Quote from: jibbajibba;419575I was actually refering to the "And the GM is God, what he says goes. That's what you always told me. I am God and God says you..."

And the intention behind that statement could be:- "You said I the GM am God. I took that to mean I could craft the game any way I chose. Obviously I have approached this endeavour with a view to creating the most enjoyable possible experience for all of us, especially including you guys. So please, bear with me. It's a shared social expectation of ours that you will let me fulfil my role. Please do. Be patient and you will reap the rewards shortly, when I reveal the true extent of the cosmic intrigue your characters are about to get involved in, in a breathtaking game full of mystery, suspense, excitement, horror, tragedy and thematic poignancy". So, that doesn't necessarily make him an ass-hat either. Though perhaps he could have expressed himself better.

Quote from: FunTyrant;419577Explain to me how any game you ran didn't have a story or narrative.

Benoist might or might not think that no game he ran had a story or narrative. He probably does think that. I don't.

But that's not the point.

The point is not whether RPGs have a story or narrative, the point is what are RPGs really about?

In your language, FunTyrant, if you are a GNS-loving storygamer, RPGs are more or less basically about being in actor stance (with the concomitant consequence of heightening your experience of play - but GNS doesn't have a word for that because it bans immersion).

See my earlier post for more on this.

Quote from: Settembrini;419585I 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.

I'm not thinking algebraically. I've just never met anyone who told me they felt crappified about gaming and who was a storygamer. In fact, I've never met anyone who told me they felt crappified about gaming, except due to burn-out from too MUCH obsessive gaming, or other external factors e.g. it not being socially-speaking cool enough for them, or real life getting in the way. So I don't go around assuming people are crappified by gaming.

But I have met zealous fanatical storygamers who acted totally as if they were put off any kind of game which they couldn't immediately pigeonhole as "narrativist" or "gamist" within the tedious framework of GNS. Telling me games which engage with all sorts of aims at once are bland, etc. Code, I think, for "incoherent according to GNS". Is that the sort of mental degeneracy you had in mind? I just can't believe that it infects any large proportion of people exposed to the storygaming virus. Otherwise storygaming would be the mainstream hobby by now, and this is one of Pundit's key arguments.

Oh fuck, 4e...

(cue flamewar)

... but even if 4e is a storygame, everything I hear is that Pathfinder books are neck and neck with 4e core books for sales. Of course I only have the anecdotal views of store-workers to go on. But if that's the case, it could be construed as a massive reaction against the gamist-storygame agenda some ascribe to 4e. Which given the strength of the D&D brand is pretty staggering.

Thanks for the douchebag comment by the way. Can you justify it?

Quote from: Benoist;419592I 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.

Of course he can't understand what you say because of your zealous insistence that your games have nothing at all to do with narrative. If you untwisted your knickers a bit* and explained that what you really mean is that any element of narrative in your games (assuming for the sake of argument that there even is such an element of narrative in your games) is purely incidental to the real purpose of the game, which is the heightened state of experiencing the game-world attained through immersion in a character's point of view, achieved through immersive roleplaying, maybe he might understand.

* no offence intended

@Sette: Danke fürs Kompliment!

Regarding story and plot... have we found and expressed a common definition yet? If not, let me offer one pulled straight from my old, moldy linguistic textbooks:

Story: the narration of a chronological sequence of events.
Plot: the narration of the causal and logical structure which connects events.

E.M. Forster's brilliant examples:
The king died and then the queen died (story).
The king died and then the queen died of grief (plot).

Using these definitions, traditional roleplaying games NEVER tell a story. In trad games, players use their characters as vehicles to explore the game world and (within limitations) to satisfy their desires (or live out their fantasies).

Only WHEN TALKING ABOUT the game events, it becomes a story.

"Story Games" is actually is misnomer because what they really are is "Plot Games": Players and GMs (if there's any difference between them, often there's none) deliberately "frame scenes" to highlight causal and logical structures within the game.

Quote from: Omnifray;419611* no offence intended

No offense taken, mate.

Quote from: Norbert G. Matausch;419612Regarding story and plot... have we found and expressed a common definition yet? If not, let me offer one pulled straight from my old, moldy linguistic textbooks:

Story: the narration of a chronological sequence of events.
Plot: the narration of the causal and logical structure which connects events.

E.M. Forster's brilliant examples:
The king died and then the queen died (story).
The king died and then the queen died of grief (plot).

Using these definitions, traditional roleplaying games NEVER tell a story. In trad games, players use their characters as vehicles to explore the game world and (within limitations) to satisfy their desires (or live out their fantasies).

Only WHEN TALKING ABOUT the game events, it becomes a story.

"Story Games" is actually is misnomer because what they really are is "Plot Games": Players and GMs (if there's any difference between them, often there's none) deliberately "frame scenes" to highlight causal and logical structures within the game.

Thank you!

Quote from: Omnifray;419606Benoist might or might not think that no game he ran had a story or narrative. He probably does think that. I don't.

That's actually not the case, because I was very much into plot-driven games, to steal Norbert's terminology (I find myself in agreement with his awesome post, btw), when I started playing WW games extensively at the beginning of the 90s. So that's not like I'm talking out of my ass, here. I actually have experience in the field, so to speak. This changed as I kept playing those games and finally realized how and why I was doing it wrong. Because of the damn "story."

As predicted, Norbert brings the awesome.

It would amuse me to a high degree, btw, if they would be called "Plottygames"...

In any case, there is a more radical version of the Plottygame: The Thematic Game. Tada!

Not only logical connections between events...but logical connections in regard to the moral values of the PLAYERS, sometimes openly so (Spione), sometimes disguised by some charade or trickery (DitV, frex).

And this my dear readers is the essence of NARRativsm, Forge style. This is also the ultra-orthodoxy that ultimately led to the demise of Forge. The milquetoast version though, it procreates and rambles on, as it was built upon 80ies era msconceptions and longings that the ultra-orthodox wanted to fight against.

The only real victory, and here I side with Omnifray, is 4e. And that is a victory of the kind were you talk bad about someone until he really feels bad himself and behaves worse. Because ultimately, no one except Mearls ever gave a fuck about "Gamism".

Quote from: Omnifray;419546It's just that even on your view of WW stuff, it's not QUITE that heavily railroaded as to totally eclipse the immersive RPG elements - it's just that on your view it significantly diminishes them, and it's also (on your view) utterly pretentious. Am I in the right ballpark?

Pretty much, yeah.  WW RPGs are regular RPGs when it comes down to it; in the sense that they can be run very badly and not generate immersion, or they can be run really well and generate immersion; and granted, they are predisposed to railroading and metaplot in ways that can be harmful to immersion, IF the GM goes along with that.  But they are not designed from the ground up as anything other than RPGs, no matter how much they claim to the contrary. When it comes down to it, there is nothing in their fundamental design that is built to intentionally KILL immersion, in the same way that Forge "storygames" are.

So WW games are generally pretentious garbage, but they're pretentious garbage RPGs.
Forge games are pretentious garbage and NOT RPGs.

RPGPundit

Quote from: Omnifray;419565The Forge has come up with this classification of Story First, Story After and Story Now! Obviously, Story Now! is meant to be the one you're supposed to love, hence the sexier-sounding name for that compared to the others (complete with exclamation mark).

I guess that Story First could include extensive metaplot pre-written and railroaded, a la WW according to the Gospel of Pundit [I am not saying that this is how WW games actually go, but how Pundit says they are intended].

Story After is your typical immersive RPG where the "story" (or sequence of events unfolding in the game, if you prefer) emerges through play.

Story Now! is where the participants are actively pushing the game in the direction of a particular kind of story during play. This isn't really something the GM would do on his own, because if it were, why wouldn't he just go the whole hog and do it as Story First? A planned story is better than one you make up on the spot. But if you are doing it collectively obviously the story only comes to life as you actually collaborate, and that's what Shared Narrative Authority storygaming is all about.

Continued below...

This is bullshit Forge Swine jargon meant to obfuscate the truth by dominating the semantic terms from the get go in an argument.  If I accepted these terms, I'd have to agree on a number of things that aren't true, particularly that "story after" is a real goal for regular roleplayers, that "story now" is actually "story" as normal people define it (it is not, which to me has always been the most ironic thing about Edwards' alleged championing of "story", his understanding of "story" is not what 99% of people would think of it as), and of course that "story now" is the inherently superior option over the other two.

All of these are untruths.

The truth is that regular RPGs are not designed to tell stories. Stories may come out of them out of sheer coincidence, but there's a reason that most of the times when some gamer sits there for an hour telling you about his character's awesome adventures you want to claw your eardrums out: its not actually a "good" story that's been created.  What makes it so exciting for the gamer that he feels he has to tell you about it, and what makes it (normally) impossible for you to share in that excitement (except maybe in a "good for you, buddy" congratulatory sense) is that the thing that's awesome to the guy who lived it is that he LIVED it, not the story that got made. Its a case of "you had to be there", because the excitement comes from the immersion the guy felt as he lived out his character's actions, not from the brilliance of a story that ended up getting told.
Yes, once in a blue moon there are exceptions, but this is the exception that proves the rule; the rule in this case being that "story" is an ENTIRELY INCIDENTAL byproduct of the gaming experience.

Regular RPGs, meanwhile, are not well designed to do a story first and then have players live it, there's a reason why the railroad is so reviled.   Ron Edwards recognizes this, as do ALL HIS LITTLE FOLLOWERS who have come on here deceitfully to try to argue that the RPG is somehow an inherent story-making device. They KNOW this isn't true, they're trying to use that lie to get people to then go on to accept the bigger "revolution" of changing RPGs.
And it follows then that, obviously, "story now" is not something RPGs are made to do either, so that those "storygames" that the Forge are creating are not actually RPGs at all, but something new. Edwards realized that to get what he wanted, you have to CHANGE the fundamental nature of RPGs, from a game that is not about telling stories to one that is. That's the "storygame".  Of course, while I wouldn't personally give a rat's piss as to whether "storygames" would actually be good at telling stories or not either (I only care about RPGs, not "storygames", and all my issues with the latter is the way they are trying to usurp the former), it would likewise seem to me that storygames aren't in fact all that good at telling stories either; because the framework for creating story that is historically successful is the model of one person telling the story with an idea from start to finish of what he generally wants (possibly revising along the way).  But "group story-creating" is relatively an inferior form. The problem is that there's really NO way of doing that genuine story-making well in the framework of a game, which is why Forge games will always have a relatively small following compared to, say, fanfic-writing. Its probably why the Forge Swine don't have enough faith in their own hobby to admit that its a new and separate hobby; they realize that it wouldn't have enough critical mass to stand on its own, and that it needs to parasitically leech the life out of the more broadly-appealing regular RPG hobby.

RPGPundit

Quote from: FunTyrant;419573I'm sorry, but I had to register because of this post.

This is the single dumbest thing I've ever seen posted about gaming. Ever.

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

Can you tell me what happened in your game? Then guess what? That's a story!

By your logic, going fishing is a "story-making game".

QuoteI mean, good lord, if you don't have a story or narrative or anything, when what do you do in your games? Sit there and stare at each other for four hours?

No, they interact in and with an emulated world.  That accounts detailing those interactions can follow does not make "story" the goal of the game. Again, you can make an account of how you debugged a computer program, that doesn't make "computer programing" into a story-making game.

QuoteI have beaten your point to my satisfaction, RPGPundit. Therefore I claim victory over you. I win, and that's all there is to it. That's how this works, right? I can just declare it like you did?

Nope, for that you have to either actually win the argument or get me to announce that I'm quitting. You know, like Ron Edwards did. That's losing.

RPGpundit

Quote from: RPGPundit;419624By your logic, going fishing is a "story-making game".

Yup. That story being "I went fishing, and caught a fish".

Quote from: RPGPundit;419623This is bullshit Forge Swine jargon meant to obfuscate the truth by dominating the semantic terms from the get go in an argument.  If I accepted these terms, I'd have to agree on a number of things that aren't true, particularly that "story after" is a real goal for regular roleplayers, that "story now" is actually "story" as normal people define it (it is not, which to me has always been the most ironic thing about Edwards' alleged championing of "story", his understanding of "story" is not what 99% of people would think of it as), and of course that "story now" is the inherently superior option over the other two.

All of these are untruths.

The truth is that regular RPGs are not designed to tell stories. Stories may come out of them out of sheer coincidence, but there's a reason that most of the times when some gamer sits there for an hour telling you about his character's awesome adventures you want to claw your eardrums out: its not actually a "good" story that's been created.  What makes it so exciting for the gamer that he feels he has to tell you about it, and what makes it (normally) impossible for you to share in that excitement (except maybe in a "good for you, buddy" congratulatory sense) is that the thing that's awesome to the guy who lived it is that he LIVED it, not the story that got made. Its a case of "you had to be there", because the excitement comes from the immersion the guy felt as he lived out his character's actions, not from the brilliance of a story that ended up getting told.
Yes, once in a blue moon there are exceptions, but this is the exception that proves the rule; the rule in this case being that "story" is an ENTIRELY INCIDENTAL byproduct of the gaming experience.

Regular RPGs, meanwhile, are not well designed to do a story first and then have players live it, there's a reason why the railroad is so reviled.   Ron Edwards recognizes this, as do ALL HIS LITTLE FOLLOWERS who have come on here deceitfully to try to argue that the RPG is somehow an inherent story-making device. They KNOW this isn't true, they're trying to use that lie to get people to then go on to accept the bigger "revolution" of changing RPGs.
And it follows then that, obviously, "story now" is not something RPGs are made to do either, so that those "storygames" that the Forge are creating are not actually RPGs at all, but something new. Edwards realized that to get what he wanted, you have to CHANGE the fundamental nature of RPGs, from a game that is not about telling stories to one that is. That's the "storygame".  Of course, while I wouldn't personally give a rat's piss as to whether "storygames" would actually be good at telling stories or not either (I only care about RPGs, not "storygames", and all my issues with the latter is the way they are trying to usurp the former), it would likewise seem to me that storygames aren't in fact all that good at telling stories either; because the framework for creating story that is historically successful is the model of one person telling the story with an idea from start to finish of what he generally wants (possibly revising along the way).  But "group story-creating" is relatively an inferior form. The problem is that there's really NO way of doing that genuine story-making well in the framework of a game, which is why Forge games will always have a relatively small following compared to, say, fanfic-writing. Its probably why the Forge Swine don't have enough faith in their own hobby to admit that its a new and separate hobby; they realize that it wouldn't have enough critical mass to stand on its own, and that it needs to parasitically leech the life out of the more broadly-appealing regular RPG hobby.

RPGPundit

I honestly don't know what scares me more; the fact that you believe this or the fact that you get this frothed up about RPGs.

Quote from: FunTyrant;419626Yup. That story being "I went fishing, and caught a fish".

So the POINT of fishing is to be able to tell a story, then?
By that logic, absolutely EVERYTHING is about telling a story, and therefore "story" is a meaningless term. You have defeated yourself.
What's more, it means that whatever "storygamers" are trying to do, what they're trying to create with their stories, is not something within that norm, brining us right back to square one.

That's the key, here, folks: if RPGs were already about "making stories", then the Story Swine wouldn't NEED to create all these new kinds of games.  They would be doing it with existing regular RPGs.  The whole essence of Edwards' argument is that RPGs are in fact NOT MADE for telling stories; he also argues that telling stories is what RPGs should do, and therefore argues the necessity for his kind of games. But the point is that he already admits right from the start what I am arguing here; as usual, his conclusions are entirely different than mine; and there's no way to read his conclusions other than "we're going to try to REMAKE RPGs to tell stories", otherwise with the same basic assumptions he'd have had to have been arguing for the creation of a new hobby. Once you admit that RPGs aren't good at "making story", and that what you want is to "make story", there's really only two paths: either you want to create a new hobby, or subvert the existing one into something YOU JUST ADMITTED IT IS NOT.

RPGPundit