Quote from: FingerRod on April 19, 2024, 06:54:37 AMI just checked my watch, it is still a story game. And that mechanic is a way for others to participate in the STORY. It 100% is not used as part of standard resolution.

And when 1 is barely a success, 2 is you do it but not well, 3 you do it adequately, etc. those are called DEGREES OF SUCCESS. And again, the failure story mechanic does not change that. It is only used as a way to introduce something "more interesting". The person doing the action can always reroll, using insight, until they get their way. Annnnnd....if the player doing the action doesn't think the failure is interesting for their character or the story, then most of the time people back it out. A table etiquette thing.

I cannot believe you keep digging deeper on this lol.

FingerRod: "My GM always let me succeed with no risk of failure, because at our table it's standard table etiquette not to allow anyone to fail if they don't want to."

Dude, that may be the etiquette at your table, but that's not the standard etiquette for all tables, and it's not what the Cthulhu Dark rules say. No, I haven't played Cthulhu Dark, but I was very involved with story games in 2010 and read it when it was released. I had been a participant on The Forge and administered the Indie RPG Awards, and played lots of its siblings and predecessors like Lady Blackbird, Blowback, etc.

In general, I find it is more fun to have the risk of failure. In my groups, it was normal for the GM and others to introduce risk of failure, even if the rules allowed for the GM to grant auto-success. If I were playing Cthulhu Dark, I'd be using the failure rules to their fullest as written - the same way that I have introduced failure and adversity in other story games like Lady Blackbird, Polaris, etc. For me, it's been more fun that way.

Quote from: jhkim on April 19, 2024, 05:41:16 PM

Quote from: FingerRod on April 19, 2024, 06:54:37 AMI just checked my watch, it is still a story game. And that mechanic is a way for others to participate in the STORY. It 100% is not used as part of standard resolution.

And when 1 is barely a success, 2 is you do it but not well, 3 you do it adequately, etc. those are called DEGREES OF SUCCESS. And again, the failure story mechanic does not change that. It is only used as a way to introduce something "more interesting". The person doing the action can always reroll, using insight, until they get their way. Annnnnd....if the player doing the action doesn't think the failure is interesting for their character or the story, then most of the time people back it out. A table etiquette thing.

I cannot believe you keep digging deeper on this lol.

FingerRod: "My GM always let me succeed with no risk of failure, because at our table it's standard table etiquette not to allow anyone to fail if they don't want to."

Dude, that may be the etiquette at your table, but that's not the standard etiquette for all tables, and it's not what the Cthulhu Dark rules say. No, I haven't played Cthulhu Dark, but I was very involved with story games in 2010 and read it when it was released. I had been a participant on The Forge and administered the Indie RPG Awards, and played lots of its siblings and predecessors like Lady Blackbird, Blowback, etc.

In general, I find it is more fun to have the risk of failure. In my groups, it was normal for the GM and others to introduce risk of failure, even if the rules allowed for the GM to grant auto-success. If I were playing Cthulhu Dark, I'd be using the failure rules to their fullest as written - the same way that I have introduced failure and adversity in other story games like Lady Blackbird, Polaris, etc. For me, it's been more fun that way.

Nice resume, who cares? You got caught trying to represent a game you've never played. Simple as that.

For the record, I tried with you this time.

Quote from: KindaMeh on April 19, 2024, 04:28:21 PMI'll readily admit to not knowing much about the specifics of the conversational origins of all that. Partly as I wasn't old enough to even read in/access a forum at the time. Interesting to know, I guess. I had oftentimes heard that he hated D&D and simulationism, but didn't know that he hated even WoD, which always struck me either as neotrad or (for the railroaded adventures) trad gameplay.

Yeah, the Forge was the manifestation of the "Not Invented Here" principle for tabletop games, with Edwards as its lead priest. Everything that didn't follow GNS/Big Model principles pretty much to the letter was criticized heavily.

Quote from: FingerRod on April 19, 2024, 09:30:11 PMNice resume, who cares? You got caught trying to represent a game you've never played. Simple as that.

For the record, I tried with you this time.

I hate defending jhkim here, but that's a bitch argument. It's akin to saying if you haven't watched a movie you can't say it's a bad movie. If you haven't played a video game you can't say it's a bad video game. If you haven't eaten a shit sandwich with bacon you can't tell me it's a bad sandwich.

There are plenty of ways to interact with something and form a valid opinion. Don't get pissy just because it isn't the same opinion/conclusion you have.

Quote from: rgalex on April 20, 2024, 12:15:27 PM

Quote from: FingerRod on April 19, 2024, 09:30:11 PMNice resume, who cares? You got caught trying to represent a game you've never played. Simple as that.

For the record, I tried with you this time.

I hate defending jhkim here, but that's a bitch argument. It's akin to saying if you haven't watched a movie you can't say it's a bad movie. If you haven't played a video game you can't say it's a bad video game. If you haven't eaten a shit sandwich with bacon you can't tell me it's a bad sandwich.

There are plenty of ways to interact with something and form a valid opinion. Don't get pissy just because it isn't the same opinion/conclusion you have.

Except that wasn't his argument.  He pointed out that jhkim hadn't payed the game, and his understanding of the rules was wrong.  And, it being jhkim, jhkim just doubled down on his (maybe accidental) misunderstanding of the rules...

Quote from: KindaMeh on April 18, 2024, 02:23:16 PMSo essentially if I read this right, the argument is roughly that storygaming waters down the rpg components of an rpg. To some degree I would concur with that proposition.

It is more that storygamers, like the woke, are never satisfied with what they have and have to fuck with everyone else. AND they then turn around and do the very things they accuse RPGers of doing.

Universalis is my personal example of just one hair short of the final end result. It is storytelling. Not even a game anymore. Remove the bid for control of the story element and its near pure storytelling. That they waste hundreds of pages essentially telling you to play round robin. It calls itself an RPG. But it is anything but.

Quote from: Steven Mitchell on April 18, 2024, 03:14:49 PMThe devil is always in the details:

- Add OOC chatter to a game session, good or bad?  Some people hate it like the plague.  For others, the game itself is no fun if they can't revel such chatter.  Most people are somewhere in between.

- Have music playing in the background?  Likewise, everything from absolute ban from the GM or even the whole group to playing loud, constantly.

- Having the GM portray some interesting NPCs for you to interact with in character?  Is there anyone that dislikes that?

- The player to your left hitting your thumb with a hammer every time you roll poorly?  The only people that like that are sick and/or lying.

Some of these activities are more central to playing an RPG than others.

None of those are storygaming though.

Quote from: rgalex on April 20, 2024, 12:15:27 PMI hate defending jhkim here, but that's a bitch argument. It's akin to saying if you haven't watched a movie you can't say it's a bad movie. If you haven't played a video game you can't say it's a bad video game. If you haven't eaten a shit sandwich with bacon you can't tell me it's a bad sandwich.

There are plenty of ways to interact with something and form a valid opinion. Don't get pissy just because it isn't the same opinion/conclusion you have.

If I have never heard of a game outside hearsay from someone else then NO I do not have any valid opinion on the game. This is why I do not participate in threads on games I do not either actually have, or have played.

I might get a general idea of I will like or not a system from a review. But I prefer to actually see for myself as some reviews are so skewed for god unknown reasons. Some jackass wrote a flowery review of Faltasy Wargaming as a rebuttal to my rather skathing review of it. You can tell the poor sod has no damn clue and is just grasping at straws. He even tried to play the legal threat card.

Quote from: Omega on April 20, 2024, 01:58:05 PM

Quote from: KindaMeh on April 18, 2024, 02:23:16 PMSo essentially if I read this right, the argument is roughly that storygaming waters down the rpg components of an rpg. To some degree I would concur with that proposition.

It is more that storygamers, like the woke, are never satisfied with what they have and have to fuck with everyone else. AND they then turn around and do the very things they accuse RPGers of doing.

Universalis is my personal example of just one hair short of the final end result. It is storytelling. Not even a game anymore. Remove the bid for control of the story element and its near pure storytelling. That they waste hundreds of pages essentially telling you to play round robin. It calls itself an RPG. But it is anything but.

I feel like there's probably some overlap between the RPG community and Storygaming folks, not least because it seems to me like there are indeed some RPGs with storygaming elements. (Arguably it does from my perspective water down the rpg side of things, but I digress.) So I'm not sure the battle lines so to speak are necessarily drawn for everybody.


There probably are indeed a fair number of storygamers and storygame theorists who are toxic. (Likewise, I'll admit the same for RPGs, much though I wish it weren't true as arguably sizably more a member of that community than the other.) Cultural association of many of those games with the woke for whatever reason may well be part of that, I would concur. And although I have very little knowledge of Universalis I would agree that it's quite obviously not an rpg on account of a lack of both emulation and immersion among other things. So yeah, there's definitely some incorrect or dishonest marketing floating around out there.

That said, it does seem like a bit of an oversimplification to me to say that all folks who play or make storygames or RPGs with storygame components are that way. I do sometimes worry about competing marketing to the same audience lessening the demand for the core rpg experience, but I can't really blame that on the consumers, or even most of the producers, I feel, of more content.

As a tangential interest... With respect to storygames turning around and doing the things storygame theorists claim RPGs do, I'm not really well versed in that enough to comment. I'm kinda surprised to hear that, since I see storygaming as almost orthogonal to rpg stuff, and weakening the focus on it. If you have some examples of that sort of thing, I think that would be prospectively interesting to hear about, though.

Quote from: Omega on April 20, 2024, 02:14:36 PM

Quote from: rgalex on April 20, 2024, 12:15:27 PMI hate defending jhkim here, but that's a bitch argument. It's akin to saying if you haven't watched a movie you can't say it's a bad movie. If you haven't played a video game you can't say it's a bad video game. If you haven't eaten a shit sandwich with bacon you can't tell me it's a bad sandwich.

There are plenty of ways to interact with something and form a valid opinion. Don't get pissy just because it isn't the same opinion/conclusion you have.

If I have never heard of a game outside hearsay from someone else then NO I do not have any valid opinion on the game. This is why I do not participate in threads on games I do not either actually have, or have played.

I might get a general idea of I will like or not a system from a review. But I prefer to actually see for myself as some reviews are so skewed for god unknown reasons. Some jackass wrote a flowery review of Faltasy Wargaming as a rebuttal to my rather skathing review of it. You can tell the poor sod has no damn clue and is just grasping at straws. He even tried to play the legal threat card.

In all fairness, while he didn't play it jhkim did at least read it and participate in conversations and evaluations of it. Which I'll be honest is more than I myself have done for that system. Fingerrod's feedback from live play was valuable, but I do think it was useful to hear another point of view on it as well, even if I suspect the live play is probably the more common experience, I guess? I dunno, doesn't seem like something I'd want to play regardless, but was interesting to hear the discussion at least.

Quote from: KindaMeh on April 20, 2024, 02:31:59 PM

Quote from: Omega on April 20, 2024, 01:58:05 PM

Quote from: KindaMeh on April 18, 2024, 02:23:16 PMSo essentially if I read this right, the argument is roughly that storygaming waters down the rpg components of an rpg. To some degree I would concur with that proposition.

It is more that storygamers, like the woke, are never satisfied with what they have and have to fuck with everyone else. AND they then turn around and do the very things they accuse RPGers of doing.

Universalis is my personal example of just one hair short of the final end result. It is storytelling. Not even a game anymore. Remove the bid for control of the story element and its near pure storytelling. That they waste hundreds of pages essentially telling you to play round robin. It calls itself an RPG. But it is anything but.

I feel like there's probably some overlap between the RPG community and Storygaming folks, not least because it seems to me like there are indeed some RPGs with storygaming elements. (Arguably it does from my perspective water down the rpg side of things, but I digress.) So I'm not sure the battle lines so to speak are necessarily drawn for everybody.


There probably are indeed a fair number of storygamers and storygame theorists who are toxic. (Likewise, I'll admit the same for RPGs, much though I wish it weren't true as arguably sizably more a member of that community than the other.) Cultural association of many of those games with the woke for whatever reason may well be part of that, I would concur. And although I have very little knowledge of Universalis I would agree that it's quite obviously not an rpg on account of a lack of both emulation and immersion among other things. So yeah, there's definitely some incorrect or dishonest marketing floating around out there.

That said, it does seem like a bit of an oversimplification to me to say that all folks who play or make storygames or RPGs with storygame components are that way. I do sometimes worry about competing marketing to the same audience lessening the demand for the core rpg experience, but I can't really blame that on the consumers, or even most of the producers, I feel, of more content.

As a tangential interest... With respect to storygames turning around and doing the things storygame theorists claim RPGs do, I'm not really well versed in that enough to comment. I'm kinda surprised to hear that, since I see storygaming as almost orthogonal to rpg stuff, and weakening the focus on it. If you have some examples of that sort of thing, I think that would be prospectively interesting to hear about, though.

I don't like PbtA, but I've seen in this thread a lot of folks saying that "storygames" are not RPGs. In order for us not to fall into true Scotmanship, what would you define as "rpg stuff" and how is that different than "storygames"?

I repeat, I don't like PbtA, which is supposedly the poster boy for "narrative" games or whatever other fluff term is used. I am not defending PbtA or "storygames" I just want to understand what this forum means when they use the term.

Quote from: KindaMeh on April 20, 2024, 02:35:07 PM

Quote from: Omega on April 20, 2024, 02:14:36 PMIf I have never heard of a game outside hearsay from someone else then NO I do not have any valid opinion on the game. This is why I do not participate in threads on games I do not either actually have, or have played.

In all fairness, while he didn't play it jhkim did at least read it and participate in conversations and evaluations of it.

Right. I agree with Omega in general that one should have played or read the rules. In the case of Cthulhu Dark, I opened my copy and reread the whole thing before replying, which is easy in this case since the rules are less than 3 pages. They're also free. Here's a direct link to the PDF:

http://catchyourhare.com/files/Cthulhu%20Dark.pdf

There's a section entitled "Doing Things" that covers the die roll and degrees of success, and immediately after that there is a section entitled "Failing" about how if anyone thinks that failure would be interesting, then an opposed die is rolled to check for failure.

I'm fine calling it a story game, but it's clearly wrong to say that no failure is possible.

Quote from: Omega on April 20, 2024, 02:02:43 PM

Quote from: Steven Mitchell on April 18, 2024, 03:14:49 PMThe devil is always in the details:

- Add OOC chatter to a game session, good or bad?  Some people hate it like the plague.  For others, the game itself is no fun if they can't revel such chatter.  Most people are somewhere in between.

- Have music playing in the background?  Likewise, everything from absolute ban from the GM or even the whole group to playing loud, constantly.

- Having the GM portray some interesting NPCs for you to interact with in character?  Is there anyone that dislikes that?

- The player to your left hitting your thumb with a hammer every time you roll poorly?  The only people that like that are sick and/or lying.

Some of these activities are more central to playing an RPG than others.

None of those are storygaming though.

Never said they were.  They are other examples of things you could do while playing an RPG.  Only the third one is part of playing an RPG.  For the rest, focus on them enough, eventually you wouldn't be playing an RPG anymore.  They are analogous to story game things like that, and for purposes of discussing playing an RPG should get the same tertiary importance only to the degree that the group is fine with mixing non-RPG peanut butter with their RPG chocolate.

KindaMeh is trying real hard to be nice and include everything.  I'm just showing how that doesn't work, for story games or anything else that is not central.

My response, likewise, would probably be that if it has the core rpg attributes of character immersion and living world emulation included as notable components of the experience then it's an rpg, music or no music, storygame or no storygame. While still recognizing that storygame focus is not rpg focus. Some people like music to set the tone of an rpg, some like a degree of OOC chatter being allowed and won't play without it. That's part of their taste in RPGs, even if those things are not actually part of an RPG's core definition. Storygaming one could argue is similar to music or the like in that sense, sure.


 I'd say story games are a bit different though in that they actively water down and subtract from the core RPG focus directly, not just proportionally, in that they discourage both immersion and emulation. To Cipher, I'd say a storygame constitutes when circumstances in-game that are beyond the influence of the player character and within the realm of the game master are adjudicated by the player as an editor to the world, acting outside their character. This breaks immersion in your character. It also messes with the dungeon master's ability to ensure a coherent and living world through emulation, to say nothing of making simulationism nigh impossible.

Quote from: Cipher on April 20, 2024, 03:49:26 PMI don't like PbtA, but I've seen in this thread a lot of folks saying that "storygames" are not RPGs. In order for us not to fall into true Scotmanship, what would you define as "rpg stuff" and how is that different than "storygames"?

I repeat, I don't like PbtA, which is supposedly the poster boy for "narrative" games or whatever other fluff term is used. I am not defending PbtA or "storygames" I just want to understand what this forum means when they use the term.

Well, I think there are two different ways you can look at it, at least from my point of view of the generally opposition to storygames:

First, a main criticism might be that storygames privilege the construction of a simultaneous narrative over every other part of the game.  In D&D, no matter which edition, the attempt is made to create a coherent, cohesive setting within which the players' characters interact.  Narrative might flow from the game (we might tell stories about what happened later), but each player is playing their character as an inhabitant of the setting reacting to the in-world fiction as if it was real.  It doesn't matter the genre, the amount of "railroading," the inclusion of gonzo elements, or the way that fluff doesn't quite match up to the crunch, the primary motivating factor of decisions within the game occur based on in-setting concerns.  Now, this is not to say that most (or even any) games live up to this ideal completely, but that's the general thrust of the criticism.  Storygames are creating a story first.  The in-setting conceits are useful only as far as they help create the shared narrative.  They can be manipulated, changed, or even jettisoned whenever the shared narrative would benefit from it.  RPGs do not have to be true (or even mostly) simulations, but they are directed towards responding to what is happening in the setting, not building the setting as another tool to create story.

Secondly, many criticisms of storygames highlight that the mechanics of the games provide mechanics designed to empower players to change or control the events of the game based on meta concerns.  A traditional RPG has a single person (usually the DM) in charge of construction of the setting, as well as moderating the players' interaction with it.  The mechanics depend on independent adjudication based on the in-setting probability of success, not the effect of the outcome on a simultaneous story.  So, you can spot storygame mechanics because they give players tools to shape the outcome of the game to create outcomes desirable for some meta view of the game, as opposed to outcomes that are based in setting conceits.  This is why I don't agree that things like luck points, bennies, or other meta-currency are indicative of storygame tendencies.  These metacurrencies are still directed at player character level outcomes (did I get hit?, did I die?, etc.) as opposed to mechanics like jhkim described in Cthulhu Dark, where other players can roll against you to get the outcome they think is dramatic or "better" for the story.  There is no "in-setting" rationale for a mechanic like that.

So, in short, a storygame is a game that emphasizes the conscious construction of a narrative over the presentation of a coherent and consistent setting and its realities, with mechanics that don't represent in-setting concerns and move control of the setting and events away from the DM and towards construction of a shared, simultaneous narrative.