Quote from: VengerSatanis;910481Although, how should we account for a player's skill being an important factor in his character's chances to do A, B, or C?  

Traditional roleplaying adapted wargame mechanics in such a way to allow people to pretend to be character in an imagined setting. Before Arneson and Gygax innovations, most campaigns and session had a definitive goal in sight. To win the battle, to win the war. To because the most powerful nations, etc. The game had victory conditions.

Starting Arneson's Blackmoor, the victory conditions started to go away. Players were still trying to win but winning individual encounters to further some nebulous goal in their mind. Sort of like how real life plays out. So mastery of the mechanics was a very useful skill to winning all these encounters so the player can get what he wants. In often this was done as part of a team of other players working together in common interest.

Fundamentally that was all in-game. The goals, the means, and how, arose from the circumstance of the campaign.

With Storygame that all shifts to producing a good story through the use of a game. The only winning condition that an interesting story was produced that everybody contributed too. I can't see working well if one or more participants keep trying to push their character to "win"

Here's a quote from Bren:

"But the example of the players telling stories about their D&D characters is just as much storytelling but even less a game than is my The Storytelling Game ~™."

Let's imagine you had shown up for the D&D game with no one planning for the session to be purely in character story telling, but it just happened to go there. Would you feel like you had not played D&D? It may sound like a bit of a stretch, but I (and I'm sure many others) have certainly played sessions in which the actual codified game rules were barely referred to. Yet I still consider those sessions to be examples of playing a roleplaying game, and not simply roleplaying.

This kind of thing is why I feel it is often better to consider individual mechanics rather than to categorize entire games. In particular, as observed elsewhere in this thread, a lot of modern RPGs include Story Game elements, such as meta resources that allow players authority to define narrative elements outside of their characters, or otherwise expand player interaction with the game outside of a pure context of playing a particular role.

EDIT: On a side note, I find an earlier comment about GMs always having "story game" type powers to be a very good observation and for me it raises the question of what exactly is the GM's motivation in a typical traditional roleplaying game? To what effect do most GMs employ their Story game powers or narrative authority or whatever you want to call it? Not looking to sidetrack the thread, but just something to consider.

QuoteOriginally Posted by Bren
OK. Might be true. But it isn't like the players are all good players. Why in the world would one assume that the players know what they are doing anymore than does the GM?

I'm not quite sure that we're communicating on the same lines.  Nathan suggested that storygame rules were necessary to protect players from sucky GMs.  On the other hand, if I get what you're saying, yeah it doesn't really follow that if "GM sucking" is a real problem in the designer's eyes that he should assume that players would be any better at handling GM authority/powers.

QuoteOriginally Posted by estar
What matters after this point is what kind of advice the author focuses on and what tools he writes to support what he focuses. That what needs to be made explicit. An author can easily present a version of OD&D focused on collaborative storytelling if that what interest them.

I fully acknowledge that there is crossover, that many RPGs have story elements and many story games have RPG elements, and that in most games you have some choice in which elements you want to emphasize to compliment your preferred playstyle for your game.  Written advice may play into that, especially in a flexible game, but the bottom line is the "tools" or mechanics.

My primary issue is when a Story Game forces OoC behavior and decisions from players and/or limits GM authority in some way that is baked in to the mechanics.  No amount of advice can overturn this. In this case, the game cannot effectively be altered to be played as a traditional experience of players taking the roles of characters interacting with GM created and controlled setting.  Most games are flexible in their use of story based mechanics (BoL or many other game's Hero points are easily removed and are not terribly offensive in the first place, and you can even strip FATE of it's story mechanics and have a rough playable traditional game), but some games do not function without their story based OoC and/or GM limiting mechanics (again, I am looking at 2d20 ).

QuoteOriginally Posted by Bren
I think it is more accurate to view games as being on a continuum. So the differences are matters of degree, not two things that are altogether different in kind.

Yeah, but you need to draw the line somewhere.  DBM is a miniatures game even if I pretend to be Alexander the Great while I am playing it.  For me, storygames draw the line and cease to be RPGs when they cannot be played as a traditional RPG due to OoC player mechanics or GM limitations that cannot be removed from the system.

Quote from: RosenMcStern;910414This is a very good "definition as example", too. I like it very much.

And like Venger's, it focuses on "what you want to achieve" in the game, and not on "the technique used", be it round-robin narrative control, luck points, or dancing while describing an action (yes, these are all techiniques used in "storygames"). It certainly tells much more about what to expect from a game than trying to explain people what "dissociated mechanics" means.



Sadly, yes. This is why I totally support Venger Satanis in his call for a truce in the other thread.



This has been explained and addressed more than 10 years ago. While it is true that the "goal" of playing is a characteristic of the group and of the campaign, it is also true thay you can design a game which pushes the group and the campaign in one specific direction so strongly that they are effectively selecting the "goal" for the group. If you try to use them for something different, the game rules frustrate your intentions and ultimately induce you into playing something else, eventually posting "This game sucks!" on some forums.

Simple example: compare RuneQuest and Pendragon. One comes straight from the other, but while RuneQuest does NOT make choices for you, allowing you to play dungeon crawls, quests for money, revenge tales, quests for glory, community adventures, order vs. chaos, evil vs. good, and basically anything that could have a resemblance to a fantasy tale (and definitely leaving the task of incentivizing the playstyle that the group is looking for, if any, to the GM), Pendragon uses a slightly modified RuneQuest engine to support and produce one and ONLY one of the aforementioned experience: the quest for glory of Righteous and Virtuous knights. Trying to play with other goals in mind will disrupt your fun (unless you hack the game, as someone does, but this is a demonstration of what I am stating: you need to change the rules to allow them to support the group's goal if different from the one Greg Stafford originally intended).

Conclusion: while the ultimate arbiter of the goal is the group, some games, like Pendragon, do have a goal of their own. The technical term is that they "promote" that specific goal, to be precise. But saying that they "have" a goal is probably easier to understand for a casual reader.



And this is an agreed point. I think we all convene that what is really important is the goal of the game. See also Coffe Zombie's "definition by example".



This is reasonable. Goals are non-measurable, while mechanics are. And definitions are better tied to measurable, verifiable quantities. The point is that the verifiabel definition should not be misleading.



Ok, let's try with an initial example. The challenged definition is "In a story game, a player’s ability to affect what happens in the game is not dependent on their character’s fictional ability to do those things."

I state that according to this definition, "3:16 - Carnage among the Stars", a totally forgie game developed on the Forge after winning the 24h game design contest, is not a story game., because it enables players to influence the game only through their characters' fictional abilities to do things. There is no OOC action or declaration a player can choose in 3.16.

Now, one might object that 3.16 has "luck points" of a devastating order of magnitude. I agree on the order of magnitude: I used them to kill Chtulhu, once. But Strengths and Weaknesses in 3:16 are a totally in-character mechanics. They represent exactly a fictional ability (or inability for a weakness) that your character has, and has always had. It is just that you mark it on the character sheet only when you use it in play, and not at character creation time, describing a flashback that explains how you gained that strength/weakness. There is no deus-ex-machina that you can activate: everything comes from a yet-unexplored facet of your character. You describe the flashback in-character, not out-of-character.

Apart from this, 3:16 has only traditional aspects: you fight aliens, you kill them, you can get wounded and die. In fact, the game incentivizes other players to backstab you by limiting character improvement to only one surviving character per mission, so you die quite often. And everything - everything - is handled in first person. No OOC action or thinking is incentivized in any way. You can hardly find anything more "immersive".

Does this make this "hardcore forgie" game a "non-storygame", then?

(Incidentally, 3:16 is among my favourite indie games, too. I even know the author in real life, great guy).

The character does not choose to invoke a flashback.  "Crap, I just took a kill that would have moved me from Crippled to Dead, so I decide to invoke a Weakness, and use a Flashback to describe how the history of my character lets me escape certain death." No.

This is not an IC choice by any stretch of the imagination.  You are exiting your character, entering a 3rd person authorial stance, declaring the invocation of the Flashback mechanic as a Player, and then entering the character again to narrate the Flashback.  But I would also hesitate to call the Flashback itself a roleplaying exercise, it's a narrative exercise.  There is no roleplay in a Flashback when you think about it.  It's creative storytelling and narrative authority used to create history.  Look at the following example:

If I am roleplaying a character sitting in a bar, and an NPC asks me why he should hire me, my PC tells him a story which gives him that reason.  I am doing one of the following here:

• Roleplaying my character bullshitting the NPC.  I am roleplaying my PC, and my PC is creating a story out of whole cloth. 100% Roleplaying.
• Roleplaying my character telling a story about something my PC actually did in game.  I am roleplaying my PC, and my PC is telling a story about his actual history, embellishing or not, but the embellishments are just that.  100% Roleplaying
• Roleplaying my character telling a story about something my PC did not actually do in game, but is assumed to be true because I have the Narrative Authority to declare everything about my PC true.  I am roleplaying my PC, and I, as a player, am now generating the history of my character through storytelling.  Maybe 50% Roleplaying, if you're being overly generous.
  

3:16 uses the third option.  The player invokes the Flashback to save or help the character, and the player narrates the Flashback, which then becomes true history of the character.

Now if 3:16 were a Space Marine game based on GURPS, with the Flashback mechanic, then you remove the Flashback mechanic and you still are left with a game that can stand on it's own merits as a fully functioning system.  3:16's system is so highly abstracted and minimalist, with so few IC choices for actual tactical depth in a game about soldiers in unit-level skirmishes, that the Flashback mechanic is a central, Key Mechanic (and is called so by the designer). At that point, what do you have without it?  An abstract skirmish game you could play on a busride.

The tactics in 3:16 are more about how to use Strengths and Weaknesses (a player mechanic) then about how to actually use soldiers battlefield tactics (character mechanic).  Thus the key element of the game, ie. how you interface and use the mechanics, is done as a player, not a character.

It's a very minimalist system created for the purpose of telling stories and roleplaying futuristic soldiers with all the depth of the system invested in a player-facing mechanic.

Venger Definition: Storygame.
Ars Ludi Definition: Possesses Storygame Elements
Krueger Definition: Those Storygame Elements are the game, it's Raison D'etre.  You remove them and it's a completely different game. So what do you call it?  That's one of the purposes of this thread I think.  What I would not call it is a Roleplaying Game, not without clarifiers.

Note: 3:16 is brilliant design, fully deserving of the Ronnie and other awards it has garnered.  However, you know going in, you're going to be roleplayer and storyteller, player and limited GM.

One thing I don't advocate, or want, is a binary definition of Roleplaying Game or Storygame.

The term Storygame I would personally leave for a relatively narrow scope of games, games where the "game" element, the mechanics, are there to facilitate who gets to narrate truth about the collaborative space.

Roleplaying Game I would prefer be used for games without any Storygame Elements.  That horse left the barn an Epoch ago, we're kind of stuck with Roleplaying Game being a catch-all phrase for anything even tangentially concerning characters that aren't us, even writing about them.

So what's left is types of games under the ridiculously broad label of Roleplaying Games.
Roleplaying games without OOC elements - You roleplay your character, you do not, from the 3rd person, affect your character.  Mechanics are character facing, every invocation of a mechanic is a choice made by the character and executed by the character.
Roleplaying games with OOC elements - You roleplay your character, and can, from the 3rd person, affect your character. The game possesses mechanics that are invoked as a choice by the player and can be executed by the player.
Storygames - That's a tough one, because at what point do you cross the line from "Roleplaying game with OOC elements" to "OOC game with roleplaying elements"?  That's why my definition of Storygame would probably be very narrow as mentioned above, and instead we'd be talking about "Narrative Roleplaying Games" or somesuch, but since I don't want to guarantee people attempting to disingenuously obfuscate the discussion, I'll refrain from using the N-word.

Quote from: Madprofessor;910498I'm not quite sure that we're communicating on the same lines.  Nathan suggested that storygame rules were necessary to protect players from sucky GMs.  On the other hand, if I get what you're saying, yeah it doesn't really follow that if "GM sucking" is a real problem in the designer's eyes that he should assume that players would be any better at handling GM authority/powers.

That is indeed what I was suggesting. You got it.

Quote from: Manzanaro;910496Let's imagine you had shown up for the D&D game with no one planning for the session to be purely in character story telling, but it just happened to go there. Would you feel like you had not played D&D? It may sound like a bit of a stretch, but I (and I'm sure many others) have certainly played sessions in which the actual codified game rules were barely referred to. Yet I still consider those sessions to be examples of playing a roleplaying game, and not simply roleplaying.

I'd say that the reason you or others considered that session to be playing  a roleplaying game rather than just roleplaying or storytelling is because that one session occurred in the wider context of a series of other sessions that weren't just sittin' around the fire telling tales and that did include a degree of gameyness.

QuoteThis kind of thing is why I feel it is often better to consider individual mechanics rather than to categorize entire games.

I agree that looking at mechanics makes sense. Games are on a spectrum. It's fine to look at individual mechanics, but ultimately you need to be able to say something about the game as a whole. Otherwise there is no meaning to the term storygame nor to the claim that any particular RPG is or is not a storygame. Now if that's the point you want to make, then by all means go ahead and make it.

Quote from: Madprofessor;910498Yeah, but you need to draw the line somewhere.

But I don't think we have to all draw the line in the same place.

What I would find useful would be a list of the mechanics that are OOC with a brief description or example. Such a list would be a whole lot more useful than one of two stickers one that said THIS IS A STORYGAME and the other that said THIS IS NOT A STORYGAME.

Quote from: Bren;910539But I don't think we have to all draw the line in the same place.

What I would find useful would be a list of the mechanics that are OOC with a brief description or example. Such a list would be a whole lot more useful than one of two stickers one that said THIS IS A STORYGAME and the other that said THIS IS NOT A STORYGAME.

Heh, if only.
I've found, there are a whole lot of people who grew up being told RPGs were about "telling stories" and too many roleplayers simply said "Eh, close enough." without detailing the difference.  As a result, a whole lot of gamers have always "roleplayed" from two places, IC and OOC, have always kept the storytelling aspect in their mind.  They're not really capable of discerning the difference, or, more likely, feel threatened by the challenge of the OOC element not being included in what they've always called "roleplay" and so are unwilling to accept that what they've always called "roleplaying" is actually "roleplaying" + "storytelling"...and not everyone means those two things, when they say the one.

Well, I think that while games exist on a spectrum, not all people's tastes do the same. So, for instance, if someone tells me, "I hate story games" or "Don't discuss story games on this page," that person's personal cut-off point for what constitutes a story game is not inherently clear.

On the other hand, if they say, "I hate games in which players have any narrative authority beyond what their character would have," or "I hate games that focus on theme in a mechanically driven way," or "don't talk about Fate or any games by Vince Baker on this page" than they are speaking in a specific manner that I can understand.

So, not so much that I don't think "story games" exist as I think it's a category that is a bit antiquated and resistant to easy and broadly understandable definition.

EDIT: As a side note? I've known PLENTY of D&D GMs who ran their games like one sided story games before the concept even formally existed, and really dislike that particular style of gaming.

Quote from: estar;910482You are trying to argue over the definition of campaigns and what campaigns.

Let's not debate the definition of campaign then. As I said, it’s not the campaign.  I disagree with your notion that looking at campaigns is all useful for deciding whether something is or is not a storygame. It looks to me like you are using different words to say essentially the same thing that VS said when he shifted the focus from the game and game rules to the players’ desire.

QuoteStorygamers go towards the story, while the OSR lets the story come to us.

Quote from: CRKrueger;910544As a result, a whole lot of gamers have always "roleplayed" from two places, IC and OOC, have always kept the storytelling aspect in their mind.

Just one of the reasons different people are not all going to draw the line in the same place.

Quote from: Bren;910537It's fine to look at individual mechanics, but ultimately you need to be able to say something about the game as a whole.

Quote from: Bren;910549Just one of the reasons different people are not all going to draw the line in the same place.

It's a lot more than that.  For many, that inability or unwillingness to even accept the distinction between IC and OOC means there is no spectrum, because there is no determinant they will accept to determine where on that spectrum something will go.  It's one thing to say you and I draw the line in a different place, it's another to say there is no line, it exists only in your head, is based upon whether you like something and has no objective aspect at all, which we've seen already in this very thread, not to mention a hundred times before.

Quote from: CRKrueger;910562It's one thing to say you and I draw the line in a different place, it's another to say there is no line, it exists only in your head, is based upon whether you like something and has no objective aspect at all, which we've seen already in this very thread, not to mention a hundred times before.

I have a friends who likes more of a storytelling style of gaming. She's often perfectly happy to switch from and IC to an OOC perspective during play. But she isn't confused about which mechanics are IC and which are OOC. Frankly, that sort of confusion or if it isn't confusion, that refusal to acknowledge that there is a difference always seems bizarre to me.

I'd say the ability to recognize which is which was necessary for us to be able to run shared worlds.

Quote from: CRKrueger;910526The character does not choose to invoke a flashback.  "Crap, I just took a kill that would have moved me from Crippled to Dead, so I decide to invoke a Weakness, and use a Flashback to describe how the history of my character lets me escape certain death." No.

This is not an IC choice by any stretch of the imagination.  You are exiting your character, entering a 3rd person authorial stance, declaring the invocation of the Flashback mechanic as a Player, and then entering the character again to narrate the Flashback.  But I would also hesitate to call the Flashback itself a roleplaying exercise, it's a narrative exercise.  There is no roleplay in a Flashback when you think about it.  It's creative storytelling and narrative authority used to create history.  Look at the following example:

If I am roleplaying a character sitting in a bar, and an NPC asks me why he should hire me, my PC tells him a story which gives him that reason.  I am doing one of the following here:

• Roleplaying my character bullshitting the NPC.  I am roleplaying my PC, and my PC is creating a story out of whole cloth. 100% Roleplaying.
• Roleplaying my character telling a story about something my PC actually did in game.  I am roleplaying my PC, and my PC is telling a story about his actual history, embellishing or not, but the embellishments are just that.  100% Roleplaying
• Roleplaying my character telling a story about something my PC did not actually do in game, but is assumed to be true because I have the Narrative Authority to declare everything about my PC true.  I am roleplaying my PC, and I, as a player, am now generating the history of my character through storytelling.  Maybe 50% Roleplaying, if you're being overly generous.
  

3:16 uses the third option.  The player invokes the Flashback to save or help the character, and the player narrates the Flashback, which then becomes true history of the character.

Now if 3:16 were a Space Marine game based on GURPS, with the Flashback mechanic, then you remove the Flashback mechanic and you still are left with a game that can stand on it's own merits as a fully functioning system.  3:16's system is so highly abstracted and minimalist, with so few IC choices for actual tactical depth in a game about soldiers in unit-level skirmishes, that the Flashback mechanic is a central, Key Mechanic (and is called so by the designer). At that point, what do you have without it?  An abstract skirmish game you could play on a busride.

The tactics in 3:16 are more about how to use Strengths and Weaknesses (a player mechanic) then about how to actually use soldiers battlefield tactics (character mechanic).  Thus the key element of the game, ie. how you interface and use the mechanics, is done as a player, not a character.

It's a very minimalist system created for the purpose of telling stories and roleplaying futuristic soldiers with all the depth of the system invested in a player-facing mechanic.

Venger Definition: Storygame.
Ars Ludi Definition: Possesses Storygame Elements
Krueger Definition: Those Storygame Elements are the game, it's Raison D'etre.  You remove them and it's a completely different game. So what do you call it?  That's one of the purposes of this thread I think.  What I would not call it is a Roleplaying Game, not without clarifiers.

Note: 3:16 is brilliant design, fully deserving of the Ronnie and other awards it has garnered.  However, you know going in, you're going to be roleplayer and storyteller, player and limited GM.

Tah-dah! Exactly what I expected you to object. But you see, your objections are founded, but they also show that the Ars Ludi definition is severely flawed.

Your basic - and perfectly valid, although you yourself noted that the "incriminated" mechanic is somehow midway on the spectrum - objection is

QuoteThe character does not choose to invoke a flashback.

Which is completely irrelevant if you use player abilities as the discriminant. Nowhere in the ars ludi definition is it stated that the character - and not the player - must make the choice of activating the ability. Nowhere in the definition is it stated that the ability must have been agreed beforehand and not inserted in the game at a later time with a player-driven "narrative edit". These are definitiely elements that make 3:16 a "storygame", but the Ars Ludi definition fails to identify them. On the other hand, as you immediately noted, Venger's definition immediately smells the rat.

The core point is that the discriminant in this case, and in most cases, is "who makes the choice and why", not the mere fact of "who has the ability". I strongly doubt that you can produce a working definition of what is "in character" and "out of character" that does not contain the noun "choice" or the verb "to choose".

CONCLUSION: while we have clearly determined that "3:16" is a "storygame" at its very core, the Ars Ludi definition completely failed to highlight and identify its "storygame" elements. If we want a definition that really discriminates and is based on mechanical, verifiable elements, then another definition is needed.

I have no problem including choice or to choose in the definition, as I said, we're just getting started.  However, I'm not sure that there is a difference between choosing to invoke a mechanic and the ability to use the mechanic.  If the choice to invoke a flashback is made by the player, then the character does not have the ability to invoke that flashback, therefore the AL definition still fits, and so does the Venger definition, but as you said, goals cannot be measured, mechanics can.  

IC/OOC, Associated/Dissociated, Player-Facing/Character-Facing all of these are referring essentially to who is choosing to engage with a mechanic - the character using the mechanic as the character, or the player using the mechanic for or about the character.  I think pretty much everyone agrees this is the crux, we just need different syntax.

It sounds like you might have a rewording you're thinking of.

Quote from: CRKrueger;910621all of these are referring essentially to who is choosing to engage with a mechanic

Exactly. "Choosing" is the magic word.

QuoteIt sounds like you might have a rewording you're thinking of.

I have debated the subject for 47 pages on rpg.net in 2013. If you have time to spare - and wish to witness the inevitable shitstorm that any potentially controversial thread elicits there - you can read it here: https://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?697377-On-the-existence-of-dissociated-mechanics

However, you will notice that I apply the definition to mechanics, not whole games. And I do not know whether the definition would hold if applied to games. In my opinion, the fact that a game has disassociated/OOC mechanics is not the defining factor for that game. And I say so while knowing perfectly (we acknowledged the fact in that thread) that some players do exist for whom Suspension of Disbelief (call it Immersion if you prefer) is completely dependent on this factor. It is not a problem of non-consideration for those players, the point is the axes are multiple, and this specific one is not the highest in my priority list. Although I suspect it is at the top of *your* list.