Ok, so lets say I stipulate that players do have narrative authority, they do grant that authority to the GM, RPGs can create stories.

Now what?

Sure, and it's great when it happens.  The mistake is to assume or expect it will always work that way.

Quote from: John Morrow;419821

:rotfl:


Now what?...lets go play some!

I wonder why it is so much of a big deal to have storygames recognized as role playing games in the first place...

Quote from: Benoist;419835I wonder why it is so much of a big deal to have storygames recognized as role playing games in the first place...

yeah...especialy with many folk having a dim view of RPG's you think the "storygamers" would be better off with a seperate term?!

"Jerk off" is already taken though.

B-but my gaming ideology, or some fuckin' thing!

Quote from: skofflox;419837yeah...especialy with many folk having a dim view of RPG's you think the "storygamers" would be better off with a seperate term?!

Well since many storygamers seem to think that talking in terms of stories and narratives and movies and all makes their games more "mainstream" than trad games, I'd guess they'd welcome the dissociation, but no... *shrug*

I like crunchy systems with elaborate rules.  I like a game that is driven by events rather than providing a goal to which all events converge.  I want there to always be the possibility of failure (as long as failure means we are done and are not going to roleplay an endless serious of meaningless consequences, but are now ready to move on either with these characters or with new ones or with a different campaign or game).  So I guess I prefer the traditional RPG (but not D&D), but that preference doesn't mean I won't play a story game; and (unless we simply insist that they are a brand new species) story games may have distinctive features, but their resemblance to other RPGs is deep and undeniable.  They are RPGs, just a little (and only a little) different in flavor.  I prefer the other types, but storygames are not abhorrent atrocities that have nothing to do with RPGs.

Quote from: CRKrueger;419817Ok, so lets say I stipulate that players do have narrative authority, they do grant that authority to the GM, RPGs can create stories.

Now what?

The way you've phrased this makes it sound like "narrative authority" is about who's in charge at the table, but the way I've most often seen the phrase used is to suggest the right to introduce things into the fiction (i.e., into the make-believe or imaginary world in which the characters operate). Simply put, when the GM says, "There is a 30 x 30 room here," he is establishing that it is true in the fiction that a 30 x 30 room exists at a given spot in the game-world. By the same token, when the player says, "I swing at the goblin," we all understand that she's really saying "[It is fictional that] I [intend to] swing at the goblin."

So the first thing that "narrative authority" as a concept establishes is that role-playing takes place via fictional (make-believe) statements about what is true or what happens in the game-world. Both player and GM make such statements--but they do so asymmetrically: "The players plays the character and the GM plays the world." This forces us to recognize that narrative authority is something that's distributed, both around the table (so everybody has something that they're permitted to introduce) and over the game-world (so players and GMs have different things for and about which they may make statements).

So what? I hear you saying. The fact that you grant this premise requires nothing more on your part--it should not matter in the least that you as a player are exercising your "narrative authority" whenever you make declarations of intent on behalf of your character, whether you're doing so in order to engage the game-mechanics ("I swing at the goblin." "Roll to hit.") or to evoke GM description ("I open the door." "You see a 30 x 30 room.") or to role-play ("I scream, 'Leave me alone, damn you! I'm not your slave!'" "But you owe me, yes yes, by the blood that flows in both our veins--you owe me, and I will have my due!'").

What it does do, I think, is open up a design space for games where narrative authority is distributed differently in order to simulate different kinds of game-worlds. Suppose in one game you played a powerful enchanter, with the ability to cloud men's minds. It might be the case, then, that rules stipulated that you could, by expending some sort of in-game resource (like, "Magical Power") change other players' (including the GM) declarations of intention for their characters. ("I swing at the goblin." "No, you don't." "I stroke the goblin gently." "Okay, good.")

Given that, I'm not sure that it's necessary to stipulate either that narrative authority is granted to the GM from the players, or that RPGs can create stories. In terms of where narrative authority derives, I'd argue that it's like any other "speech genre": the conventions for how it operates are derived from prior experience of participants, and being conventions are thus open to innovation, variation, and change. In terms of RPGs and story creation, I've seen a lot of arguing here that "no story exists" because play is experiential rather than narrative, but there are lots of traditional gamers who think that what they are doing is creating story. Ironically, in her book The Creation of Narrative in Tabletop Role-Playing Games, the author Jennifer Cover talks about her own gaming experience as both immersive and story-producing. In any event, I think it's a separate issue from narrative authority, which is simply a way of describing what's going on at the table. A simplification, to be sure, but a useful one from a design perspective in my opinion.

Quote from: Professort Zoot;419845*snip*
  So I guess I prefer the traditional RPG (but not D&D), but that preference doesn't mean I won't play a story game; and (unless we simply insist that they are a brand new species) story games may have distinctive features, but their resemblance to other RPGs is deep and undeniable.  They are RPGs, just a little (and only a little) different in flavor.  I prefer the other types, but storygames are not abhorrent atrocities that have nothing to do with RPGs.

I have enjoyed story games and will continue to do so.They are not abhorrent (well, most aren't!) though I  play/collect WAY more Trad.RPG's so my experience is limited.

I used to shrug off the differences between the two aproaches but upon further reflection I see that "storygames" are very much a creature of another sort. Sure they resemble Trad. games on a superficial level ie. they contain characters,settings,genres,resolution mechanics and all the rest but the whole gist of play is different.

Arguably both are "immersive" but that is niether here nor there...video games can be immersive and some folk may claim they get into character while playing but the whole point/goal of the game,as reflected in its gesign, does not support this.

Kinda like Monopoly and Aquire...both deal with similar themes but very different games indeed. Sure they can be lumped together under some arbitrary heading but does that say much about the games individualy? Not in my oppinion.

This reminds me of an old friend who liked to complain that not all cars performed like his souped-up Nova...well surprise...they weren't designed to! Decrying their shortcomings in that regard was,well, ridiculous and allways made me think "What the hell is he talking about...this complaint makes no sense." Sure you can spend all the money and time to trick out some 4 door to make it a hot-rod (much as house-ruling can do to a RPG) but I don't see to many pro's putting those type of cars up against formula racers or whatever.

I think both types of games, Trad./Story would benefit from recognizing that they are unique and really persue their own ends to the utmost. As many have been pointing out in other threads the whole idea of a Trad.RPG being "broken" because it does not allow "stories" to be convayed in any meaningful/equally shared way is bankrupt. The Trad. RPG's were never intended to do that!

Now I know this is contentious as many games have a blurb in the intro. regarding telling a story...I think this is primarily rhetoric and addendum as the games do not contain any mechanics to facilitate that type of play! I will peruse my older titles to see what they claim...

The best storygames already do this...they have their own agenda free from (most) Trad. constraints.
Would like to see more Trad. type games being produced, as opposed to regurgitated D&D (enough already!) rules,free from storygame influence (and yes I know some are).

So is this something to get all bothered about? NIMO...hey,the war is over right?
and yes the good guys won...just ask them!

my2cnts...

Quote from: Bill White;419878Ironically, in her book The Creation of Narrative in Tabletop Role-Playing Games, the author Jennifer Cover talks about her own gaming experience as both immersive and story-producing.

Pages 73 and the top paragraph of 74 (Gaming and Narratives section) she does a good job of summarizing the analysis of scholars who claim that TRPGs are not narrative and only create stories as a byproduct of gaming.  I'm obviously 100% in that boat.  I'll attempt to move on from there but I'm afraid if she starts using language like...

"Ryan(2006) explains that "the trend today is to detach narrative from language and literature and regard it instead as a cognitive template with transmedial and transdisciplinary applicability."

...then I'm going to have to dismiss the book as a postmodernist stroke-fest.

Quote from: CRKrueger;419882Pages 73 and the top paragraph of 74 (Gaming and Narratives section) she does a good job of summarizing the analysis of scholars who claim that TRPGs are not narrative and only create stories as a byproduct of gaming.  I'm obviously 100% in that boat.  I'll attempt to move on from there but I'm afraid if she starts using language like...

"Ryan(2006) explains that "the trend today is to detach narrative from language and literature and regard it instead as a cognitive template with transmedial and transdisciplinary applicability."

...then I'm going to have to dismiss the book as a postmodernist stroke-fest.

Huh? I read that as just saying that more people (well, scholars) are using the concept of "narrative" to understand how people think about things, regardless of how they're interacting with the world (thus "transmedial") and what they're thinking about (thus "transdisciplinary"). This strikes me as true enough; the concept of narrative does seem to have broken out beyond the literary studies folks.

Of course, Cover is a rhetorician, and thus belongs to a suspect academic category in the first place, but I wouldn't peg her as a post-modernist right off the bat.

Looking at her reference list, I see nothing "worse" than Barthes, Bruner, and Wittgenstein--no Foucault, no Derrida, no Baudrillard--and she cites the usual game studies subjects: Aarseth, Juul, the Games as Culture crowd, Jenkins. The non-game studies stuff she cites looks to me like rhetoric and linguistics, both of which are fairly staid if somewhat introspective disciplines.

Anyway, it's not critical to the main point.

Jerome Bruner is a moron re: story.

After-the-fact sense making is romanticist-crypto-fascist crap. At least in the muddled version of J. Bruner.

Quote from:  Jerome BrunerTo begin with, what is narrative? To put it formally, stories are  accounts of the intrusion of the unexpected on the expected; they are  about violations of the shared ordinary, and about how such violations  are resolved. A story characteristically begins with some presupposed  version of shared ordinariness, then moves on to its violation (what  Aristotle refers to as its peripeteia), then recounts actions taken in  the interest of restoring initial ordinariness or creating a new  version, and finally offers a resolution—often followed by a coda in the  form of a "moral." Here is one such narrative, an account of something  that befell me while I was at work on this article:

    I was  walking through Washington Square Park the other day when this young guy  comes up to me and asks, "Hey, do you want to buy a theory? I've got  some good ones here."

    So I said, "What kind of theories have  you got?" as I continued walking toward Bobst Library, where I knew  there'd be a cop out front.

    And he replied: "Well, nothing but the best Kuhnian paradigms!"

     So I said "You're pulling my leg!" And he laughed and said, "You  don't recognize me, but I was in your big lecture course last year."

     So I laughed and replied, "Not bad when you can use Kuhn's The  Structure of Scientific Revolutions to cut capers here in Washington  Square a year later."

There is no culture on the face of the  earth that lacks narrative genres for recounting in story form how the  ordinary got elbowed by the unexpected, what steps were taken to cope  with it, and what finally happened and to what end.

What makes  stories so universal? Recall Claude Lévi-Strauss's concept of a culture  as a system of exchanges, for the exchange of affection and respect, of  knowledge, of goods and services. Each of these systems generates its  conceptions of the ordinary and, indeed, offers templates for  delineating the possible. And, obviously, these coexisting systems often  engender conflicts, inconsistencies, incommensurabilities. Perhaps a  culture's narrative forms—its fables, myths, folktales—come into being  to standardize these conflicts and inconsistencies, indeed to render  them more manageable, more ordinary. And, indeed, we know from the  classic studies of Sir Frederic Bartlett and many since, that when  stories deviate too much from ordinariness, they are converted back into  a more conventional form in memory (Bartlett 1932).

The life of  mind seems everywhere to be caught in a never ending dialectic between  the ordinary and the unexpected, between the quotidian and the  exceptional. Narrative seems to be our natural form for rendering the  two into a culturally and cognitively manageable form.

I  commented earlier on the artfulness of narrative, suggesting that we may  need it in order to cope with deviations from the ordinary, to render  them "manageable." I once, long ago, wrote a principally literary little  book of "essays for the left hand" (Bruner 1979) in which I argued that  the function of art was to rescue the ordinary from its banality, to  bring what was taken for granted back under closer scrutiny. I realize  now that it has always been commonplace to use that very narrative form  to do just the opposite: to protect us from unexpected (and undesired)  exceptionalities. We convert the narrative form into a buffer against  the unexpected. Les extremes se touchent! Perhaps that was one reason  why Oscar Wilde's famous remark about life imitating art was greeted  with such ambivalence. In the main, I think we'd like to keep open the  question of whether art imitates life or, more disturbingly, whether  it's the other way round, an uncertainty endemic to human culture?

Avoiding or rationalizing the unexpected is pure and simple: Kitsch.