DMing is Not Storytelling

Best Selling RPGs - Available Now @ DriveThruRPG.com
To someone unfamiliar with ttrpgs that imaginative act most closely resembles someone telling a story.
Not really. No one person speaks for long and what they do say is mostly just a short description of a person/place/thing/action.
IME it feels more like a game of 'cops & robbers'... with less running around and throwing rocks at each other.
 
Not really. No one person speaks for long and what they do say is mostly just a short description of a person/place/thing/action.
IME it feels more like a game of 'cops & robbers'... with less running around and throwing rocks at each other.
Yep. We don’t say “Those kids are Storytelling”, we say “those kids are Playing Pretend”.
 
Not really. No one person speaks for long and what they do say is mostly just a short description of a person/place/thing/action.
IME it feels more like a game of 'cops & robbers'... with less running around and throwing rocks at each other.

That depends on the table. I prefer GMs and players that use short but vivid, visual images in describing their actions. Otherwise it becomes montonous and boring: 'I roll a 20, I hit, I do 8 damage' is the kiss of death for me. One reason I prefer games that don't drag out combat which practically forces you to drop into such bland, mechanical only descriptions of actions.

That had long been my issue with individual intiative and HP bloat in D&D.

Besides, it doesn't take much to spark some people's imagination. Just saying 'there's a orc with an ax coming at you' is often enough, particularly for newbies and kids.

And there is lots of storytelling, particularly verbal storytelling, that is not extensively detailed. Hardboiled detective fiction, the sometimes flowery Chandler aside, is one example. Myths and fairy tales that spend little time detailing characters appearence or even mental states, etc. is another.
 
Last edited:
I agree with this assessment entirely. I just don't think anyone was advocating for the "you're attacked, roll initiative" option.
I didn't say anyone was.

My point was not that talking about the GMs job being about providing conflict is necessarily wrong. It's just empty.

It doesn't actually communicate what matters.

Especially when the point is that the GM is not a storyteller. What does this actually mean then. The DM provides obstacles - isn't this screenwriting 101?

Of course the obstacles/conflicts need to be good ones, of a type that works in a role-playing game. But if we take that as a given aren't we basically occluding the very point that is crucial to avoiding falling into the GM trap of taking all your inspiration from non-interactive media and then not knowing what you're doing wrong?
 
Last edited:
As a kid and a teen I would have preferred that to the very common misconception that we dressed up and larped (although I was unfamiliar with that term) as we played. That is what seemed to strike adults as 'weird' about the game.

Although the fact that you were all just sitting at a table rolling dice and imagining you were a wizard also struck some as equally hard to grasp.
My wife really thought the former was what we did...until she saw us play one day and found it to be much less weird and satanic than she had been led to believe.

(She also found it remarkably boring to watch as well, but that's another story.)

I was like LOL GOD NO I'M NO LARPER (or evil) ARE YOU INSANE?!??
 
My wife really thought the former was what we did...until she saw us play one day and found it to be much less weird and satanic than she had been led to believe.

(She also found it remarkably boring to watch as well, but that's another story.)

I was like LOL GOD NO I'M NO LARPER (or evil) ARE YOU INSANE?!??

There is a hilarious episode of The Greatest American Hero where they completely misrepresent D&D in just that way!

When it comes to Larping, I've never done it but have no issue with it. I'm even impressed and intrigued by some of the more ambitous larps.

But dressing up and then just sitting at a table to play a ttrpg? I've briefly seen some do that for streams and while I'm loathe to cast shade on fellow rpg nerds, that strikes me as just awkward.

I mean if you're going to dress up might as well go whole hog and larp it I think.
 
What happened to you isn’t a story. You telling someone what happened to you is a story. You could tell 25 people what happened to you and it could be different every time depending on what you choose to include and how you tell it. What actually happened to you, however, doesn’t change.

I agree with you.

Maybe I wasn't clear or you may still disagree with my premise. I believe a story is created as an end result of a traditional rpg after the game is completed. Whereas narrative games have a direct purpose of creating a story. This was very distinct when roleplaying games were first invented. There are plenty of rpg games now that have specific game mechanics to alter the ongoing in-game fiction/characters so that the end result is a "better" story. There are also plenty of games in which the mechanics are more focused on telling a story yet retain roleplaying. This blurring of the line and meshing of story telling and roleplaying seems to seriously hamper attempts at defining which games are just story telling and which are role playing games. Especially when a complete narrative game requires players to roleplay a specific character to tell a story.

I'm thinking we won't get past semantics though.

I almost never play narrative games. They're not my thing. Kudos to people who like them. But I do know that I roleplayed the hell out of an 'alive' ventriloquist's dummy in a pure storytelling murder mystery at a party. I followed a script of what I knew and didn't know. It was a game and I was roleplaying and it was all story. Everything was predetermined except only the person running the game knew who the killer was. No one at the party would say we weren't playing roles.. or roleplaying a story.
 
I agree with you.

Maybe I wasn't clear or you may still disagree with my premise. I believe a story is created as an end result of a traditional rpg after the game is completed. Whereas narrative games have a direct purpose of creating a story. This was very distinct when roleplaying games were first invented. There are plenty of rpg games now that have specific game mechanics to alter the ongoing in-game fiction/characters so that the end result is a "better" story. There are also plenty of games in which the mechanics are more focused on telling a story yet retain roleplaying. This blurring of the line and meshing of story telling and roleplaying seems to seriously hamper attempts at defining which games are just story telling and which are role playing games. Especially when a complete narrative game requires players to roleplay a specific character to tell a story.

I'm thinking we won't get past semantics though.

I almost never play narrative games. They're not my thing. Kudos to people who like them. But I do know that I roleplayed the hell out of an 'alive' ventriloquist's dummy in a pure storytelling murder mystery at a party. I followed a script of what I knew and didn't know. It was a game and I was roleplaying and it was all story. Everything was predetermined except only the person running the game knew who the killer was. No one at the party would say we weren't playing roles.. or roleplaying a story.

What you're saying here about narrative games is not really true. I know the Forge pushed this thinking, but it's not my experience running such games. What many of these games try to do, is create more intentional drama than traditional rpgs. They also often blur or completely remove the traditional player and GM roles.
 
. What many of these games try to do, is create more intentional drama than traditional rpgs.
The end result is altered by the creation of intentional drama though.

However, you do have me thinking that using 'story' is probably the weak part in all the arguments. The actual experience of the game should be considered instead which perhaps is where you and others are coming from. I think there is still much in common between both types of games wherein everyone is still roleplaying.

And the further I can stay away from Forge stuff, the better. I tried to not delve into it but it's hard not to come across online over the years.
 
I agree with you.

Maybe I wasn't clear or you may still disagree with my premise. I believe a story is created as an end result of a traditional rpg after the game is completed. Whereas narrative games have a direct purpose of creating a story. This was very distinct when roleplaying games were first invented. There are plenty of rpg games now that have specific game mechanics to alter the ongoing in-game fiction/characters so that the end result is a "better" story. There are also plenty of games in which the mechanics are more focused on telling a story yet retain roleplaying. This blurring of the line and meshing of story telling and roleplaying seems to seriously hamper attempts at defining which games are just story telling and which are role playing games. Especially when a complete narrative game requires players to roleplay a specific character to tell a story.

I'm thinking we won't get past semantics though.

I almost never play narrative games. They're not my thing. Kudos to people who like them. But I do know that I roleplayed the hell out of an 'alive' ventriloquist's dummy in a pure storytelling murder mystery at a party. I followed a script of what I knew and didn't know. It was a game and I was roleplaying and it was all story. No one at the party would say we weren't playing roles.. or roleplaying a story.

I strain to think of even a self-identified 'storygame' that has 'a direct purpose to tell a story.'

Any examples? My Life with Master is the only one that (maybe) comes to mind right now but I haven't read that in a long time.

Fiasco often comes up in that regard but similar to the excellent Ten Candles, a horror game, the only thing really determined by the mechanics is how badly one fails or who dies by the game's end.

A lot of so-called 'narrative' mechanics strike me as moreso intended to emulate a genre than construct a story, like Ghostbusters and the James Bond rpg for instance.

Most 'storygames' are really rotating GM-games, often I think poorly described by some as GM-less. Some have more structure than others but actually few base their structure on any narrative model, like the aforementioned 3 Act structure.

Usually they are about collaboratively (but not always as some do have GMs) constructing a conflict that the central mechanic of the game resolves through the course of play, sometimes in an oppositional manner but usually more cooperatively. An example of that would be Ben Robbins' Follow.

And as so many insist that a story can only be told retrospectively I don't understand how one can claim then that any game based on emergent verbal collaboration of a group of people suddenly does qualify as a story?

The end result is altered by the creation of intentional drama though.

However, you do have me thinking that using 'story' is probably the weak part in all the arguments. The actual experience of the game should be considered instead which perhaps is where you and others are coming from. I think there is still much in common between both types of games wherein everyone is still roleplaying.

And the further I can stay away from Forge stuff, the better. I tried to not delve into it but it's hard not to come across online over the years.

Don't all rpgs have an 'end result created by intentional drama'?

The end result I'm assuming being the experience of playing the game. If you mean the game having an end result as in the play resolves based on what happens in play, again I strain to think of an rpg where this is not true. A TPK in CoC or D&D, or if all the players decide to send their PCs into retirement. These are all end results due to intentional drama.

Can you give an example of a game where this is not true?
 
Last edited:
I strain to think of even a self-identified 'storygame' that has 'a direct purpose to tell a story.'
I was stretching roleplaying all the way to party games where people roleplay characters (murder mysteries) and puzzle box games where people solve mysteries and murders as they act as a detective. When examining something, I tend to push things out to their absolute limits.
 
You know, I really am not sure that we needed yet another thread that argues the definition of story because people have some kind of trigger associated with the word, but we seem to be going again.


Well yes, EXACTLY! Holy crap do people get triggered by the term "story".

I don't know about the gentleman in the video he's responding to, but I can tell everyone this about Trevor:

He is not a veteran of the forum wars. I don;t know he's ever heard of Forge theory and pretty sure he's never even been to the RPGsite. He lurked a bit on TBP until it went crazy, and he posted here in one thread for a few days, and that's it. He's a successful actor - meaning he's got a life, unlike the rest of us scrubs

He's not speaking in coded mesages, or defining terminology, or making allusions, or targetting some group of roleplayers for badwrongfun. He's offering advice to his audience, and explaining his process, both when playing solo in his video series or gaming with friends. That's it.

There's no strawmen or anti-storygamers agenda or any of that nerd bullshit that has infected us HARDCORE forum dwellers - he's pretty much oblivious to that stuff. I had to explain to him who Zak S was for God's sake.

Trevor, like the rest of the world outside this incredibly incestuous online rpg forum bubble, doesn't know or give a shit about the microscope-level navelgazing tribalism that people are projecting onto his words. Seriously, ignore the word "story", and listen to what he actually says in the video. It's very basic, good advice for fans of his that discovered his videos and are interested into getting into roleplaying.

FFS
 
Well yes, EXACTLY! Holy crap do people get triggered by the term "story".

I don't know about the gentleman in the video he's responding to, but I can tell everyone this about Trevor:

He is not a veteran of the forum wars. I don;t know he's ever heard of Forge theory and pretty sure he's never even been to the RPGsite. He lurked a bit on TBP until it went crazy, and he posted here in one thread for a few days, and that's it. He's a successful actor - meaning he's got a life, unlike the rest of us scrubs

He's not speaking in coded mesages, or defining terminology, or making allusions, or targetting some group of roleplayers for badwrongfun. He's offering advice to his audience, and explaining his process, both when playing solo in his video series or gaming with friends. That's it.

There's no strawmen or anti-storygamers agenda or any of that nerd bullshit that has infected us HARDCORE forum dwellers - he's pretty much oblivious to that stuff. I had to explain to him who Zak S was for God's sake.

Trevor, like the rest of the world outside this incredibly incestuous online rpg forum bubble, doesn't know or give a shit about the microscope-level navelgazing tribalism that people are projecting onto his words. Seriously, ignore the word "story", and listen to what he actually says in the video. It's very basic, good advice for fans of his that discovered his videos and are interested into getting into roleplaying. It's not FOR you, or directed AT you.

FFS

I wasn't even addressing the video. I was addressing the way people were responding in the thread.

And to be honest: What did you expect.

1. He may not, but you do.
2. You linked the post here, and pointed out it was a conversation you have had many times (leaving people to assume that it is about the kind of conversations you have had on it).

Also, the whole RPGs and stories definition kerfluffle, at least as far as my annoyance, is the way people jump in to tell you how RPGS DON'T CREATE STORY if you dare to use the word story in passing about your campaign. It isn't even about "storygamers" or "narrative games".

It is about people having to come up with more and more different words to mean "the stuff that happened in the game" to keep people from sidetracking a conversation.

Honestly, if I was going to post a video or article that I felt used a term that was loaded in the community, but the person was using it differently than the normal loaded way, I would you know, point that out in the opening post.
 
Depends on the wrestlers. Some go out knowing only the ending.

Is that really true? I mean, look, we all know pro wrestling is fake, I would just be very surprised to learn that any of it is improvisational. Those are not trivial stunts being performed, and from my own experience in theatre/film/TV, that stuff is planned down to the second for safety's sake. People get badly injured even then, I can only imagine the disaster resulting from the slightest miscommunication between the wrestlers over the next signature move.

Not really. No one person speaks for long and what they do say is mostly just a short description of a person/place/thing/action.

A game is a conversation.

Seriously, the PbtA principles are the best concise description of what an RPG is and how to run/play one.

A lot of so-called 'narrative' mechanics strike me as moreso intended to emulate a genre than construct a story, like Ghostbusters and the James Bond rpg for instance.

That wasn't the intent of the "Hero Points" mechanics in those games, though. Both games use bog-standard physics-sim skill roll mechanics. The problem is that that design is inherently opposed to the genre tropes in both Ghostbusters and James Bond 007. "Hero Points" aren't a genre-emulation mechanics, they're a shallow patch on the fact that the core mechanics are routinely going to give you results that violate the genre rules of the licensed IP.
 
Is that really true? I mean, look, we all know pro wrestling is fake, I would just be very surprised to learn that any of it is improvisational. Those are not trivial stunts being performed, and from my own experience in theatre/film/TV, that stuff is planned down to the second for safety's sake. People get badly injured even then, I can only imagine the disaster resulting from the slightest miscommunication between the wrestlers over the next signature move.
They train spots, combinations and such, but they pretty much call a sequence as the match goes. Stone Cold's talked about it a lot on his podcast. He's very hard of hearing so always had to call his own matches, whereas it's often a mix of the wrestlers signaling to each other or even the ref giving instructions throughout it. But these guys are performing so frequently there definitely isn't time to choreograph a whole match. Big event matches they'll often have more structure planned out, but you're average match has a lot of improvisation.
 
Is that really true? I mean, look, we all know pro wrestling is fake, I would just be very surprised to learn that any of it is improvisational. Those are not trivial stunts being performed, and from my own experience in theatre/film/TV, that stuff is planned down to the second for safety's sake. People get badly injured even then, I can only imagine the disaster resulting from the slightest miscommunication between the wrestlers over the next signature move.



A game is a conversation.

Seriously, the PbtA principles are the best concise description of what an RPG is and how to run/play one.



That wasn't the intent of the "Hero Points" mechanics in those games, though. Both games use bog-standard physics-sim skill roll mechanics. The problem is that that design is inherently opposed to the genre tropes in both Ghostbusters and James Bond 007. "Hero Points" aren't a genre-emulation mechanics, they're a shallow patch on the fact that the core mechanics are routinely going to give you results that violate the genre rules of the licensed IP.

I agree about PbtA, aka. AW's concise description of ttrpgs.

Good point on the hero/brownie points, although the slightly clumsy fix was done in service of genre emulation of the IP no?

And GB goes further than JB and says that the player can describe the result of the expenditure of the Brownie themselves, which gives the player a level of GM/narrative control that was from what I can see rare at the time. At least in rulesets.

Peterson's The Elusive Shift shows what I noticed when reading about early rpg play: GMs allowing broader player input into the setting, etc. was not some radical later idea but was present at some tables from the beginning.
 
Well yes, EXACTLY! Holy crap do people get triggered by the term "story".

I don't know about the gentleman in the video he's responding to, but I can tell everyone this about Trevor:

He is not a veteran of the forum wars. I don;t know he's ever heard of Forge theory and pretty sure he's never even been to the RPGsite. He lurked a bit on TBP until it went crazy, and he posted here in one thread for a few days, and that's it. He's a successful actor - meaning he's got a life, unlike the rest of us scrubs

He's not speaking in coded mesages, or defining terminology, or making allusions, or targetting some group of roleplayers for badwrongfun. He's offering advice to his audience, and explaining his process, both when playing solo in his video series or gaming with friends. That's it.

There's no strawmen or anti-storygamers agenda or any of that nerd bullshit that has infected us HARDCORE forum dwellers - he's pretty much oblivious to that stuff. I had to explain to him who Zak S was for God's sake.

Trevor, like the rest of the world outside this incredibly incestuous online rpg forum bubble, doesn't know or give a shit about the microscope-level navelgazing tribalism that people are projecting onto his words. Seriously, ignore the word "story", and listen to what he actually says in the video. It's very basic, good advice for fans of his that discovered his videos and are interested into getting into roleplaying. It's not FOR you, or directed AT you.

FFS
Even before you wrote this, I was thinking to myself that the wars over story are meaningless to me. I run my games the way I run them. They are more or less sandboxes (I admire what Rob Conley talks about, the level of society and other stuff he builds up for his campaigns is more than I can manage). Players have fun in my games (or they don't, I hope those who aren't having fun because I'm "doing it wrong" gracefully bow out rather than play and not enjoy themselves). If you run your game differently, and your players enjoy it, cool. I'll continue to watch folks like Rob Conley because despite my not being up to all the bits he does, he has good advice. If I am looking for a game to play in, there are certain phrases, some that contain "story" in them that make me think it's not the game for me, and I just pass on to the next game. I have occasionally had interviews with prospective players in the past who used certain language (like role vs roll play). If someone like that asked about my game, I'd try and be up front about my GM style, and if they continued to press on more "role play" vs "roll play" I might see that they aren't likely to like my games and suggest they find another. I've scared off some players before they've finished character generation because they were obviously looking for something my games don't offer. I just refuse to give in to them and they go away.

Maybe some of my players tell stories about my games. If so cool. If not, but they're still having fun cool.
 
1. He may not, but you do.
2. You linked the post here, and pointed out it was a conversation you have had many times (leaving people to assume that it is about the kind of conversations you have had on it).


Even, if that were true, if people addressed what I've actually said on the matter, then I don't think they could possibly have any problems.
 
Is that really true? I mean, look, we all know pro wrestling is fake, I would just be very surprised to learn that any of it is improvisational. Those are not trivial stunts being performed, and from my own experience in theatre/film/TV, that stuff is planned down to the second for safety's sake. People get badly injured even then, I can only imagine the disaster resulting from the slightest miscommunication between the wrestlers over the next signature move.
100% true. I've done it. And I was hardly any good.

You figure out pretty fast who can call it in the ring and who you need to plan stuff out with in advance.

I've seen guys get screwed up worse from trying to remember every single spot and not being able/willing to improvise than I have from guys just going out and winging it.

We have our ways of communicating, but it requires training to get there.
 
Good point on the hero/brownie points, although the slightly clumsy fix was done in service of genre emulation of the IP no?

And GB goes further than JB and says that the player can describe the result of the expenditure of the Brownie themselves, which gives the player a level of GM/narrative control that was from what I can see rare at the time. At least in rulesets.

Not exactly, although I'm probably splitting hairs on this. Genre emulation mechanics are things like Fiasco's Tilt or Smallville's No PC Death rules ( or, more subtly, the only way to improve your character in Smallville is to get into arguments with other PCs, lose, and then go commiserate with someone afterwards).

What GB and JB7 do is simply layer a shallow hack on top of the trad D&D style mechanics which, if played straight, would result in the PCs failing most rolls and/or dying at a rate entirely at odds with either genre. I contend there's a difference between designing mechanics to emulate specific genre tropes and just using D&D for your mechanics but layering hacks on top when those mechanics give you atonal results.

The foreword to Marvel Heroic Roleplaying sums the problem up nicely:

Margaret Weis said:
My history with Marvel Universe goes back a long way—twenty-five years—to the original TSR version of the game. In fact, I almost derailed it! The designers, Jeff Grubb and Steve Winter, wanted to test the game on people in the company who weren’t “professional” gamers. Another editor in the book department and I volunteered to playtest the very first version. I was Captain America. In the opening sequence, Captain America is supposed to handily defeat two teenage thugs. Unfortunately, I had such horrible dice rolls that Captain America missed all his punches, was pummeled unmercifully, and wound up unconscious in the gutter. So it was back to the design board. (And I was not invited to playtest again!)

MSH's response to that was to add a Hero Points mechanic that allows you to buy off bad rolls. MHR's response to it was to build the core mechanics so it can't happen in the first place.
 
In all my replies in this thread, except the very first one, I have avoided using "story". I felt it was completely unnecessary. I understood G Gabriel gm style without needing to dismiss his use of story and storyteliing.
The importance people put into it seems meaningless to me. Just like I find the whole traditionel/narrative/storygame division meaningless personally. I like to judge games by the experience they give me running and playing them. I like running and playing games of various styles, and I like hearing about other peoples experiences too.
I don't believe there is only one way to play a rpg. I do have some preferences obviously, but so do everyone else. If whatever works for you and your group, just keep doing it. Don't be put down by someone on the internet saying your doing it wrong. They don't know you and your group.

About Trevor. I obviously only know him from his Me, Myself and Die show, but I love his enthusiasm. It's really inspiring. He also realy reminds me of some my gamer friends, who doesn't follow any rpg stuff on the internet.
I wanted to write more, but it's over 2 AM here and I can barely keep my eyes open.
 
There is a hilarious episode of The Greatest American Hero where they completely misrepresent D&D in just that way!

When it comes to Larping, I've never done it but have no issue with it. I'm even impressed and intrigued by some of the more ambitous larps.

But dressing up and then just sitting at a table to play a ttrpg? I've briefly seen some do that for streams and while I'm loathe to cast shade on fellow rpg nerds, that strikes me as just awkward.

I mean if you're going to dress up might as well go whole hog and larp it I think.
If it helps, LARPers also find those types weird.

"Wait, you're LARPing, but you use dice to resolve actions? What is this madness?"
 
Is that really true? I mean, look, we all know pro wrestling is fake, I would just be very surprised to learn that any of it is improvisational. Those are not trivial stunts being performed, and from my own experience in theatre/film/TV, that stuff is planned down to the second for safety's sake. People get badly injured even then, I can only imagine the disaster resulting from the slightest miscommunication between the wrestlers over the next signature move.
I only know the British side of things. (My dad was a wrestler and then referee. As you can imagine, kayfbe gets pretty loose in that situation, even back in the days when it was taken much more seriously).

It depends on the specific match, but generally some moves etc. will be practiced beforehand but it's not a step by step choreography.

Especially with wrestlers that know each other well and train together, a lot of it is about bouncing off each other and responding to cues. That's why any ref worth their salt has several ways of ending the round early just in case.
 
People make this argument too complicated.

DMing is being a biological computer that acts and reacts to various situations within the setting. Anything else is just putting RGB lights in your casing.
 
I was like LOL GOD NO I'M NO LARPER (or evil) ARE YOU INSANE?!??
Say that to my face :wink:
1625193169554.png

Yes I was big into LARPS in the 90s and early 2000s. Even owned and ran a boffer LARP chapter. But I don't mix the two, despite my LARP experience and liking it, I find it weird that a few folks like to dress up for a tabletop roleplaying session.
 
I believe that true of improv as well and crucial to making it work well.
Long before I was a wrestler, I was in theatre - both in high school and later in community theater - and I loved to improvise...and I accidentally tripped up more than a few people in the process. But I had one classmate where we would just shoot from the hip off each other all day.
 
I'm not getting the insistence on stories being something told after the fact.

I remember reading a great book at University on African Oral Literature which described big community events where people from various towns would gather together and listen to music, poetry, stories and songs from those different places. One of the things the book described was orators who would get up and tell an audience an improvised story and that improvisation was based on the audience reaction. This was often competitive with someone winning based on the best crowd reaction. That is a story being created in the moment. It doesn't need to be written down and then read, or discussed, later for it to qualify as a story.

You're right that writers often plan ahead, creating synopses or treatments and the like, before writing but that doesn't mean the story they ultimately create doesn't diverge, sometimes radically, as they work. It doesn't mean that writers always do that planning stage either. Jim Thompson, a writer I'm a big fan of, could get tanked on whiskey and churn out a hardboiled novel, based on nothing but a painted cover, in a few weeks. No planning! I'm actually thinking of a specific instance here. He did this when writing the novel Pop. 1280 and when it was finished the book had nothing whatsoever to do with the painted cover that inspired it (other than the title Pop. 1280 which is on a sign on the cover). It's all a matter of taste but I really enjoyed that book!
I can't speak for other folks but for me the times I improvise a story, I am relying on a bag of stuff in my mind. So if somebody says "Make a story about X, Go!" I will take a moment to think about it and decide on something. As I add more and more elements and character, how it starts to hang together suggest what I should do next. Then finally it become more clear how the story should flow and that eventually leads to its conclusion. I am doing this a step of ahead of time while speaking to my audience. When it works out, I get into a zen state, where there on part of me addressing the audience and another part of planning what to say next.

Oddly it similar mentally what I do when I played Football and Swam as a sport. I even tried a small number of times at conventions where I went into the event with nothing more than a map. I rolled on one of those plot generators 5 minutes for the event start. It was evil wizards kidnap noble's daughter. And I made adventure in real time as the players explored the map. It was a success but I rather be prepared than do it over and over again. I did just to see if I could.

TLDR; one is an event that can lead to storytelling as an unexpected byproduct while the other is an event that facilitates, or encourages, storytelling.
That fair, however I view tabletop roleplaying also as an event that could lead to storytelling as an unexpected byproduct. And that where I believe we disagree. Because unlike the story told by a storyteller, roleplaying games have two elements that set them apart.

1) The possibility of failure
2) Fog of War.

A storyteller can't fail in the way the players of a tabletop roleplaying game can fail. The storyteller can have character die but that happens because the author choose have the character die. Most times it because it make good narrative sense. But in tabletop roleplaying characters can die despite the wishes of the player who want to continue playing as that character. Or they fail the quest, or wreck their starship, any number of outcomes that were neither planned or desired by the participants.

A storyteller is not subject to Fog of War in the same way. A player in a tabletop roleplaying campaign doesn't know what the referee knows. And isn't expected too. Roleplayers are expected to explore the setting. Not just literal exploration but also social exploration as well like uncovering a plot to kill the king. An author may not know everything about their character at the start and find that new elements they think of make sense to have later in the writing process. But not a case of the author discovering something that out there in the first. It about the author deciding that X idea was good for the character or story and add it.

To me these two things among others set tabletop roleplaying as something very different than storytelling improvised or not. This two things are also crucial

Now before you respond please do me a favor and assume I am considering the naunces. I am not talking about extremes here and saying "Well campaigns are only about players wandering the landscape" when at I say exploration. Or that campaign without character death doesn't have failure. In both cases I mean Fog of War and Failure in their broadest sense.
n

Whatever the case may be, "story" does not equal "railroading" or "lack of player agency", regardless of whether it can lead to those in certain circumstances, and I don't think it's good to imply that it does.
The reason I pulled out the dictionary definition is to make my point that stories are always about what is the past. You are reading or hearing what happened after the fact. My view is that there is no agency there. As for it not being good, what does that has to do with anything? What story means or what roleplaying means is neither good or bad. Either we agree one what it describes or we don't.

Most RPGs are pushing storytelling as an element, not the sole element but one of them, and a lot of people are playing them for that part. For other parts of the experience too. Also, some of us are quite happy with how that works out. No, it's not the same as a novel or a movie, but it's not meant to be either.
And I think RPGs that push storytelling are making a mistake. That if cooperative storytelling is a goal there are better ways of doing it than using mechanics of a game. That in trying to incorporate storytelling as part of their game, they weaken the elements that make roleplaying games compelling. Namely the sense that you are there as the character in a particular setting having a adventure.

If you want to tell a story about an adventure in Middle Earth then write one. Do it as a group. But if you want to experience life within Middle Earth then use a RPG like Adventures in Middle Earth and have a referee who know Middle Earth run the campaign.



Anyway, I've made my points by now and I don't want to repeat myself too much... or be late to the pub!
We may disagree but you make good points :smile:
 
My net was out over the weekend, and I've been busy with a lot of things, and I didn't see this thread start or explode.

So what are we talking about? Bear with Me?

I think of the story /in games/ is the basic plot structure of stuff I want to see unfold.

That is fundamental "here is my idea of a game" you are X and do Y for Z (reasons.)

Here is where you start, and here is your (ideal) end goal "make a change by being a big damn hero." (Because that's what /I/ want to play and run.)

Everything else is in game conflicts, created to make beginning lead to end providing the middle stuff as difficulties and challenges to both Why are you X, and why do you do Z?

The player's choices which of course will shift the end from my plans, because that's what I want to happen. . The middle is less planned than "here are some places, and people and key things which you can pursue or not."

Now how they do that, why they do that, is usually left to my players--they build the ahem "story" by choosing how any challenge (people stuff) or difficulty (setting hazards like weather and not tied always to people stuff.)

Now to make the abstract more clear an example: Your characters are superheroes, and then "what do you want to face in superhero game? Are you disaster relief, or do you fight bad guys? Do you do a mix of those? Then adding in "why are you a superhero?" as questions that come up in play through fighting bad guys, or saving people from disasters, what is your character's motive here? I the GM will challenge that with things other characters do, and what happens in the world so it makes the game exciting to play.

That's it. My last D&D game was "You are dead people resurrected by a spirit who has some power"

It tells you that this guy, who calls himself Emperor of the Blighted Throne came to power because YOU and many thousands of others died. Because he made the sword that killed you but didn't directly cause your death, he just reaped POWER from all of it.

The spirit tells you this and that "You got lucky your soul got stuck-- and the sword shattered for reasons you might want to look into, and if you pick up the shards, we might be able to make a weapon to fight him and save the world. It's up to you because he killed all the gods you knew, and even wiped out all the demons/devils as well.

The world is a hellscape of toxic seas, acid rain, people struggling to survive in the bitter cold and blazing heat. So are you up to that? Here some funerary goods that are still useable, GO fight, win, save the world! But he's beyond any power ever, so take out those who serve him FIRST, weaken him, and stop him from getting more souls since those helpers are regional horrors who you can fight /now/, or disrupt their plans somehow and keep at it until the sword is remade and you can go take him down. Here is a map of the world, it may not be familiar because the world changed. Now go!"

(Not verbatim, but the idea is there)

Through play they discovered werewolves who couldn't control themselves unless they stayed mired near a "piece of the moon" their wolf god's EYE, and had to get in since the werewolves couldn't and free it before the full moon when they'd wolf out and kill them, thus protecting their enslavement to their own gifts. PC's did that. They could have gone and hunted down the "Demon Bear" that haunted the north and was the enemy of the wolf god, but they didn't. They saved the werewolf clans by freeing the "eye."

Then they found a city held by a warlord/"Raven King" because they went west instead of going down along with the wolves to one of their trading hubs--found out the Raven King took sacrifices to send to the Emporer, the King asked for them to find "his" heart, and return it to him. (It was in the last Dwarven mountain which teleported every few weeks, and ONLY now was it near to get to before it vanished and the king and forces couldn't GO or it vanish anyway. They did that, got the heart, the King asked them to smash it in his presence. They did so freeing HER from her dark pact to protect MOST of her people from harm, only having to send so many for soul harvesting--and turns out she's the daughter of one of the LONG dead PC's, but they only find out after the heart breaks before she turns to dust. Freeing her knights and breaking the pact.

And so on it went, finding out secrets of the world, wee bad guys, big bad guys, good kings, bad ones, elves who locked themselves in the time since they were the last KNOWN city of them as the rest had died, found a Tomb of the Dead Gods guarded by a surviving DEMON (one of the PC's parent--a Tiefling) and so on. They fought, they traveled they used diplomacy, they stopped slavers, a mad alchemist trying to breed monsters like owlbears without the elegance of true creation (think making Frankenstein rather than creating a normal human), and so on.

Their actions were always driven by player choices, and their changes good or bad to the world had an impact. They made the alchemist an ongoing enemy, finally killed him atop a manufactured elemental powered dracolich mockery. Parleyed with a hobgoblin ARMY's last general, and got the promise of aid against the Emporer, and so on and so forth, until covid, and the game dropped to half the starting players and went online. but they kept going. Finally, it imploded before they reached the Emporer (about 13th level, the campaign plan was to 20) but I had nothing more than a map, and problems I wanted on it here and there. They skipped 50% of the "planned" stuff, and dealt with the stuff I spun up on the fly to make things FUN and hard, with moral dilemmas over gods, demons, people suffering or not.

Their items grew in power as they made the world better, or were gifted with some, or discovered some. They even aided resistance fighters and discovered yes, some people were still trying to make the world better without them.

The utter end to the campaign? Well, It had a nasty nasty choice at the end. One I won't share, but just trust me. It would have been a lesson in the road to Evil is built on good intentions. (Not them, but someone big and important to the PC's final choices.) Mind you what they did /during/ play had huge implications on their final choices, I'm not Bioware :grin:

Just a plot structure, Wake up, go fight evil, save the world! The rest? Well, it's all based on actions they took and reactions the world and its people took.

The whole story? They made. I just put a start and potential finish and let the rest fall out one way or another.
 
Last edited:
Wouldn't a closer approximation be actors improving? Music is a much more abstract form, rpgs are constructed largely via language, not the more mathematical form of music.

I just watched an interview with Robert Duvall last night and when asked to explain acting he explained it via the theatre truism of 'acting is reacting.'

He says that he as an actor watches and listens to the other actor and then reacts to that and you develop a conversation.

This reminds me of the PbtA phrase that the game is 'a conversation between the players and the GM.'

It also reminded me of how in The Elusive Shift Peterson notes the structure of rpgs being largely based on the call and response or question and answer conversation of the GM and the players.

A good GM listens to their players and reacts to them.

I realize comparing rpgs to theatre also sets some people off but ironically a lot of rpg discourse around immersion echoes well established actorly practices and terminolgy for 'getting into character.'
If you want to go down the acting road, which is something else I'm not sold on, Who's Line Is It Anyway is about the best analogy I've found.

GM, aka Clive Anderson, sets a scene. Players, aka the panel, improvise and develop that scene until the GM moves them on to a new scene. Rinse and repeat.
 
Last edited:
What about adventure paths... Any series of adventures can only be useful as such if there is something guiding the players to the next adventure.
They suck and shall continue to do so:devil:?

These kinds of threads will continue to appear because of the nature of RPGs. As several have mentioned in various ways, RPGs are in some ways like, but definitely different from various kinds of story telling. The fact that there are different techniques and different boundaries drawn means that there will always be argument about which techniques "break" RPGs and whether your line includes or excludes too much compared to my line.
And it's not like there aren't any arguments about "the right way" among storytellers. In fact, their flamewars tend to make ours seem like a polite disagreement, IME:shade:.
 
I've found a very early example of story being referenced in regards to RPGs, from Lew Pulsipher in 1979:

D&D players can be divided into two groups, those who want to play the game as a game and those who want to play it as a fantasy novel, i .e . direct escapism through abandonment of oneself to the flow of play as opposed to the gamer's indirect escapism - the clearcut competition and mental exercise any good game offers.

(...)

The escapists can be divided into those who prefer to be told a story by the referee, in effect, with themselves as protagonist, and those who like a silly, totally unbelievable game.

The other notable thing here is he really is quite disapproving of "escapist" play, although for him it's the lack of a game element, not immersion, which is the issue.

There is nothing inherently wrong with the silly/escapist method, but it is a strange way for game players to act, and many White Dwarf readers are presumably game players as well as SF fans . Gary Gygax has made it clear that D&D is a wargame, though the majority of players do not use it as such . I personally consider the silly/escapist style to be both boring and inferior for any campaign, though all right occasionally for a weird evening.
 
That fair, however I view tabletop roleplaying also as an event that could lead to storytelling as an unexpected byproduct. And that where I believe we disagree. Because unlike the story told by a storyteller, roleplaying games have two elements that set them apart.

1) The possibility of failure
2) Fog of War.

A storyteller can't fail in the way the players of a tabletop roleplaying game can fail. The storyteller can have character die but that happens because the author choose have the character die. Most times it because it make good narrative sense. But in tabletop roleplaying characters can die despite the wishes of the player who want to continue playing as that character. Or they fail the quest, or wreck their starship, any number of outcomes that were neither planned or desired by the participants.

A storyteller is not subject to Fog of War in the same way. A player in a tabletop roleplaying campaign doesn't know what the referee knows. And isn't expected too. Roleplayers are expected to explore the setting. Not just literal exploration but also social exploration as well like uncovering a plot to kill the king. An author may not know everything about their character at the start and find that new elements they think of make sense to have later in the writing process. But not a case of the author discovering something that out there in the first. It about the author deciding that X idea was good for the character or story and add it.

To me these two things among others set tabletop roleplaying as something very different than storytelling improvised or not. This two things are also crucial

I see these two elements as essential parts of an RPG that sets them apart from the experience of writing a novel or screenplay but doesn't invalidate them as a story telling medium. I don't think RPGs are exclusively about storytelling but it is, to me and many others, a part of what they are. As a rule I don't play or have interest in what I would call "pure story games" where, for instance, there is no GM and everyone takes a turn in narrating and there is no clear definition of characters (probably the closest I've got to that is the Story Cubes game Untold - Adventures Await). The game aspect, and the playing of a character within it, is an essential part of what makes it fun for me. Along with what I see as the group creating a story.

The reason I pulled out the dictionary definition is to make my point that stories are always about what is the past. You are reading or hearing what happened after the fact. My view is that there is no agency there. As for it not being good, what does that has to do with anything? What story means or what roleplaying means is neither good or bad. Either we agree one what it describes or we don't.

The reason I say it's not good is because it's a generalisation and is not an accurate reresentation of what is happening at the tables of many people who say they are telling a story. It can also imply a judgment (as railroading is rarely seen as good) and, while I'm not offended, some people will take offence if you say that they are railroading players when they aren't. That's when a good debate can become an argument and, on forums, people tend to start drawing battlelines and dogpiling people if we're not careful! So far this has been one of the better, most civilised online discussions I've seen on the subject and (while I don't think I have much more to add on the matter) it will be nice to see that continue.

Personally, I don't think we'll change each other's minds at this point, or on this point, but I don't think stories are always about what is in the past. That dictionary definition doesn't categorically state that a story is in the past and storytelling is something I've studied so my mind is made up unfortunately. I'm flexible on many points but not his one!

And I think RPGs that push storytelling are making a mistake. That if cooperative storytelling is a goal there are better ways of doing it than using mechanics of a game. That in trying to incorporate storytelling as part of their game, they weaken the elements that make roleplaying games compelling. Namely the sense that you are there as the character in a particular setting having a adventure.

If you want to tell a story about an adventure in Middle Earth then write one. Do it as a group. But if you want to experience life within Middle Earth then use a RPG like Adventures in Middle Earth and have a referee who know Middle Earth run the campaign.

What first attracted me to RPGs (way back in 1986) were -

a) they were like Fighting Fantasy books... but where you could do anything... and with a group of friends!
b) they were like Text Adventure Games on my computer... but where you could do anything... and with a group of friends!
c) you could help create the adventure/story/call-it-what-you-will instead of it being created for you (note: I've rarely run or played in pre-written modules).
d) you could play a cool character you created.
e) you can explore another world... with a group of friends!

All of those things to me fit with "you are there as the character in a particular setting having an adventure" and the first three are, at least in part, about story telling to me. That's what I wanted from RPGs and they've always given me that successfully (well, there's a couple that didn't but that's a whole other tale!). However, I think what you're talking about is getting into the idea of immersion and my friends and I have always been immersion-lite I think.

We don't do much "in character", for example, and I don't think any of us has ever thought gaming gave us a sense of living within a setting per se. I didn't come across the idea of immersion until the late 90s and I've always found that I didn't quite get it. Not in a bad way, just in the sense of I never felt I fully understood the position of anyone discussing it. I'd think I understood them, and how they play, for a few minutes and then they'd say something that kinda threw me off again. It's not a concept I saw explicitly discussed in any of the games I owned before then (and I'm not sure it's really discussed in any that I own even now) so it's not a style we ever considered embracing in our formative gaming years.

Well, I've got a bad headache now (definitely not related to being in the pub last night:crossed: ) so I think I need to either go and lie down for a bit or get some very strong coffee!

My parting comment is this: if so many of us here have different, seemingly opposed, ideas on what RPGs are and how they should be played, and yet we're all having a damn good time, then I think that speaks for just how great RPGs are!
 
I've found a very early example of story being referenced in regards to RPGs, from Lew Pulsipher in 1979:



The other notable thing here is he really is quite disapproving of "escapist" play, although for him it's the lack of a game element, not immersion, which is the issue.

Peterson discusses this piece and others by Pulsipher in The Elisive Shift, as you can imagine lots of people disagreed eith him in the APAs at the time. What that book drives bome is that none of these debates are new.
 
e) you can explore another world... with a group of friends!


We don't do much "in character", for example, and I don't think any of us has ever thought gaming gave us a sense of living within a setting per se.
I honestly don't know how to put those two together. OK, I think I know, you could explore it via an avatar/game piece...but to me, "exploring a new world" has always meant "a sense of living within a setting":shade:.
 
I honestly don't know how to put those two together. OK, I think I know, you could explore it via an avatar/game piece...but to me, "exploring a new world" has always meant "a sense of living within a setting":shade:.

Yes, those are both ways to do it!

Maybe this is going to be a semantics thing...

However, in my group people don't do a lot in character. It's mostly "what can my character see?" or "what does this place look like?" rather than "what do I see?" It's a fairly superficial difference but, in the example the "I" is important, without it it's a sign that the players are imagining the setting much the way they would a film, only the are also interacting with it. It's a related experience but they aren't trying to capture the feel of living in the setting. There's a certain psychological distance there. That is the best way I can put it! While we don't use miniatures (not generally anyway) the characters are avatars of sorts I guess. There's a third-person quality to the experience rather than imagining the first-person experience, which is how I believe immersion works.
 
Yes, those are both ways to do it!

Maybe this is going to be a semantics thing...

However, in my group people don't do a lot in character. It's mostly "what can my character see?" or "what does this place look like?" rather than "what do I see?" It's a fairly superficial difference but, in the example the "I" is important, without it it's a sign that the players are imagining the setting much the way they would a film, only the are also interacting with it. It's a related experience but they aren't trying to capture the feel of living in the setting. There's a certain psychological distance there. That is the best way I can put it! While we don't use miniatures (not generally anyway) the characters are avatars of sorts I guess. There's a third-person quality to the experience rather than imagining the first-person experience, which is how I believe immersion works.
Yeah. Let's just say that my natural tendency is to speak in first person when roleplaying:thumbsup:.
 
Last edited:
Banner: The best cosmic horror & Cthulhu Mythos @ DriveThruRPG.com
Back
Top