Quote from: Settembrini;419576FunTyrant is raping the word "story", thereby communication is impossible.

Using his thought model, RPGs are RILLY about creating heat, as people sit around emanating it. Or creating sentences, because sentences are uttered without end. Or creating wind with the mouth, or reading books, because the actual meeting is just a catalyst for people RILLY reading books...

ad nauseam.

Raping the word "story"? What the hell is that supposed to mean?

And your "counterpoint" makes no sense whatsoever. How is people crating a narrative together like sharing heat? That doesn't even make any sense in any sane way. You can't disprove my point my making an unrelated analogy.

Quote from: FunTyrant;419573I mean, how can you honestly say that RPGs aren't about stories or narratives?

My trip to the beach/mountains/whatever last weekend was not a story in-and-of-itself.  I created a story/narrative after-the-fact when I told my friends about it.

Also, the use of the term "story" by White-Wolf, story-gamers, and a majority of the people who see it as a goal for gaming use the term to refer to a compelling narrative with lots of drama.  In otherwords, tension and conflict are needed to produce the sort of story these games supposedly try to achieve.  That doesn't automatically happen if your goal isn't to create a story or drama, but to navigate your avatar through an imaginary world.  Not all RPGs involve stories or narratives.

And this is coming from someone who doesn't agree with Pundit, and who is a borderline "story-gamer."

Quote from: jibbajibba;419550...background points you can spend at chargen to create property, people, places, stuff etc etc . ...

Not in any meaningful sense part of the continuum of storygame mechanics at all IMHO, simply because you are not roleplaying immersively when you design your character (except possibly if it uses an extensive CharGen system like Traveller's which kind of involves playing out your character's previous life-history in outline prior to the official start of play). Your immersive roleplay is not interrupted to think about story-creation because your immersive roleplay hasn't actually started. It's no worse than choosing your character class on the basis that you think the party needs a cleric.

You could counter my point by saying that you can be starting to immerse yourself in the character's viewpoint during CharGen, but c'mon, you're hardly roleplaying at that stage. You're just getting ready to roleplay. Who cares what process you do to get set up for the roleplay? It's the roleplay which matters.

Quote from: Cranewings;419555That's how the Exalted game I played in for 6 months was. It was definitely an RPG. It just sucks a bit of dick, and their were odd things, like one players outrageous homicidal rage as he bucked the rails.

Did it come very, very close to breaking your spirit as an immersive roleplayer? Did the relentless railroading lead to the homicidal rage, and was that homicidal rage a real-world event?? Presumably not leading to ACTUAL homicide...

Quote from: Omnifray;419578I played Montsegur 1244 and went back to gaming exactly the same way as I had before - immersively. Does that make me blessed and seldom, or are you exaggerating the "brain-damage" (to borrow a Forgite term) which storygaming does to the immersive roleplayer?

Oh wait... you can invoke the douchebag caveat I guess...

I played more Storygames than you apparently, out of journalistic interest.
The people that are crappified are those who buy into the whole thing and wonder where everybody went. Like CR Nixon, just listen to his podcast...
I think you know exactly what I meant. Or are you some kind of totalitarian algebraic thinker?

But I do remember you being a douchebag of some sorts. In any case, with anything related to culture, there is no algebra. And there is no brain damage.

When I start a sentence with "People who watch Glenn Beck..." it is obvious that a critical watching is not alluded to. Dwell on that, code-boy.

Quote from: Benoist;419557Background dots in WW dots work pretty much the same way, to me. In the off chance I would make people roll their backgrounds during the game, this would be no different than rolling say, your Henchman's Loyalty. These are all acceptable things to me, because they are part of the emulation of the game world, and they fundamentally do not break immersion.

I fucking hate background dots in WW bought for xp or creation dots at CharGen meaning Allies, Contacts, Retainer, Status etc. But I'm not sure it has anything to do with immersion v. narrative control. I don't like the way better Allies and Contacts are equated with Strength and Dexterity. Either it strait-jackets the ST's (for which read GM's for the uninitiated) freedom to run the game naturally (because these social circumstances etc. are sacrosanct), or it has a fundamental tendency towards being poorly balanced (because it's so easy to lose the Allies, Contacts etc. you've bought with xp which could have bought you permastats, or because the Merit Dots in these things are fundamentally undercosted to begin with - which is in fact IMHO YMMV the case), or it leads to munchkinistic stat-wankery like deliberately losing Allies so the ST will refund your wasted xp, and weirdnesses like getting more xp just because you had the misfortune to fall out of touch with your Contacts.

The mechanic which lets you buy these things after play has started using xp is even worse. It means that you get less xp to spend on permastats if you play effectively and build up Allies, Contacts etc. It incentivises people to play ineffectively. It's total statwank. Also, more fundamentally, building up Allies, Contacts etc. is a goldmine of potentially interesting roleplay. Why the fuck turn it into an XP-spending meat market of NPC-buying???

I'm not saying that a little bit of direct resource-spending on NPCs after play has started is necessarily ruinous of the game. But I would think of it as something which happens at MAJOR faultlines in the game, say, transition between one whole campaign and the next (involving the same characters but with the game effectively re-started with everyone higher level, better off etc.)

All this said, in my own games I let people pre-buy wealth, status etc. at CharGen BUT NOT USING THE SAME RESOURCE POOL AS PERMASTATS. I balance it off against what are in essence fate points. I really think it's a super-neat dividing line, as long as you can get the fate points into the game without compromising immersion. My original solution was to have the GM in ultimate control of this particular kind of fate points even for the PCs, using them on your behalf. One guy at a con objected because he thought it made the game adversarial. That's not the intention, nor when I run it the effect. The point isn't for the GM to act like a cock, it's for him to help you, in a relatively finite way, but in a way you can't predict. In my next game I think it will be GM's choice whether the GM controls the Fate resource, but if he doesn't, the players can have the choice to hand back control of the Fate resource to him either from time to time, or globally. After all, the GM can use it more effectively than the players can. He knows his GM secrets.

I devised this system years ago but having recently read the Amber entry on Wikipedia I notice that spare character points (basically xp) in Amber become Good Stuff and overspends become Bad Stuff. Interesting parallel, except of course the Amber cp are used for permastats.

Quote from: Peregrin;419580My trip to the beach/mountains/whatever last weekend was not a story in-and-of-itself.  I created a story/narrative after-the-fact when I told my friends about it.

I don't see how it matters when the story was told, it's still a story. Things happened; there's no quantum cut-off point where something "starts" being a story where it wasn't before.

QuoteAlso, the use of the term "story" by White-Wolf, story-gamers, and a majority of the people who see it as a goal for gaming use the term to refer to a compelling narrative with lots of drama.  In otherwords, tension and conflict are needed to produce the sort of story these games supposedly try to achieve.  That doesn't automatically happen if your goal isn't to create a story or drama, but to navigate your avatar through an imaginary world.  Not all RPGs involve stories or narratives.

And this is coming from someone who doesn't agree with Pundit, and who is a borderline "story-gamer."

So, wait...you don't want a game with drama or conflict or a compelling narrative? Then, quite frankly, what's the bloody point? Just having your character wandering aimlessly through a campaign world just seems so...pointless and not-fun. It'd be like watching a two-hour movie where people just walk down the street and nothing happens.

edit: And every game tells a story! Even if the story is "we went into a dungeon, killed a dragon, took it's stuff and high-fived", it's still a story! Even if it's "we wandered aimlessly for a while and fought some orcs" that's still a story! Are they interesting ones? No, but that doesn't change the fact that they're still stories.

Quote from: Omnifray;419584Did it come very, very close to breaking your spirit as an immersive roleplayer? Did the relentless railroading lead to the homicidal rage, and was that homicidal rage a real-world event?? Presumably not leading to ACTUAL homicide...

No, the homicidal rage was in character. For example, we show up in this town and decide we need an audience with the king. The GM states that meeting him will be basically impossible. One of the guys basically says, "I beg to differ." He then murders one of his hirelings in the street, assuming that if nothing else would get the guy's attention, that would.

The game was still immersive. The tools he used to rail road us were all the good ones. The characters didn't know much about the world. There was a DMPC who was more powerful and informed than the rest of us, and hiding information. We were having prophetic dreams. The scenarios were so black and white that there was only ever one good and or useful course of action. Nothing that happened was out of sink with what should or could happen, given the personalities of the characters in the game.

Quote from: FunTyrant;419577Explain to me how any game you ran didn't have a story or narrative. Don't give a stupid little coy non-answer, actually defend your stance.

I did. Several times over this thread. So read my posts again, because visibly you haven't been paying much attention to what's been said already, assuming you indeed did think before you posted the first time.

Quote from: FunTyrant;419590edit: And every game tells a story! Even if the story is "we went into a dungeon, killed a dragon, took it's stuff and high-fived", it's still a story! Even if it's "we wandered aimlessly for a while and fought some orcs" that's still a story! Are they interesting ones? No, but that doesn't change the fact that they're still stories.

...and while gaming, people generated heat with their bodies, and talked. So really, RPGs are about HEAT and TALKING.

Quote from: boulet;419568I'm puzzled by story-game designers trying to create mystery games. It seems impossible to design a game that both create story collaboratively and enables players to reveal a mystery. "Randomly created mystery on the fly" isn't going to satisfy gamers who want to prove their wits and deductive powers either. If there's no secret and no one to say "you're warming up... nope getting cold" then players aren't going to solve any mystery.

Hail the True Believer! Mystery, intrigue, suspense and discovery are key experiences of immersive roleplay for which abstract storygaming is full of fail. Welcome to the Priesthood brother!

Quote from: FunTyrant;419590I don't see how it matters when the story was told, it's still a story. Things happened; there's no quantum cut-off point where something "starts" being a story where it wasn't before.

So, wait...you don't want a game with drama or conflict or a compelling narrative? Then, quite frankly, what's the bloody point? Just having your character wandering aimlessly through a campaign world just seems so...pointless and not-fun. It'd be like watching a two-hour movie where people just walk down the street and nothing happens.

edit: And every game tells a story! Even if the story is "we went into a dungeon, killed a dragon, took it's stuff and high-fived", it's still a story! Even if it's "we wandered aimlessly for a while and fought some orcs" that's still a story! Are they interesting ones? No, but that doesn't change the fact that they're still stories.

People don't have a problem here with having cool things happen. What they want is for the events to come about organically through the natural interaction between the characters and nature. You can even get things to go a certain way by writing up certain kinds of people. What is frowned on is having the players or GM artificially determining what happens and then forcing the chain of events along that path, irrespective of what would seem more likely.

Quote from: Settembrini;419571The mystery, it is just window dressing. Because, you know, TV and Comic book adventures RILLY are about the human condition! And that is the Forge-conjecture that even approaches conspiracy-like actions, as they are very secretive in their games about that.
So, not the detectives or the perpetrators actions matter. But the "cathartic process" of revealing some of your/your characters inner life through the process of story creation against the painted canvas of the Mystery.

It all comes back to a total failure to engage their faculty of empathy with the immersive roleplayers around them. It's not that they're bad people. It's just that they're not really focused on engaging with the internal perspective of other people because that's all subjectivity which carries very little weight in their world of solipsism and the Scientific Method where nothing which isn't externally observable is worth noticing. Of course they then go and make assertions about other people's internal experiences which actually contradict what those people report* (e.g. denying immersion exists), showing that inevitably they themselves are forced to engage with the roleplayer's internal perspective, it's just that, due to a craptacular lack of empathic effort, when they do so the result is full of epic fail.

* this is not what I was doing to John Morrow on another thread; I wasn't disagreeing with the substance of his experiences, just being pedantic about how he described them, more or less at a terminological / semantic level - I do that sometimes

Quote from: FunTyrant;419590I don't see how it matters when the story was told, it's still a story. Things happened; there's no quantum cut-off point where something "starts" being a story where it wasn't before.

Sett is right. The problem is that you visibly don't understand what a "story" is, isn't, or implies. See previous posts for more.

Quote from: FunTyrant;419573Can you tell me what happened in your game? Then guess what? That's a story!

Are things happening one after the other? Then guess what? That's a narrative!

Are the players actually doing things and interacting with setting elements? Then guess what? They're collaborating in the story!

I have had exactly this debate with a number of posters on this site over the last few days, at tedious length. As a use of plain English, of course, you ARE right on any sane view that describing things happening one after the other is a narrative, and a description of what happened in the game would be a story. But what you are in danger of missing is the significance of where the focus of the activity is and what its purpose is. Just because roleplaying games inevitably involve the creation of a story, and just because roleplaying games inevitably use techniques of story, even if only the GM uses them, and even if he uses them subconsciously, does not mean that the game's purpose or focal significance is the creation of a story.

QuoteI mean, how can you honestly say that RPGs aren't about stories or narratives?

Because what RPGs are fundamentally about is immersion in your character's point of view, having your character come alive for you and using that phenomenon as a vehicle for the experience of a deeply atmospheric game. The atmosphere might be one of the excitement of combat, it might be one of mystery, suspense, horror or tragedy. It might even involve soaking in poignant themes in the form of personal dilemmas of the sort so-called-GNS-narrativists love so much (and I love those themes too! but I'm not a so-called-GNS-narrativist).

The story is just something which you do to keep yourself busy while you are busy being immersed. It's a vehicle for reaching immersion, an incidental byproduct of play, nothing more. It's not the purpose of play in any meaningful sense. Unless your group switches its focus from immersion to the story.

Of course, terminologically I'm not fully on Pundit's side on this one, because I think that storygames are a kind of roleplaying game. They are just not immersive roleplaying games in the true sense. To me, it's as obvious as the craptacularity of GNS that immersive RPGs inevitably involve elements of storygaming (especially at the GM's end), and storygames almost inevitably involve elements of immersive roleplaying. It's a difference of focus. They are at opposite ends of a continuum from the focus on the construction and content of the in-game events to the focus on the player's experience of the in-game events.

So to me, storygames are abstract roleplaying games, as opposed to immersive roleplaying games.

But a lot of games which you may think of as storygames are actually immersive roleplaying games on this view. For instance Dread of Night which I played at a con last year. Excellent game. Totally an immersive RPG. Yes the GM was focusing relentlessly on certain themes. But all I the player had to do was roleplay immersively. I had a stake in my character,a sense of ownership of him, and the chance for impactful choices within the game. I had suspension of disbelief. There was descriptive engagement with the game-world. I took my character's point of view undistracted by considerations of how to improve the game-narrative or push it in particular directions - that last one is what immersion is all about.

So ask yourself - is the reason why you enjoy the games you play that they end up looking like a story which you find absorbing, or is it that you immerse yourself in your character's point of view and see the world through his eyes, which heightens your experience of the story considerably? If the latter, then the fact that you prefer the story to take particular sorts of direction, such as dealing with poignant themes, seems to me to be by the by. The really important thing is that the key to your enjoyment of play is immersive roleplay, rather than the abstract form that the story takes. So, maybe you're not a storygamer after all - in the sense I use the term anyway.