Quote from: RPGPundit;419628So 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.

RPGPundit

No, the point of going fishing is about my enjoyment. Getting a story out of it is one of the effects of going fishing. I caught a fish, and I have a story about it. Win/win.

Oh, and also?

Quote from: RPGPundit;419623All of these are untruths.

That's incorrect. They're actually opinions that differ from yours. Not the same thing. Your inability to differentiate between the two seems to be a large problem for you, and seems to drive a lot of your rage. You should probably work on that.

Quote from: FunTyrant;419631Oh, and also?



That's incorrect. They're actually opinions that differ from yours. Not the same thing. Your inability to differentiate between the two seems to be a large problem for you, and seems to drive a lot of your rage. You should probably work on that.

Nah....

Pundit's mostly right on this and you, 'FunTyrant' are full of shit.

Again the phrase or term "narrative authority' is a bullshit phrase when applied to RPGs.

 The GM is the final authority at the game table.


- Ed C.

Quote from: Koltar;419636Nah....

Pundit's mostly right on this and you, 'FunTyrant' are full of shit.

Please explain how my pointing out that Pundit's opinion on RPGs is actually just that, an opinion, and not objective fact, makes me full of shit.

Quote from: FunTyrant;419637Please explain how my pointing out that Pundit's opinion on RPGs is actually just that, an opinion, and not objective fact, makes me full of shit.

Are you one of those hipster post-modernists who likes to claim that "everything is opinion"? Is there no such thing as fact?

It is a fact that RPGs in their structure are set up to maximize emulative experience, that's what they do. They aren't for "making a story", they create a world, and people play in that world. Story is incidental.  That's not opinion, that's reality. You need to deal with it.

RPGPundit

Quote from: FunTyrant;419631That's incorrect. They're actually opinions that differ from yours. Not the same thing. Your inability to differentiate between the two seems to be a large problem for you, and seems to drive a lot of your rage. You should probably work on that.

"After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the nonexistence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it -
"I refute it thus."  - Boswell

Quote from: RPGPundit;419640Are you one of those hipster post-modernists who likes to claim that "everything is opinion"? Is there no such thing as fact?

No, I'm one of those people who's not so full of himself that I'm actually capable of separating fact from opinion.

"RPGPundit wrote GnomeMurdered" is a fact.
"GnomeMurdered is a silly concept for a game" is an opinion.

QuoteIt is a fact that RPGs in their structure are set up to maximize emulative experience, that's what they do. They aren't for "making a story", they create a world, and people play in that world. Story is incidental.  That's not opinion, that's reality. You need to deal with it.

RPGPundit

Fine. Prove it. Cite irrefutable and universal sources. Prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that no RPG in the history of the industry ever was ever designed to make a story. Show your sources and detail your research please.

Otherwise, it's just your opinion that RPGs are a certain way.

FunTyrant is full of fail. This is getting ultra-lame.

Yes, if his English were worse I'd suspect THE SWINE who graced Sett's forum for a while. Except THE SWINE could occasionally rub two thoughts together to start a fire.

Arguably, any event generates a potential narrative. (e.g. "I typed the sentence, 'Arguably, any event generates a potential narrative.') But that is a trivial assertion that, in my opinion, is beside the point.

I just went to the bank. Really, just now. I have the narrative, "I went to the bank." I could go into more detail, but I'm not going to bother, because it would not be a very good story. That does not mean my having gone to the bank was a flawed and failed exercise. It accomplished the goals of the trip just fine.

There is not an identity between my trip to the bank and the narrative of it. The narrative follows inevitably from the event, but they're not the same thing, nor is the quality of the event dependent on the quality of the narrative, or the fact that it was related to you guys.

So let's take the example of the most widely recognizable example of a roleplaying game, D&D. I will use a real example from my the actual D&D game I played in last week. "Last week, my character went into a dungeon, fought a monster, and left." (I could go into much more detail here, too, but the details of this aren't particularly relevant, either.) The story generated is "Last week, my character went into a dungeon, fought a monster, and left."

Is that a good story? No, but that's beside the point - the trip into the dungeon was very intriguing and entertaining for me as a player (and very challenging and profitable for my character as an adventurer in the game world.) The quality of the narrative generated in no way impacts the quality of game play. If I wanted, I could make the narrative of that same event much more entertaining than I did, but even if I did so, the event itself is over and the superior narrative will not effect the event - I could make the bank event more entertaining if I really wanted to, also, but the event is, similarly, done.

The D&D event is imaginary, but its relationship to the narrative it produces is the same as that of my trip to the bank, which was 100% real. When I go to the bank, my goal is to go on a trip to the (real) bank. When I play D&D, my goal is to go on a trip to the (imaginary) dungeon.* The basic difference between the two narratives produced is just that one is based on real events and one is based on imaginary events.

And, in my opinion, if I'm going to the bank, and trying to approach this activity in such a way that I am maximizing the potential quality of the narrative I can produce about the bank trip, I am probably interfering with the quality and likelihood of success of the trip itself. I think the similar tends to apply to RPGs, for me as a player.

*There is, I would argue, a sense in which the D&D adventure is "real" - an actual trip to an imaginary location.

Quote from: Norbert G. Matausch;419612...
Story: the narration of a chronological sequence of events.
Plot: the narration of the causal and logical structure which connects events.
...
Only WHEN TALKING ABOUT the game events, it becomes a story.

Except that you can as a matter of plain English "narrate events as they happen" - I did doubt this under fire from CKrueger, but a Google search for that phrase confirmed my view of usage to my satisfaction at least.

Therefore you can narrate "a chronological sequence of events" as they happen.

Therefore a roleplaying discourse does constitute literal storytelling.

But even if I'm wrong about that, the fact is that the generation of the chronological sequence of events through play via discourse is so closely analogous to a story, that it is utter pedantry to argue with the use of the word "narrate" and "story" in this context.

Was Du sagst (wenn ich Dich duzen darf), macht besseren Sinn auf deutsch. Denn Ihr habt nur ein Wort fuer >>die Geschichte<<. Wir Englaender haben zwei:- story und history. Verzeih mal, wenn Du nicht deutscher/oesterreicher/andertwie deutschsprachiger bist, ich geh nur davon aus, weil Du jemandem >>fuers Kompliment<< gedankt hast. And sorry for my crappy German.

Story doesn't equal history (unlike in German where both are translated as "die Geschichte"). You can recount a brief history of events. You can narrate a story. The first very clearly implies past tense. The second far less clearly if at all. I think it's natural to speak of telling a story which has yet to happen, and certainly of one which is now happening.

Anyway all this talk of NO STORY EVER! is just insanely difficult for people to understand who are coming to this discussion fresh from the storygames side of things or even the general RPG public with no understanding of the Punditesque idea (which incidentally I agree with) of immersion as the holy grail and primary purpose of true RPGs. If we can persuade people that the focus should be on immersion, not on the game-narrative, that immediately changes their whole perspective. We don't actually need to persuade them that no incidental story whatsoever is involved in the RPG hobby. The more effective form of advocacy is IMHO to focus on the positive message of immersion being the central focus of the hobby, and story being if anything an incidental byproduct or at most a technique (conscious or subconscious) to facilitate enjoyable and interesting immersion, and to bring home the most important point of all, which is that the conscious pursuit of story can harm immersion and rob the RPG experience of its central value and purpose.

It's much easier to get people to explain that viewpoint than to get them to accept what at first seems nonsensical (sitting around talking about a sequence of fictional events is not telling a story???) when they have no understanding of why that conclusion would be worth coming to (namely, to liberate the gamer from the shackles of the pursuit of story so that he can indulge immersion to the max). All I'm saying is that as an advocacy technique, even if you believe there is NO STORY EVER, you should say something which explains your position in terms that the totally uninitiated can understand:-

Assuming for the sake of argument that there even were story involved in truly immersive roleplaying (which I, e.g. Benoist, Pundit, CKrueger, Norbert or whoever [but not Omnifray], by the way deny for terminological reasons on which reasonable minds might differ), my central point is that it is the immersive experience of roleplaying from the perspective of a character which is the fundamental purpose of roleplaying and which makes it enjoyable, and that the shape and content of the sequence of events (which some might controversially call a story) which is thereby produced is not the central focus of the endeavour, and certainly not its defining feature, and in particular that the conscious and deliberate pursuit of story can be harmful to immersion and therefore overall counterproductive.

I know, it's very wordy, like pretty much anything that springs from my fingers at a keyboard, and I'm sure someone can condense it, but the point is, if you just harang people with the idea NO STORY EVER, they're not going to engage with your argument, they're going to think you're a dickwad and you will lose them to the Dark Side possibly forever.

Quote from: RPGPundit;419628That'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

Game
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Quote from: Omnifray;419650Was Du sagst (wenn ich Dich duzen darf), macht besseren Sinn auf deutsch. Denn Ihr habt nur ein Wort fuer >>die Geschichte<<. Wir Englaender haben zwei:- story und history. Verzeih mal, wenn Du nicht deutscher/oesterreicher/andertwie deutschsprachiger bist, ich geh nur davon aus, weil Du jemandem >>fuers Kompliment<< gedankt hast. And sorry for my crappy German.

Story doesn't equal history (unlike in German where both are translated as "die Geschichte").

I'm sorry, but I can't get get any farther with your post because you're exhibiting a classic fallacy of equivocation here. German does use "Geschichte" to mean both "history" and "story", but this doesn't mean that German-speakers are confused by the distinction made by Anglophones.

I think you are making the same error when you play around with "narrate".

Some of you guys are really exhausting.

Quote from: FunTyrant;419644No, I'm one of those people who's not so full of himself that I'm actually capable of separating fact from opinion.

"RPGPundit wrote GnomeMurdered" is a fact.
"GnomeMurdered is a silly concept for a game" is an opinion.


Fine. Prove it. Cite irrefutable and universal sources. Prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that no RPG in the history of the industry ever was ever designed to make a story. Show your sources and detail your research please.

Otherwise, it's just your opinion that RPGs are a certain way.

Dude, are you also a Creationist? Its funny.

Since you will end up suggesting that any amount of examples, data, or references to other items is just "opinion" (and even though you probably worship it secretly, if I quoted Ron Edwards to you right now, you'd probably say his is just an opinion too), there's really no point in having this argument with you.

Proof: The storygamers want to change RPGs to tell stories. If were already made to tell stories, they wouldn't have to.

Proof: D&D and all other subsequent "regular" games were NOT designed as games where the GM tells a story to the players, or the players collaboratively write a story together.  It was designed as people interacting in a dungeon or the wilderness.  Things very vaguely described as "stories" in the loosest of terms (an "account of what happened") can be derived from this, but they are usually the sort of thing that would utterly fail at any Creative Writing class. They are not "stories" in the sense of novels, movies or TV shows.

Proof: Railroading, the attempt to FORCE story on a gaming group, is almost universally despised among gamers.

This is an objective historical reality that's currently raping you in the ass, my young friend. Give up now before you become the town fuck-slut.

RPGpundit