rack up 'Likes' and '+1s' to feed your starved and stunted  egos.

Personally I was just hoping the kudos would make my penis grow larger.

Quote from: jeff37923;981082Likewise, many don't see the fun in playing a character who has "plot immunity" and survives everything that is thrown at them. Without chance of failure, there is no challenge, and without challenge, then victory does not taste as sweet.

Quote from: jeff37923;981157Heroic fiction is not heroic role-playing gaming.

A. Men.

My personal style is event driven sandboxes. It's not a module (of which my hatred of them is Gronan-level gods bless your like-minded soul...). It's also not a true sandbox. I interject adventure if things slow way down or get boring. I want the bad guys to react to the actions of the characters. Sometimes I interject things because I feel like "this would be fun to happen right now!" I want the game to be fun for my players and I want the story to fall out of that fun. If a module is so strict that you HAVE to go to the goblin cave to the get the important clue to know that the evil sorcerer is in the volcano castle... then I think your module sucks. Which, unless you make a super cool sandbox full of maps and random encounters and useful tid-bits, I'm probably going to hate your module anyways. :-P

I was sucked into the Storygames thing. I didn't just happen upon theRPGsite. I washed up here. Lost and confused in a sea of meme-laden shenanigans trying to remember why the fuck I loved RPGs in the first place. Tis why I related to The Pundit's counter-war. Because the original Forge crowd, lead by He Who Shall Remain Unrecognized were hard-selling a reboot of our hobby. It was bullshit and it remains bullshit. I wear my Story Games War medals with pride. Sure, I switched sides half-way through. And I'm super thankful I did.

I think it's cool that people can play the games they want. When I naively embarked on a quest to understand story games better I found a cult. Had they simply billed it as "games of collaborative storytelling where your character is an interface to direct the story vs. interact with the world" I might have liked both kinds of games. But instead, like anyone who survives a cult brainwashing, I was left with a considerably bad taste in my mouth.

These days I'm very happy GMing my "traditional" (original) RPGs without all the fancy narrative doohickeys that still give me a twitch in my left eye. :-D

Quote from: trechriron;981213Personally I was just hoping the kudos would make my penis grow larger.

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Quote from: jhkim;981197This doesn't make any sense.

I agree that the play and outcome are not pre-ordained in a game. And, indeed, there is no pre-ordained play or outcomes in essentially all the story games that I play -- Fiasco, The Play's the Thing, Polaris, Microscope, Once Upon a Time, etc.  Usually, there is an even greater variety of outcomes than in a traditional RPG session. i.e. When I'm DMing my D&D5 game, I go into a session knowing roughly what the dungeon is and/or what opponents the PCs will be facing. They might win or lose, or negotiate an unexpected result - but I know that there isn't going to be a volcanic eruption in the middle of the fight. If I'm playing Polaris, then volcanic eruptions, solar eclipses, or all kinds of other shit can happen with no warning due to spontaneous escalation.

Hell, the same thing is true of kids playing pretend. When kids play pretend, they make stuff up. If you tell a bunch of kids playing pretend that really Hector is forcing everything to fit with his planned story, then they'll get pissed and tell Hector to play right.

Yeah, I don't get the point either. Playing pretend is a game like any other to me, and it's outcome may be as unpredictable as anything.

Quote from: Itachi;981224Yeah, I don't get the point either. Playing pretend is a game like any other to me, and it's outcome may be as unpredictable as anything.

We always called it a game and never had the outcome worked. Hell, allot the time we didn't have setting or limits worked out.