I am not sure there is a story games "movement" of any particular kind, remember, I see story gaming as existing (at least) within the RPG hobby almost since the very beginning, so yes, I agree with you that whatever-it-is certainly is not a response to White Wolf games. Some examples of what-other-people-call story games that I have close to hand include things like Cartoon Action Hour, an indie RPG developed outside the core Forge group, Penny For My Thoughts, which is not a RPG at all and is focused entirely on collaborative storytelling, and Passages, a d20 RPG developed at the height of d20's popularity but which includes a lot of literary stuff.  There are plenty of what-people-call story games I can think of that just don't have any connection whatsoever with anything White Wolf did.

But to try to get the thread back on topic by talking about White Wolf and its influences...

Games like Sorcerer clearly owe a major debt to White Wolf games - in fact I'd say Sorcerer is a White Wolf game in virtually every way except, of course, who owns it. (Also it is very much more specific and focused than White Wolf games, which relied a lot on individual GMs to design campaigns thoroughly.)  Other what-people-call story games that have significant elements in common with White Wolf games include Don't Rest Your Head (special powers balanced with declining personal control), Houses of the Blooded (houses, political maneuvering in a highly structured system, duh) and Apocalypse World (which takes splatbooks as the core organizing feature of the game).  I've also heard Conspiracy of Shadows has White Wolf-esque elements but I don't have experience with it.

I think the main thing that indie story games have not been able to take from White Wolf is the incredible detail WW puts into its settings - many multiple volumes spanning many lines.  This is very expensive and beyond the reach (and I think interest) of most indie RPG producers, story-game or non-, excepting of course the d20 fantasy realm. I think there's a perception, right or wrong, that developing more and more setting material is chasing a declining trend - eventually people are going to check out of buying the next thing, and you could have put that effort/money into creating a new game entirely. Me, I adore super-detailed settings because as a GM I like to have all kinds of new things I can introduce.

My only problem with indies really begun when I started to read some of the creators/players opinions, taking their, I admit, good and interesting design, and adding the whole absurdal amount of philosophy and "It has been since DnD, but ssssh - WE HAVE DISCOVERED IT" attitude.

I love how story Swine love to point at absolute marginalia to try to claim "storygaming has been part of RPG's mainstream all along... there was that one game published in the mid-80s that like, three people played! THAT PROVES IT!"

Fuck that. Storygames are not RPGs. At most, you demonstrate that there were misguided idiots long before the Forge who mistook what RPGs are for way back then too, and tried to make RPGs do something they're not made to do.

RPGPundit

I was mostly thinking of Star Wars d6, which urged you to use cinematic storytelling techniques, and James Bond 007, which explicitly compared playing a character to improvisational acting.

But yes, in a way, all games other than The Current Edition Of D&D are marginal in the hobby.  Even then, magazines and letters columns showed that people were very concerned with story in their D&D game and gained great benefit from considering it.  And eventually, of course, Dragonlance, Al-Qadim, and Ravenloft came along and introduced story-oriented material more directly.

Then in the 90s, you had the big White Wolf boom that included things like Theme and Tone as campaign organizational tools.  Lots more to talk about there, and that was 20 years ago.

I understand that you feel RPGs are "meant to do" something, but people have included story elements in their RPGs and talked about story concerns in RPGs since (very close to) the beginning.  Even if I spot you everything before Vampire (which would be silly, Vampire had its roots in many other RPGs), that's still 21 years of story stuff in RPGs. How many more years do you need to show people are interested in it?

I don't mind being the marginalia - after all, I haven't ever felt the need to only play The Current Edition Of D&D, which has always been a supermajority or majority of the hobby. I'm fine with that!

Or were you talking about Cartoon Action Hour, Passages and such? I'm pretty sure those games didn't expect to replace The Current Edition Of D&D, but you'd have to ask the designers.

Quote from: JDCorley;497914I was mostly thinking of Star Wars d6, which urged you to use cinematic storytelling techniques, and James Bond 007, which explicitly compared playing a character to improvisational acting.

But yes, in a way, all games other than The Current Edition Of D&D are marginal in the hobby.  Even then, magazines and letters columns showed that people were very concerned with story in their D&D game and gained great benefit from considering it.  And eventually, of course, Dragonlance, Al-Qadim, and Ravenloft came along and introduced story-oriented material more directly.

Then in the 90s, you had the big White Wolf boom that included things like Theme and Tone as campaign organizational tools.  Lots more to talk about there, and that was 20 years ago.

I understand that you feel RPGs are "meant to do" something, but people have included story elements in their RPGs and talked about story concerns in RPGs since (very close to) the beginning.  Even if I spot you everything before Vampire (which would be silly, Vampire had its roots in many other RPGs), that's still 21 years of story stuff in RPGs. How many more years do you need to show people are interested in it?

I don't mind being the marginalia - after all, I haven't ever felt the need to only play The Current Edition Of D&D, which has always been a supermajority or majority of the hobby. I'm fine with that!

Or were you talking about Cartoon Action Hour, Passages and such? I'm pretty sure those games didn't expect to replace The Current Edition Of D&D, but you'd have to ask the designers.

It doesn't matter what you think about some nebulous idea of what people might have "wanted".  The FACT is that RPGs were not designed to tell stories. That was not the goal.  The goal is to IMMERSE in a character in an EMULATED WORLD.

And the proof of that is that from the first RPG onward, the mechanical structure of the game was made to encourage immersion and emulation, and NOT story.  

Whether or not people "wished it wasn't so" is irrelevant.  The evidence is so significant that in fact UNTIL THIS DECADE even the overwhelming majority of those games that CLAIMED to be "RPGS for telling story" did not in fact manage to do that, they failed at that because they didn't change the fundamental mechanic.
And in this decade, the games that claimed to be "rpgs for telling story" did change the fundamental mechanics and therefore ARE NOT ACTUALLY RPGS.  They fail in their claim, only the other way around.

RPGPundit

I don't know what you're on about, I've only ever been talking about normal ole RPGs here (except I think I mentioned one non-RPG in my list of story games not related to White Wolf).

Nothing you are saying seems to be related to any of the games or examples I brought up?

Can you give an example of how Star Wars d6 is not an RPG, so maybe I can follow you?

Quote from: JDCorley;498074Can you give an example of how Star Wars d6 is not an RPG, so maybe I can follow you?

I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you sincerely didn't comprehend what I meant in my last post.

Games like Star Wars D6, or Vampire for that matter, are real RPGs in every sense.  They both made some claims to "literary" aspirations of "telling a story", but neither of them actually did anything to mechanically allow that to happen.  The result is about the same as telling a little story while you play monopoly, something that is entirely inconsequential to the actual play of the game itself.  Of course, a group of people playing either of these games (or any other game, including D&D, or Monopoly for that matter) could decide that "the story" matters more than "the game" and start to break the rules and consistency of the game in favour of what they feel makes "better story".  In WW games this was even something that the GM (or "storyteller" as they preferred to call it) was theoretically encouraged to do, usually to the detriment of the Players, as their PCs were reduced to powerless cheerleaders whose decisions and agency in the world didn't matter at all because the GM already had an idea of the "story" he wanted to tell, and wouldn't let something as petty as the actual participation of his players ruin that "art".

But this doesn't mean, none of this means, that RPGs were "meant" to tell stories. They explicitly aren't, and the problem with games like SW d6 and Vampire PROVE this; because the attempt to inject "story" as a priority there inevitably ends up creating a conflict of interests and priority between "the story" and "the game" itself.

No major game presenting itself as an RPG actually dealt with that issue until the forge came along, and their solution was to invert the problem: instead of creating RPGs that failed at telling stories, they created storygames that fail at being RPGs.  Everything an RPG is supposed to do cannot be easily done in a storygame, because the whole goal is different.  And since Ron Edwards was desperate to try to subvert the RPG hobby, rather than create a new "storygaming hobby" of his own, this problem with his inversion was why he had to attempt to redefine concepts and engage in a kind of ideological war, where he claimed that the way all previous RPGs were set up was "broken" due to a conflict of "priorities" and that things that were in fact the essential POINT of standard RPGs (emulation, immersion) were undesirable things that were delusional and caused brain damage.  He tried to subvert the hobby by claiming we all were really just wanting to "tell stories" all along, but until he came along to save us no one knew how to do it right.

Never mind that what he (and storygame Swine as a whole) define as "story" is really highly debatable since it doesn't even really fit with the more standard literary concepts of "story"... but that's an unrelated issue to this debate.

RPGPundit

QuoteNo major game presenting itself as an RPG actually dealt with that issue until the forge came along, and their solution was to invert the problem: instead of creating RPGs that failed at telling stories, they created storygames that fail at being RPGs. Everything an RPG is supposed to do cannot be easily done in a storygame, because the whole goal is different. And since Ron Edwards was desperate to try to subvert the RPG hobby, rather than create a new "storygaming hobby" of his own, this problem with his inversion was why he had to attempt to redefine concepts and engage in a kind of ideological war, where he claimed that the way all previous RPGs were set up was "broken" due to a conflict of "priorities" and that things that were in fact the essential POINT of standard RPGs (emulation, immersion) were undesirable things that were delusional and caused brain damage. He tried to subvert the hobby by claiming we all were really just wanting to "tell stories" all along, but until he came along to save us no one knew how to do it right.

Or as I like to call it, he jumped out of the bathtub screaming "Eureka", and people instead of pointing out that he needs a towel, agreed that he rediscovered Archimedes' law. I like storygames, it's just the "artists" and their claims that I have a problem with. Not to mention that his famed "social contract" is pretty much "rules with added house rules  and common decency" >.>.

I don't agree about the "evils" of story games - I usually run my games relatively loose mechanically, and they never develop into railroads. If that makes me a Swine, well - good I ain't Hebrew. I dunno why exactly you attack Star Wars d6, since I found it to be a rather superior game mechanically.

Quote from: RPGPundit;498615I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you sincerely didn't comprehend what I meant in my last post.

I get it, I just don't know what in the world it has to do with the topic at hand, which is good ole normal RPGs like Vampire.

QuoteGames like Star Wars D6, or Vampire for that matter, are real RPGs in every sense.  They both made some claims to "literary" aspirations of "telling a story", but neither of them actually did anything to mechanically allow that to happen.

Really?

The GM is an important part of the mechanics of both games, and the GM advice gave solid information on how to pace games like a story (or movie), how to use movie language and imagery in order to vividly enhance the story of your game, use Themes and Tones to organize the game and characters, and use character traits (Vampire) and stereotypes (both games) to quickly get your story moving, and information on setting up dramatically interesting (Vampire) and exciting (Star Wars) conflicts....

But none of that to you is doing anything to "allow" story to happen.  To me, that's promoting story happening in the game!

Now, if you don't think the GM is important, or what the GM does is important, or if you think telling GMs to do things or not do other things in their game is not important, then I dig what you are saying.  To me, the GM and what the GM does in a game with a GM is a very important part of the mechanics and the play experience.

QuoteIn WW games this was even something that the GM (or "storyteller" as they preferred to call it) was theoretically encouraged to do, usually to the detriment of the Players, as their PCs were reduced to powerless cheerleaders whose decisions and agency in the world didn't matter at all because the GM already had an idea of the "story" he wanted to tell, and wouldn't let something as petty as the actual participation of his players ruin that "art".

This actually is not what the games themselves said to do. But yes, many modules said to do this, not all of them Vampire.  Dragonlance is a big offender here. (I believe this is clearly anti-story advice, as consequences of character decisions are the central elements of virtually all stories, especially genre stories like Star Wars or vampire stories!  But that's something for another time.)

QuoteBut this doesn't mean, none of this means, that RPGs were "meant" to tell stories.

Nobody said they were, at least not in this thread! You are the only one who is making a claim about what RPGs are "meant to do".

QuoteNo major game presenting itself as an RPG actually dealt with that issue until the forge came along

Wait, what? Didn't you just say Vampire and Star Wars tried to deal with the issue? I mean you say they fail, I say they succeed, but it's not like the Forge (collectively, which is a stupid way to talk about it since the games that came from it were so diverse) was the first to look at it.

Actually, I do remember (again trying to get this back on topic) that there were a number of sandbox/exploration-style GMs in the early days of Vampire who pushed back on the drama elements of the game and saw it more as a horror world-discovery game, where the characters, noob Vampires, slowly came to grips with how fucked they were.  They used city books like Chicago by Night to simulate how Vampire society would operate and what players would find when they started to go different places.  Their interest in online discussion was primarily in "How can I help the players decide what a reasonable goal is in this situation?"  It really wasn't that well supported as a playstyle until the Gilded Cage supplement came out, very late in the Vampire Revised cycle.

Requiem had the excellent Damnation City supplement, which we already discussed.  Similar principles advanced there.

Quote from: Rincewind1;498618Or as I like to call it, he jumped out of the bathtub screaming "Eureka", and people instead of pointing out that he needs a towel, agreed that he rediscovered Archimedes' law. I like storygames, it's just the "artists" and their claims that I have a problem with.

Many of the things-people-call storygames actually have an influences/bibliography of games that explicitly call out what their roots are. Sorcerer, Dogs in the Vineyard, Dust Devils, etc.  They all thank and point to earlier RPGs as inspirations. Can you be more specific?  I've gotten pretty jaded on games (of all sorts) saying they do something AMAZING and NEW. It certainly hasn't been limited to "arty" games.  At this late date in my jaded career I glaze over those sorts of back-cover-copy like girls in beer commercials.  I'm pretty sure if I buy the beer, the girls are not going to show up to party with me.

To keep on the Vampire topic, how well I remember sniggering at the "you're a REAL ROLEPLAYER NOW!" text in First Edition Vampire in 1991.  The great "roll vs. role"-player insult-off of 1989-1997.  The good old days of gamers hating each other. Not like today...

Quote from: JDCorley;498685Many of the things-people-call storygames actually have an influences/bibliography of games that explicitly call out what their roots are. Sorcerer, Dogs in the Vineyard, Dust Devils, etc.  They all thank and point to earlier RPGs as inspirations. Can you be more specific?  I've gotten pretty jaded on games (of all sorts) saying they do something AMAZING and NEW. It certainly hasn't been limited to "arty" games.  At this late date in my jaded career I glaze over those sorts of back-cover-copy like girls in beer commercials.  I'm pretty sure if I buy the beer, the girls are not going to show up to party with me.

To keep on the Vampire topic, how well I remember sniggering at the "you're a REAL ROLEPLAYER NOW!" text in First Edition Vampire in 1991.  The great "roll vs. role"-player insult-off of 1989-1997.  The good old days of gamers hating each other. Not like today...

Like this snippet that's supposedly in AW,  that I picked up on TBP the other day, in a post claiming it to be the discovery of decade in RPGs

Quote(R)oleplaying is a conversation. You and the other players go back and forth, talking about these fictional characters in their fictional circumstances doing whatever it is that they do. (...)

All these rules do is mediate the conversation. They kick in when someone says some particular things, and they impose constraints on what everyone should say after. Makes sense, right?

Come on. I've known that since I picked up my copy of Warhammer at the age of 12. Claiming this is "new" means that you either commit purposeful bias, or it's your first RPG. And the funniest thing is, I actually find AW a good game. It's just that the author's commentary to it sounds like something I'd cut out of the damn piece.

There's a difference between "mechanical looseness" (my players would point out I'm not exactly the most steadfast defender of the "rules as written") and actively changing the central priority of why you're there.
If you're not being a rules-stickler, that doesn't affect the fundamental function of the roleplaying game experience.  In fact, one can easily play fast and loose with the rules IN ORDER to enhance emulation or immersion.

On the other hand, If you are putting the game experience itself, including emulation and immersion, into a secondary place of priority in favor of "crafting a story", that's where you end up going against the very grain of what RPGs are supposed to be about, "playing the game".

If its more important to you that you "craft a story" than that you effectively emulate a world, to the point that you fuck over emulation for the sake of "story", or that you break the immersive experience for the sake of story-crafting, then you don't really want to play an RPG, you want to play a storygame.

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPundit;498696There's a difference between "mechanical looseness" (my players would point out I'm not exactly the most steadfast defender of the "rules as written") and actively changing the central priority of why you're there.
If you're not being a rules-stickler, that doesn't affect the fundamental function of the roleplaying game experience.  In fact, one can easily play fast and loose with the rules IN ORDER to enhance emulation or immersion.

On the other hand, If you are putting the game experience itself, including emulation and immersion, into a secondary place of priority in favor of "crafting a story", that's where you end up going against the very grain of what RPGs are supposed to be about, "playing the game".

If its more important to you that you "craft a story" than that you effectively emulate a world, to the point that you fuck over emulation for the sake of "story", or that you break the immersive experience for the sake of story-crafting, then you don't really want to play an RPG, you want to play a storygame.

RPGPundit

And that sentiment I can agree with. I'd not put storygames beneath RPGs though, or accuse all of them of "artsinessness" as I like to call this trend in general works today - but I know you are in a different trench on that, Pundit, and chances of any of us persuading the other are pointless. I also think there's a certain interesting fine line between story and immersion, that Gumshoe mechanic treads, for example.

Quote from: Rincewind1;498688Like this snippet that's supposedly in AW,  that I picked up on TBP the other day, in a post claiming it to be the discovery of decade in RPGs

Come on. I've known that since I picked up my copy of Warhammer at the age of 12. Claiming this is "new" means that you either commit purposeful bias, or it's your first RPG. And the funniest thing is, I actually find AW a good game. It's just that the author's commentary to it sounds like something I'd cut out of the damn piece.

Well, but the game isn't claiming it's a huge discovery, just some idiot on the Internet, right? Or does the game claim this is a big discovery? (I don't actually own AW, so I don't know.)