I've been reading this thread with interest, although i admit that this sort of analysis usually bores me to tears.

So i'll post my 2 cents.

I want to reply to Ryan's quoted number of people who said they play for 'story'. As has been seen in this thread and fuck knows how many others, what that term really means as regards RPGs is by no means nailed down. Was that how the question was asked in the questionaire? "Do you play for story?"

If i was asked that question, i would have to reply something like this, "Unless i have a reason why, i find it less interesting." The 'why' in question might be "why are you going into the dungeon?" The answer could well be "to investigate local deaths" or "because we want to". Now, over time, all of those 'why's' build up into a pretty big tale as to your adventures. They might contain recurring people and places or it might just be wandering the world, but the 'why's' build up.

I can only speak for myself, but if 'why's' are really all that story is about in the context of RPGs, i've been doing it since i was 12 and so has everyone else that i know. If it's not about the 'why's' what is it about? Just a personal hunch, but it could be that a large proportion of folks who said they play for story meant exactly what i've just posted. Story for them is having a reason to do what you do. ??

Quote from: RSDanceySo long as you can hold your game group together in the face of withering network competition from MMORPGs, you bet.  More power to you.

There are people, right now, playing AD&D.  In fact, I'd guess that Dragonsfoot is one of the more popular RPG sites. With the technology advances allowing more play TTRPG's - as is, not as MMORPG's - across distances, I'd be less inclined to worry about network externalities as 10 years ago; even 5 years ago.

I've said before that I think that is the way to combat MMORPG attrition (if you take for sake of argument that it is a direct threat to TTRPG). Hone the distance play. Make the tools so good that there is little difference between playing D&D across a table or across the world. IMHO it's not to give up by changing the hobby into something else, either story-games or MMORPG.

And to be clear, I don't have any problem with your efforts, I'm just trying to figure out if the underlying reasons you have are as black and white as you appear to make them, or if it's like Luke Crane admitted in another thread here - gut instinct. The former is an issue I'd have to actively track, the latter is a passive game-and-let-game.

Quote from: RSDanceyI look at the RPG sales data.

Which, if I'm not mistaken, have been in decline for years before MMORPG's came into vogue.  Other than the aberration that is D&D 3rd Edition, that is.

Quote from: RSDanceyI look at the player base sizes of MMORPGs.

Do we have any real hard data on how many players have left TTRPG completely for MMORPG? I'm not hounding, I'm truly curious...

Quote from: RSDanceyI look at the collapse of RPGs in retail.

I just want to make sure I'm clear - you mean retail as in FLGS and book store, yes?  Or are you including Internet sales, etc?

Quote from: RSDanceyI look at the market research.

Which, as others, particularly Stuart, have pointed out, might not mean what you think it means. It could...but it seems as likely to not, IMHO.

Quote from: RSDanceyI look at the evidence of my own eyes in the game groups I'm aware of.

I want to make sure I'm clear.  My assumption is you are saying this about people leaving for MMORPG, and not with respect to the Story Now aspects of this conversation - is that correct?

Quote from: RSDanceyAnd I conclude that the MMORPGs are already well on their way to destroying the player balance.  In my opinion, this is no a potential future.  This is now.

I'm just curious - you seem to have been chin deep in the industry at the time, what did people say about video games destroying the TTRPG market?

Quote from: RSDanceyThere is no such thing as a viable 1 player network.  

1 purchase does not make a 1 player network. You seem to be ignoring, as you already had previously in this discussion, that it is mainly GMs who buy books.

I've known lots of gaming groups where the GM is the ONLY guy to have the book.

Here in Uruguay, a game like Amber has a "player network" of about 200 people. And as far as I know, I'm the only person in the entire country who owns the Amber book.

Ditto for Qin, ditto for the new edition of Pendragon, I believe I know of only two other people who own the new edition of WFRP, etc.

And it isn't just a Uruguay thing. In Canada, in my gaming group there were two or three of my six players who owned a copy of the D&D PHB, one who owned a DMG, and one who owned the monster manual (mostly so he could cheat and know all the stats for anything he might face).
A couple of the guys owned the Star Wars rpg.
Every single other game we ran, I was the only guy who ever owned a copy of the book.

So there's the "one player network" for you...

RPGPundit

I don't think anyone's debating the RPG market has seriously shrunk over the years. What *is* being debated, and what hasn't been proven, is that MMORPGs are responsible for that shrinkage.

(Popping back in briefly.)

PI: Correct. Also being debated and by no means proven, is that the "Power Gamer" portion of the RPG market is eroding at a higher rate than the other portions.

Plus a bunch of other contentious assumptions.

Quote from: RSDanceyMike's analogy is deeply flawed.  People do not play football to tell stories.  People absolutely play RPGs to tell stories.

Ryan

Not the people I play with. They play RPGs to immerse themselves in a challenging environment. Sometimes stories are generated during gameplay, though more often it's amusing incidents and out of character banter that are the most memorable part of a session.

Quote from: RSDanceyI'm arguing that what most players want out of the RPG experience isn't just a story.  They want a great story.  And I'm arguing that you can engineer the game to generate that result (within some obvious boundaries).

How in fuck are a bunch of dorks sitting around a kitchen table going to tell a great story, when even enormously talented directors and actors usually fall flat on their faces when they try to generate a great story by improvisation? Even the best works of guys like Robert Altman hardly qualify as great stories. More like wonderfully textured incidents held together very loosely by threads of coincidence.

Great stories are not generated improvisationally in any other medium. It takes a vast ego (or vast naivete) to think they can be generated by fantasy gamers.

Quote from: RSDanceyAnd if you sell 5,000 copies of a book, that means one person per store bought a copy, with one on the shelf.  There is no such thing as a viable 1 player network.  That means a whole lot of product is being purchased as literature, not as game product, which means the work put into those products is not being realized a maximum value by the purchasers, which means those sales are extremely fragile.  Right now, 2-5K hard core reader/collectors may be the whole RPG market outside of D&D and White Wolf sales, and direct sales by publishers not using the 3-T model.

Or it could mean that only one person in an RPG group buys books. I know about 12 guys who have played RPGs in the last few years. Only a couple of them ever buy RPG books. I know guys who have played D&D for over 25 years and never bought anything RPG related except dice.

It's funny, but just yesterday I was talking with an old friend who's in a D&D 3.5 group. I asked him if he had heard about the plans for 4E. He said his DM has been talking about 4E every session, reporting to the group on the latest he'd read about it on discussion boards. Then he commented that nobody else in the group gave a shit about 4E. When it comes out, they may play it. He didn't intend to buy any of the 4E books when the did come out - his DM would do that.

In my experience, RPG groups typically have one or two very motivated and active gamers who read message boards, buy books, and learn the rules. The rest are casual players, who enjoy playing and socializing, but who aren't caught up in system and rules sets. They don't buy RPG books. They just show up and play. And the guys who do buy the books and read them are the DMs. And the players want them to do all the work and run everything except the PCs. And it works.

I absolutely agree with Haffrung on this.  

I would be thrilled if someone could point me to an .mp3 or video file of an actual game session where "Great" story was created.

I am the main GM for my group and I am also pretty much the only one who buys RPGs, I think this is pretty common.

I think the "story" is important to gamers, but it's like so many here have said, it's the "doing" and not the "telling" of it that makes it appealing. I am sceptical that a game mechanic can be created to make better stories happen. I'm not saying it coudn't be fun; some fun things have happened as a result of the wild cards in my Shatterzone game for instance, slightly more often than things I had to say no to anyway. But I don't know if it made the stories any better.

The players already shape the story with the actions of their characters, giving them options that are normally the domain of the GM are as likely to turn out bad as when a GM inserts his or her PC into the game. The specialness of the GM role is key to the nature and appeal of RPGs.

Oh, and that example of fighting wave after wave of mindless zombies as an example of a "bad story"? How do you know? Were you there? It sounds simplistic enough plotwise, but the devil is in the details. I have played game sessions where the plot was no more complicated than this that were fun. Fun because of the role-playing (all the character interaction, talking in funny voices, etc) and the game (fumbles and crits, moving tactically around the map, whatever). Maybe the story after sounds lame (We fought a bunch of zombies and they nearly got us but we won), but a story is more than a plot. A meaningless random encounter ceases to be meaningless if your character is killed during it. RPG's are stories without a net.

Quote from: HaffrungNot the people I play with. They play RPGs to immerse themselves in a challenging environment. Sometimes stories are generated during gameplay, though more often it's amusing incidents and out of character banter that are the most memorable part of a session.

Word.

36 years, hours of fun, I can't remember a single instance of "We created a great story".

See, I'll go one step further (and I've got this huge post I'm working on that I'll never finish so might as well short circuit that now).

It's not even that people think about the doing or telling - it's the building.  In other words, in my little experiential corner of the world, people like taking part in the story, great or not; they even enjoy and want to be able to tell a story, great or not.  What I, personally, have never seen people push to the forefront as explicitly as has been discussed in "theory" or asserted here (as a result of interpreting research) is the building of great story.

So people like story; they'd prefer something over nothing.  But do they care so much about building the great story that they will give way on the "doing" part of the story from the experiential side?  I'm not convinced....

Quote from: StuartI absolutely agree with Haffrung on this.  

I would be thrilled if someone could point me to an .mp3 or video file of an actual game session where "Great" story was created.

I can find you some great comedy...

But other than that, point to Haffrung.

You want videos of the pros from Dover creating Story, Now! ?

Here you go:
http://spione.adept-press.com/?actualplay

Quote from: HaffrungHow in fuck are a bunch of dorks sitting around a kitchen table going to tell a great story, when even enormously talented directors and actors usually fall flat on their faces when they try to generate a great story by improvisation? Even the best works of guys like Robert Altman hardly qualify as great stories. More like wonderfully textured incidents held together very loosely by threads of coincidence.

Great stories are not generated improvisationally in any other medium. It takes a vast ego (or vast naivete) to think they can be generated by fantasy gamers.

I'm not so sure that this is impossible.  I do contend, however, that it's not easy, and it wouldn't be done by chance in any case.  Improvisational theater is as likely to produce great story as 1 million monkeys typing randomly on computers will produce Hamlet.   Howver, the missing element here is the Gamesmaster as Story Guide.  Do I mean Railroading?  Nope.  I mean simply that the GM has created a sufficiently great BackStory to engender Great Story.   Do I mean a narrative that follows standard "story" form, with beginning middle and end?   No.   That is a feature of Good Story, but insufficient for Great Story.   Great Story requires a whole lot more than just fitting into a story form (which is problematic in a RPG that doesn't usually result in an "end" that can be distinctly recognized anyway).  I think producing Great Story is very difficult, actually, no matter the medium.   But that is not to say that it can not be done.   Nor does it mean that a very well run RPG can not produce one.  It's just that it's not easy to do.  One has to understand what Great Story actually is, for one thing... and once you get a grip on that, applying the principals to something as unwieldy as a Player Group in an Improvisational environment makes it even more difficult.  However, again, it is not impossible.   I would even go further to suggest that for the glorious few gamesmasters and players who can pull it off, it is what I consider to be the Ideal of RPG experience.   But again, I think it rare.  And I'm very unconvinced that anything outside of the Gamesmaster's own inner wisdom, experience and sublime skill will pull it off, regardless of whatever game design rules may be set in place to encourage "Great Story" or not.   The fact is that the rules I've seen to date that encourage "Great Story" are at best capable on their own of producing "Good Story", and even then the GM's personal talent is required.   So Great Story is hard to do, especially in RPGs.  But it *can* be done.   That's my take on it, anyway.  At the very least I'm determined to try to produce Great BackStory in the hopes that it will engender Great In-Game Story.

- Mark