|
Alternative title: "A hive-mind endorsed theoretical framework for brow beating one's intellectual opponents into submission". In the March Chat Thread FactsAreUseless said these things: FactsAreUseless posted:No, storygames are built around "collaborative creation and experience of a story," roleplaying games are about exploring and surviving in a fully-realized, immersive world. FactsAreUseless posted:Actually, they're not arbitrary, and they're important: RPGs are games in which you play a role, storygames are games in which you take a role in a story. It's not complicated. FactsAreUseless posted:RPG: I am Hrothgar, King of Axes, and because of this, I will make the game happen. In my infinite mercy I have left out everyone who took FAU's posts at face value. You all know who you are. OtspIII, reassembling your last post took more time than the rest of the OP and it still won't parse right OtspIII posted:All this, but unironically. Effectronica posted:it isn't, and a lot of games go wrong in thinking that there's a difference between the two, imo OtspIII posted:You don't see a difference between problem-solving and story-telling? I don't think they're at odds with each other, but I don't think they're the same thing. Effectronica posted:The vast majority of stories, and 99.9% of stories with plots, are about solving problems to get rewards. A dungeoncrawl is very highly procedural and probably wouldn't make good TV, but it's still ultimately a story about how a set of characters go and do something that is created by the process of solving these problems and getting those rewards. I guess you could have purely faceless pieces you move around and which you don't invest in as yours, but that's not something that's really been seen since before OD&D in RPGs, and is largely relegated to certain kinds of board game, many of which still have some player investment in their little characters. But a lot of people tend to assume that there is a gap, because we think of stories largely in terms of dramas. But, hell, if your characters have any kind of interaction or you crack jokes, it's basically an episode of Law and Order set in a dungeon. OtspIII posted:I don't know, I feel like there's a pretty fundamental experiential difference between when I'm intentionally leading my character down a doomed path in Fiasco and when I'm trying to figure out how to trick an ogre into telling me where the dragon's hoard is. Stories definitely come out of both of the two situations, and the stories might even be kind of similar if poo poo goes bad with the ogre, but in one the story is my focus and in the other it's a by-product. Effectronica posted:I mean, Fiasco is very, very different in how it does things, because it uses lots of distancing effects, so I dunno how good an example it is . OtspIII posted:
Splicer fucked around with this message at 14:04 on Mar 17, 2015 |
# ? Mar 17, 2015 14:00 |
|
|
# ? Jun 8, 2024 09:39 |
|
Yo, I know you're hoping I'll make your thread good and popular by trolling it, but... you're 100 percent correct! Hitch your wagon to THIS star!
|
# ? Mar 17, 2015 14:04 |
Okay, so I'm going to confuse the discussion further by pointing out that the original, story-games.com definition of a storygame was that it was a game where creating a story occurred as a consequence of play, which made it (in their terms) a supercategory incorporating all RPGs and a selection of other tabletop games. Of course, this depends a whole lot on how we define story, doesn't it? So I guess the first real task is to do the indescribably boring poo poo of hashing out definitions. So I'll start, and then we can argue from there! Story: The dictionary's first definition is this: "a narrative, either true or fictitious, in prose or verse, designed to interest, amuse, or instruct the hearer or reader; tale." Nasty recursion there, but I think we can all work with this and argue over the definition of the terms in the definition. Narrative: I think I'll just be simplistic about this and say that a narrative is a record of a series of events. Event: An event, meanwhile, is simply something that happens. Plot: Plot, then, is the overall structure of the narrative, the arrangement of the events into an order. This is fairly distinct from what you'd find in English textbooks, I think, but a) I'm engaging in rhetorical manipulation here and b) we are talking about a fairly distinct form from what most literature and composition studies focuses on. So with that out of the way, I'd like to address your last post, OtspIII. I do believe that you're onto something- while I still feel that you're describing a variation in playstyle, I'm coming around to thinking that certain games encourage one or the other. I am finding it interesting that D&D is, from my perspective, almost dead central in the middle between the two, or at least in the versions I'm most familiar with. With that being said, I agree with you almost completely. I feel that the ludology of RPGs is pretty much stuck because most of the meaningful focus is on board-and-card games (anyone else remember the poster Hipster Scumbag?) and from the perspective of good boardgame design, RPGs are at best mediocre. Meanwhile, indigenous ludology is focused almost purely on story, often from a bizarre perspective in terms of formal studies, and doesn't focus much on mechanics except as engines to serve the story. Of course, my perspective on this has been somewhat curdled by actually seriously working on designing an RPG. Anyways, I think I'll stop here for the moment so this doesn't get too long.
|
|
# ? Mar 17, 2015 14:33 |
|
i dont know what the gently caress this thread is about
|
# ? Mar 17, 2015 14:36 |
|
Currently Smoking: H.P. Lovecraft's pubic hair
|
# ? Mar 17, 2015 14:38 |
Endorph posted:i dont know what the gently caress this thread is about It's where I hash out my manifesto before I send it to Wizards of the Coast with a note demanding they publish it or I blow up all of Dungeons and Dragons.
|
|
# ? Mar 17, 2015 14:42 |
|
Effectronica posted:It's where I hash out my manifesto before I send it to Wizards of the Coast with a note demanding they publish it or I blow up all of Dungeons and Dragons. Wish you blew up this thread instead
|
# ? Mar 17, 2015 14:46 |
|
Storygames: The cool, right thing that happens when I play my favourite RPG's. Wrongfungames: The wrong, bad thing that happens when plebs play their favourite RPG's or when they play my favourite RPG's but play them wrong. Cleaned up the terminology some for everyone who was having trouble following the conversation.
|
# ? Mar 17, 2015 15:07 |
PurpleXVI posted:Storygames: The cool, right thing that happens when I play my favourite RPG's. I'm curious as to how you got this from things so far, or why you're messing up the epic loving RPG dot net meme.
|
|
# ? Mar 17, 2015 15:09 |
|
Just ducking in for a second to say I've been thinking about this a lot since last night, but that I won't really have any free time to post for a few hours. One thing I will note is that I actually think dungeon crawls (which isn't exactly D&D, but is a playstyle pretty closely related to it) are probably the style of play that I think most heavily leans towards. . .I really need a better term for this than "stuff happens" gameplay. Each room starts as an independent puzzle/challenge, allowing but not requiring larger context to be brought in as appropriate. But even then, the general trend is to start with a bunch of "events" and still end up with a "story" with a "narrative" about what happened during the session, but all that just gets come up with as people think back on what they've done rather than while they're in the thick of it. Err, I guess the one complaint I have about your definitions is that I feel like the "a record of" part of your definition of "narrative" is actually pretty important and has a lot of implications. Basically, it implies that a narrative is a conscious effort to prune a description of a set of events and give it a sort of "meaning". Think of the term "controlling the narrative" about a subject matter.
|
# ? Mar 17, 2015 15:12 |
OtspIII posted:Just ducking in for a second to say I've been thinking about this a lot since last night, but that I won't really have any free time to post for a few hours. It does, but I wanted to be rigorous and distinguish narrative from the events themselves. We can drop it for the purposes of this thread, though I'm not going to edit the post for the sake of posterity.
|
|
# ? Mar 17, 2015 15:14 |
|
Endorph posted:i dont know what the gently caress this thread is about
|
# ? Mar 17, 2015 15:55 |
|
I don't know how valuable my contribution'll be to the conversation, but I'll take a stab at it: What I would consider a storygame-ish approach to play would be letting go of the idea that the RPG is actually some sort of window into an alternate world with the GM as the conduit, and instead embracing whatever produces a more interesting series of events. Like, it doesn't matter what the locked door is made of or what brand padlock was used on it, it's going to be locked or it's going to need special effort to bust down because it's the one door that's standing in the way of the party at a critical moment. Never mind how many doors were already effortlessly bypassed before, this one specific door is a problem for the same reason that it's always the last engine that gives Dennis Quaid a problem in Flight of the Phoenix. It doesn't have to make sense, it just has to be dramatic. I don't think that the above necessitates collaborative worldbuilding either - it's possible to have a "traditional", GM-is-completely-in-the-lead game if the GM is still using story beats and plot armor and plot conceits (cliches?) anyway. The fact that we're also encouraged to let players "fill in the blanks" is a happy coincidence and a best practice.
|
# ? Mar 17, 2015 16:05 |
|
If I understand the distinction between these playstyles correctly, some decent names for them could be "objective based" and "narrative based". A player in an objective based game has a series of goals that he is trying to achieve; the game is about reaching these objectives and surpassing the obstacles that are between the players and those. While the wide world or the characters themselves have room for fleshing out, they are not the focus of the game, the challenges are. The closest comparison that I can make is with the Mario series: what happens is set in motion by the kidnapping of Peach, true, but you aren't really playing for that, you are playing because jumping on mushrooms and avoiding oversized bullets is fun. A player in a narrative based game is also having fun, but in a different way: what matters to those sort of games is the roleplaying, the characters' story arcs and the setting they are in. The players' choices aren't dictated by what they believe is the best way to solve their problems: they are dictated by what makes a better story, or makes the most sense for their characters. The truth is that most games are somewhere between these two extremes; not only that, but a lot of characters in narrative based games do have an objective in their lives and obstacles between themselves and those objectives; so a player's choices could be the same indipendently from where the focus lies. I am not sure if this is the correct interpretation or even if it makes sense but I don't know how to put it better than that. paradoxGentleman fucked around with this message at 16:21 on Mar 17, 2015 |
# ? Mar 17, 2015 16:12 |
|
paradoxGentleman posted:If I understand the distinction between these playstyles correctly, some decent names for them could be "objective based" and "narrative based". It's not complicated: RPGs feature powerful masculine warriors and wizards uniting to overcome obstacles placed by a fair and objective DM. Storygames are a bunch of basket weavers discussing their feelings while the "storyteller" (enabler) gives them all participation As and fudges dice rolls.
|
# ? Mar 17, 2015 16:24 |
I was thinking that procedural and dramatic were the best terms, but now I feel they'd be confusing, because we have the powergamer/whatever-you-call-people-who-make-ineffective-characters-for-"roleplaying" types who blend the two.
|
|
# ? Mar 17, 2015 16:30 |
|
Effectronica posted:I was thinking that procedural and dramatic were the best terms, but now I feel they'd be confusing, because we have the powergamer/whatever-you-call-people-who-make-ineffective-characters-for-"roleplaying" types who blend the two.
|
# ? Mar 17, 2015 16:49 |
|
FactsAreUseless posted:Look at this cultural Marxist poo poo right here.
|
# ? Mar 17, 2015 16:50 |
|
They're different extremes in the same medium, and there are all sorts of things in between. It's like how Koyanisqaatsi and Transformers: Age of Extinction are both movies.
|
# ? Mar 17, 2015 16:52 |
|
Maxwell Lord posted:They're different extremes in the same medium, and there are all sorts of things in between.
|
# ? Mar 17, 2015 16:53 |
FactsAreUseless posted:Oh great, now we can choose between roguelikes and visual novels. Thanks. LMAO. You've been on fire recently.
|
|
# ? Mar 17, 2015 16:55 |
|
Maxwell Lord posted:It's like how Koyanisqaatsi and Transformers: Age of Extinction are both movies. Yeah but what is the Citizen Kane of RPGs
|
# ? Mar 17, 2015 16:57 |
|
gradenko_2000 posted:Yeah but what is the Citizen Kane of RPGs
|
# ? Mar 17, 2015 17:00 |
|
Maxwell Lord posted:They're different extremes in the same medium, and there are all sorts of things in between. Well yes, but there are movies that are closer to one style of play or the other, so it can be helpful in searching what one is interested in to define them . I'd also argue that certain games can be played in both styles, even though some tend more strongly one way or the other.
|
# ? Mar 17, 2015 17:05 |
|
gradenko_2000 posted:Yeah but what is the Citizen Kane of RPGs Toon, obviously. But that's beside the point.
|
# ? Mar 17, 2015 17:05 |
|
Oh cool, I 'm still hoping to get an answer to that question. So to continue my trend of saying stupid things that invite ridicule in a pathetic attempt to engage with other human beings over the internet; it sounds like one of the play styles being described is somewhat analogous to the procedurally generated content in some computer games, with initial content and starting conditions determined, somehow, and then continuing in an open ended dialectical manner in response to player interaction with those starting conditions. During play and afterwards a narrative is created by the participants as they process the series of events that've occurred, and their attachment/investment in this narrative influences their actions independent of game mechanics in a continuing game. This creation of story occurs even though nothing in the game mechanics directly interfaces with it on the level of "story". Is that somewhat close? I'm not drawing the comparison to computer games in a derogatory manner - one of my favorite parts of Civ V is creating a narrative that explains why my civ will stop at nothing to drive the fascists into the sea, even if following that narrative doesn't have anything to do with the mechanics or victory conditions. Often in D&D or similar games the desire to advance a character mechanically by leveling, etc, rapidly fades to second place next to a concern with what they're going to do to influence the game world. On the subject of why doors are locked, I’d rather the door be locked or unlocked for a reason internally congruent with the setting/narrative rather than because it’s dramatic. The best reason I can put forth for this is that it feels like a game where things always tend toward the most dramatic/interesting option is boring after a while, because there isn’t room for surprise, lateral thinking or having a quiet boring moment to contrast the exciting things. If everything is always interesting all the time (either because it is or those are the only moments you focus on) than it gets repetitious through overexposure. And I get that 99% of the time a locked door is either picked, knocked or bashed down, but some of my favorite gaming moments have been when players creatively got around a locked door by doing something I didn’t expect and I love those kinds of surprises. I find them easier to come by when players are reacting to the constraints imposed by a more simulationist rules set.
|
# ? Mar 17, 2015 17:08 |
|
Glorified Scrivener posted:Oh cool, I 'm still hoping to get an answer to that question. are you for real
|
# ? Mar 17, 2015 17:13 |
|
Captain Foo posted:are you for real
|
# ? Mar 17, 2015 17:15 |
|
paradoxGentleman posted:Well yes, but there are movies that are closer to one style of play or the other, so it can be helpful in searching what one is interested in to define them . I'd also argue that certain games can be played in both styles, even though some tend more strongly one way or the other. True, it's just that thanks to Pundits and such there's this idea that they're two separate things with a clear line between them, when it's more a blurry thing. Like there are plenty of games that throw in occasional "author the narrative" elements but are mostly just "roll to succeed at a task", and that works.
|
# ? Mar 17, 2015 17:16 |
|
Glorified Scrivener posted:Oh cool, I 'm still hoping to get an answer to that question.
|
# ? Mar 17, 2015 17:17 |
|
|
# ? Mar 17, 2015 17:28 |
|
|
# ? Mar 17, 2015 17:45 |
|
Maxwell Lord posted:True, it's just that thanks to Pundits and such there's this idea that they're two separate things with a clear line between them, when it's more a blurry thing. Like there are plenty of games that throw in occasional "author the narrative" elements but are mostly just "roll to succeed at a task", and that works. You'll notice that I said something similar towards the end of my post. And we really shouldn't let that person's reputation ruin the discussion for everyone else. Glorified Scrivener posted:Oh cool, I 'm still hoping to get an answer to that question. It took three rereads but I think I finally understood what you're trying to say. No, the narrative isn't necessarily cobbled together after the fact, the way a LPer in these forums would; most RPGs, even the closest to pure "objective based" there are, already come with a narrative of what is happening in the roleplaying world. I honestly can't tell where you could have gotten this. No, the fact that a door can be locked or unlocked depending on the drama of the situation doesn't necessarily make for a boring game. In fact, the objective is exactly to avoid that; if you bother to make an encounter out of a locked door, this door needs to actually be an obstacle, not something that the thief can open with no problems whatsoever. In this example, you could describe how the party maneuvers its way through all the doors in the fortress/labyrinth/dungeon/whatever only to be stumped by one with a particularly complex lock, which happens just as they were running away from a dragon they awoken. If they met that lock without the urgency of the encroaching monster, it would just stop them dead on their tracks, which would be boring unless there was a different way in. paradoxGentleman fucked around with this message at 17:51 on Mar 17, 2015 |
# ? Mar 17, 2015 17:45 |
|
That is one thing in favor of crunchier or more "sim" rules sets (disclaimer: the two are not the same thing and it's the D&D edition wars that muddied the waters)- there are more opportunities for the rules and the dice to create things you wouldn't have thought of yourself. Best example is Traveller- both the chargen and sub sector generation, the latter of which makes you think "Okay why are there a billion people on this dwarf planet with a low-grade spaceport", and this forces decisions. Of course they can also cut off possibilities by restricting things excessively.
|
# ? Mar 17, 2015 17:53 |
|
paradoxGentleman posted:It took three rereads but I think I finally understood what you're trying to say. Thanks and I’ll try to organize my thoughts more clearly. In the first part I was trying to describe the style of play that I’m most familiar with, which roughly adheres to a dynamic of; Initial Situation -> Player Actions (+ GM Reaction) -> (New) Situation; repeat. Depending on the game the initial situation is set up by a GM or collaboratively by the players, the characters then take actions in response to the initial situation, creating a new one that requires further actions. This can be complicated or refined all sorts of ways –the initial situation might include a timeline of actions that npcs will take until the player actions intersect with them, etc. So attempting to use Effectronica’s earlier definitions, in this style of play the plot would arise from the order of events, with each event being the result of player interaction with a situation, which creates and sets up the next event. In this the player’s decisions at each juncture are influenced by how they initially conceived the character, what’s happened to them already and what they desire to have happen to them. This biographical element forms a major part of how each player perceives the story of that game and informs their choices going forward. Now to make a fool of myself by discussing doors; I agree that the door being locked or unlocked depending on the drama of the situation doesn't make for a boring game – but also that it can potentially make for a game that never has boring moments. Which I admit sounds stupid. But if you elide everything surrounding the dramatic portions of the game with narration, so that choices only ever exist in dramatic contexts, it lessens the impact of those moments because they’re all dramatic. Even most roller coasters have long slow climbs that build tension and anticipation because they're not fast downhills. So, in the example given, if the players come across a door that stops them dead in their tracks, how they determine to get past it isn't boring. I assume there’s a reason they want it open and multiple ways to open it, even if none of them are immediately at hand and they might have to seek one out and come back to that door later on. edit: Capitalization. Glorified Scrivener fucked around with this message at 19:20 on Mar 17, 2015 |
# ? Mar 17, 2015 19:03 |
Glorified Scrivener posted:Thanks and I’ll try to organize my thoughts more clearly. Please don't capitalize "plot" or "event" in this thread.
|
|
# ? Mar 17, 2015 19:08 |
|
Schroedinger's door A Plot Event so Sensational You won't believe You're Eyes!
|
# ? Mar 17, 2015 19:30 |
Glorified Scrivener's games should all just be called "A tribute to Jim Morrison."
|
|
# ? Mar 17, 2015 19:36 |
|
Effectronica posted:I was thinking that procedural and dramatic were the best terms, but now I feel they'd be confusing, because we have the powergamer/whatever-you-call-people-who-make-ineffective-characters-for-"roleplaying" types who blend the two. Anyway, here's some bullshit to contribute: a useful heuristic for whether something's on the storygame side of the spectrum might be the role of a character's failure in the mechanics. Does failure mechanically drive the story forwards? Does the game give equivalent mechanical significance and depth to a character's failure? Does it account for multiple types and layers of failure, both concrete and abstract, where a character can succeed on one level and fail on another? Does the game give players influence over when and/or how their character fails? Could a character conceivably fail to achieve their goals over and over again without the player losing interest or feeling that they've somehow failed? If you look at systems like Apocalypse World, FATE, Dogs in the Vineyard, Don't Rest Your Head and so on, the answer to most of these questions is yes - the systems themselves are built to make failure something that the players are mechanically and creatively involved in, and something that drives their story. It's not perfect - Metrofinal would definitely be classified as a storygame even though ultimate success is explicitly guaranteed - but answering the question 'is failure interesting for everyone involved' does seem useful. Maxwell Lord posted:That is one thing in favor of crunchier or more "sim" rules sets (disclaimer: the two are not the same thing and it's the D&D edition wars that muddied the waters)- there are more opportunities for the rules and the dice to create things you wouldn't have thought of yourself. I think Conway's Game of Life is a good example of this - a few simple rules give you massively complex behaviour (without just devolving into chaos). I think you can achieve the same thing in RPGs by making the system have few unique moving parts and just applying them in different ways in a network of asymmetrically connected entities (that may have different forms of the same properties). As an example, in Monsterhearts (admittedly I haven't played it myself) each character has some personal issues, some unique moves and different levels of the same stats everyone has, and links between the characters in the form of strings, and when you prod something the whole social network starts wobbling uncontrollably. This is assuming that the players are invested in and actively contributing to the game, which I think we should do in this kind of discussion.
|
# ? Mar 17, 2015 19:49 |
|
|
# ? Jun 8, 2024 09:39 |
UnCO3 posted:This is starting to sound a bit GNS. "Procedural" and "dramatic" are terms from actual literary studies, so it's only GNS if every bit of theory is GNS. That being said, I don't think that there's necessarily anything useful in practical terms for both design and play in distinguishing between games according to this aspect, and I'd be surprised if there was. Even distinguishing between playstyles is likely to only have limited benefits, even if it's as meaningful as what WOTC has already done. I also disagree heavily with your analysis because it treats all failures as identical ones, even as it says "does it account for multiple types of failure." This would require a lengthy response for me to go into why I feel that that makes it not particularly meaningful, so I'm not going to go into why I consider that a major flaw right now. Have to put some things together first.
|
|
# ? Mar 17, 2015 20:05 |