Quote from: Bill;708704Seems people are using the words differently. To me, the events of the game can be observed by someone, and that person can label it a story that was created. But as a player, I am not thinking about 'story' I just do what the character would do.

Quote from: The Ent;708706Yep, that's my position too.

Could someone explain to me what is so terrible about an adventure that tells a story?

Let me start with a plot summary from an unpublished module (not mine, I am just illustrating it):


Introduction: The group meets an old acquaintance who has retired from a major shipping line to open a business as a broker in a small town. A large trade guild, with a mixture of corrupt, hard playing and honest members, is using strong arm tactics to control small businesses by influencing local governments. Your old friend wants to create a trade cooperative as a counterweight to the influence of the guild. They have set a date and location for the meeting to discuss this and would like to hire you to deliver the invitations to some friends and acquaintances that she wants to attend the meeting. The group will be paid 1000 GP per person they can convince to attend. The group is free to work this activity into whatever other ‘adventures’ they may have, but the date and location of the meeting cannot be changed … you have 1 year.

One person is the owner of a large mining complex. He will agree to come if the players can investigate a production discrepancy at one of his remote mining sites, otherwise he will need to take care of this matter himself and cannot spare the time to attend.

Another person is a politician in a distant city. When the group arrives, they are accused of criminal mischief and issued a restraining order forbidding them from meeting with the politician. The guild is behind this and the group will need to meet the politician in secret, fight the matter in court, or break the law and flee.

A third person is a trader with political ties visiting her relatives in a remote rural community. When the group tracks her down, the village is attacked by a hoard and the group must decide how they will react.

A fourth member is an influential scholar with a group of students on an archeological expedition. When the group arrives, members of the guild are also there to convince the scholar to support the guild rather than this criminal organization. The group will need to use persuasive skill to win him over.


You get the idea …

So here is an adventure where the actions of the characters will clearly influence events (for better or worse) on a grand scale. There is no preset success or failure in the adventures. There is clearly an overarching story with the players shaping the outcome of this story.

I like this adventure concept.
So why does this make me clueless about what role-playing really is, a troll, part of a secret plot to destroy this site and brain damaged … all of which I have been accused of for comments supporting the idea of a story being a good thing in role-playing?

Sigh.

I think the best way to start this thread would be to provide the actual definitions of a story, a plot, and a narrative, as these tend to get mixed up and tossed around willy-billy in these sorts of discussions...

Quote from: DictionaryStory
noun
1. a narrative, either true or fictitious, in prose or verse, designed to interest, amuse, or instruct the hearer or reader; tale.


Plot
noun
2. the plan, scheme, or main story of a literary or dramatic work, as a play, novel, or short story.

Narrative
noun
1. a story or account of events, experiences, or the like, whether true or fictitious.

So, a GM may have a plot for a game picked out beforehand, but not a story. What you'll notice about story and narrative is that they both are about events in the past tense. If a GM does have a plot, then this limits player freedom, and is oft referred to as railroading. The GMs plot may involve the players getting on a ship, fighting off pirates, and sailing to a magical island, while the players might want to go explore the woods outside of town. As enforcing the plot means limiting player freedom, it creates an artificial set of constraints on the players actions, which is antithetical to versimilitude. Why does this matter? Well, because for players who enjoy immersion, anything that weakens versimilitude also hinders the ability to immerse by calling attention to the artificial nature of the game.

Quote from: atpollard;708733Could someone explain to me what is so terrible about an adventure that tells a story?

Nothing, assuming that is what you and your players around the table enjoy doing.

Not everyone plays role playing games to tell a story, and some people's games have nothing to do with storytelling, however. Some gamers out there actually don't like to play role playing games construed as "storytelling," and that should be cool too. These people are not fiction, they are not lying, or misunderstanding what you really mean. They exist, and when they tell you how they construe their own games and play them for their own enjoyment, you are faced with a choice. Either you (1) accept that is where they are coming from and that it is how they enjoy playing their games, or (2) deny their own experiences and pretend to know better than them what's going on in their own heads as they play the game, which is boneheaded and stupid.

Your choice.

Quote from: One Horse Town;708737Sigh.

Of all the voices that I have heard since first visiting here, yours was one I would have most like to have heard on this matter.

From this reaction, I suspect that I have just wandered into one of the classic shitstorm topics on the RPGsite.
Sorry, we have those in the Traveller RPG universe as well.

Quote from: TristramEvans;708738I think the best way to start this thread would be to provide the actual definitions of a story, a plot, and a narrative, as these tend to get mixed up and tossed around willy-billy in these sorts of discussions...

Thank you, that was helpful.

Quote from: Benoist;708739Nothing, assuming that is what you and your players around the table enjoy doing.

Frankly, that is not the feeling that I got from the general response to my first post on high mortality, hence the request for clarification.

Quote from: atpollard;708733A third person is a trader with political ties visiting her relatives in a remote rural community. When the group tracks her down, the village is attacked by a hoard and the group must decide how they will react.

When attacked by treasure, the only thing to do is sit back and smile.

Quote from: atpollard;708745Frankly, that is not the feeling that I got from the general response to my first post on high mortality, hence the request for clarification.

That'll depend on the poster obviously. I can only talk about my own posts and my own intent. I am not telling you you are sucking at role playing games. You have a particular way of construing the experience that is not mine, and that is cool. You play your own games however you want to and if you and your buddies around the game table have fun, that's it. Full stop. Mission accomplished.

What you cannot tell me is what's going on at my own game tables, how I construe my own games, and what I enjoy or do not enjoy about role playing games. If you cross that line into "all RPGs are about storytelling therefore YOU BEN do not understand what role playing games are about" you will face my disagreement, because then you, Arthur, will be the guy trying to tell me I am "clueless about what role playing really is," to use your OP's expression.

I know better than you what my own games are about.

Quote from: atpollard;708733Could someone explain to me what is so terrible about an adventure that tells a story?

There's nothing "terrible".  It's just that a HUGE % of experienced RPers dislike railroading.  Which is what HAS to happen to in a Game that has a "story".

Quote from: atpollard;708745From this reaction, I suspect that I have just wandered into one of the classic shitstorm topics on the RPGsite.

Sorry, we have those in the Traveller RPG universe as well.

Yeah, pretty much. Took me some time wrapping my head around this here too.

As for the actual topic of the thread, I don't really have a lot to add to this previous post on the other thread so I'll take the liberty of quoting myself, at least the relevant bit, in which I try to sum up the shitstorm the best I can:

Quote from: The Butcher;708359You can call the output of a game session a "story", though if you're playing a traditional RPG, it's unlikely to look like an actual piece of storytelling, i.e. a narrative created expressly for the passive entertainment of a reading (or listening, viewing, etc.) crowd. Because traditional RPGs for the most part tend to simulate lifelike worlds, with varying degrees of abstraction including frequent use of randomizers (dice), the output of a traditional RPG gaming session won't necessarily adhere to the formalisms of actual storytelling as usually understood.

Certain RPGs, influenced by a gent named Ron Edwards and his fellow-travelers, have been built from the ground up to enforce an output that resembles a "story", understood here as a string of fictitious facts tied together by certain literary conventions, with the explicit purpose of entertaining a passive observer (reader, listener, viewer). You know, stuff with a beginning, a middle and an end.

Like you, I don't have a dog in this fight, and I could care less about who gets to use the "RPG" label, which is a big sticking point with a lot of people here.

Hope that helps.

Well, the short version:

Once upon a time there was a hobby called roleplaying games, and it included games like Vampire, D&D, Traveller, and GURPs, and all was well with the world. Adults could play make believe  and nobody looked at them crossways.

Then along came a fellow by the name of Ron Edwards, who decided that adults shouldn't be allowed to play make believe and were, to quote him, "brain damaged" to try. Presumably this was because he felt that playing make believe was not a fitting pastime for an adult, and/or he had a bad GM one time.

So what Ron did was he took a hypothesis, Gamer/Narrative/Simulationist which was self admittedly incomplete and in no way proven, intended to describe gamers, and he inexplicably applied it wholesale to game design. A bit like someone trying to apply personality types to cars.

Not to figure out which personality type liked which car type, but applying personality types to actual vehicles. That's not even an exaggeration.

Anyway, this was latched onto by various extreme leftist slacktivists and unpleasant antisocial types, who read and embraced the voluminous works he had written to enable this bizarre categorisation game (big hint folks, if it can't be explained in a short paragraph someone's trying to bullshit you).

These types basically rejected the concept of roleplaying, preferring instead to adopt a third person narrative approach. For example:

An RPG:
"I leap forward and kill the orc with my hammer"

A shared narrative game:
"Sir Perceval the Knight leaps forward and kills the orc with his hammer, before ten more orcs burst into the room wielding giant wobbly vegetables"

It's a far more detached and less personal experience, much like wargaming. The out of character further control over the setting world is really the finishing touch. Shared narrative games in the sense that they are currently used repudiate the notion of roleplaying.

Moving along, these lesser lights then decided to start some kind of a jihad across the interwebs, raining hatred in copious quantities upon all who disagreed with their ideology, and by this point it was in fact a political ideology (2004 onwards I guess). The old guard must die, all who deny the One Truth must be shamed and their livelihoods ruined, this was the catchcry, a bit like Microsoft's "embrace, extend, extinguish" strategy, or more accurately Trotskyist entryism.

The most recent symptom was the wikipedia edit raid which you yourself acidentally highlighted. Apparently RPGs are now shared narrative games.

Completely insane I think you'll agree.

Take a look back at earlier threads on rpgnet (pre 2004) and note the difference in tone and character between then and now. The hostile, toxic atmosphere that has recently been fostered is entirely the result of these idiots.

So eh that's the short version. As you can see, the use of the word "story" in connection to RPGs has almost no relevance to the way the shared narrative movement uses it, yet they continue to abuse it.



PS: I don't think anyone here is saying that shared narrative games are bad in and of themselves. They're simply saying that it's a different hobby, and should go be different in its own space. Part of what annoys people is the way that these types claim simultaneously to be doing something completely new and at the same time exactly the same as what came before. One among many, many cognitive dissonances, I assure you.

Start of this thread:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCEFOx5Hc2Y

Quote from: atpollard;708733So why does this make me clueless about what role-playing really is, a troll, part of a secret plot to destroy this site and brain damaged ... all of which I have been accused of for comments supporting the idea of a story being a good thing in role-playing?

The games described as tabletop roleplaying games work best when they are used as a guideline by a human referee to adjudicate the actions of players acting as individual characters

Does anything in in your OP require the players NOT to act as an individual character? Require the player to think of anything other than what his
character would need to think about? Does anything require the player to HAVE to perform an an a predestined action? For any other reason than that it makes sense to the player based on the circumstance or the character's motivations?


If the answer is no then likely Tabletop RPGs will handle your OP just fine and the only thing that making your OP distinct that it has a lot of details in the initial background.

If the answer to any of the question is yes then likely the mechanics of most Tabletop RPGs is going to be overkill for what you are trying to do.


The way I think it about it is that plot and story are two different things. The plot is a description of movitation and plans coupled with a timeline of a POSSIBLE future. The broad concept is pretty similar to that of a battle plan made prior to offensive operations of an armed force.

Like a battle plan it is a guide and organizational tool. Once the offensive or in the case of tabletop the session begins, stuff changes. If you rigidly adhere to the initial plan then the results are likely to be poor. Similarly a rigidly followed battle plan will result in disaster for the offensive force in the face of a adaptable enemy.

However without a battle plan then the offensive will be likely but now always a mess with it own attendant problems. The same with writing a plot for tabletop. Without preparation and forethought it is likely, but not always, a tabletop session won't work out well. So you write down motivations, detail possible locales, draft a possible future to get a sense of where the NPCs are going with their plans, etc. I.e. you write a plot.

Then after the session is over you can then tell the story of how it all happened.

Quote from: Arduin;708751There's nothing "terrible".  It's just that a HUGE % of experienced RPers dislike railroading.  Which is what HAS to happen to in a Game that has a "story".

Which makes sense because the "point" of tabletop roleplaying is to play a individual character within the setting of the campaign with the ability to attempt anything that the character can do. The railroad takes away the ability to attempt anything and defeats the purpose of why you play this type of game in the first place.

Quote from: TristramEvans;708738So, a GM may have a plot for a game picked out beforehand, but not a story. What you'll notice about story and narrative is that they both are about events in the past tense. If a GM does have a plot, then this limits player freedom, and is oft referred to as railroading. The GMs plot may involve the players getting on a ship, fighting off pirates, and sailing to a magical island, while the players might want to go explore the woods outside of town. As enforcing the plot means limiting player freedom, it creates an artificial set of constraints on the players actions, which is antithetical to versimilitude. Why does this matter? Well, because for players who enjoy immersion, anything that weakens versimilitude also hinders the ability to immerse by calling attention to the artificial nature of the game.

At the risk of straying too far from philosophical into the theological, if God orders the lives of men, guiding the broad pattern of history, then reality has a story that is yet still unfolding ... and it doesn't get any more real that reality.

But I agree that railroading generally sucks.
I just prefer to entertain the possibility that a plot can be created more like a pick-a-path book so that the characters have complete freedom to go where they wish and do what they wish and their actions will shape the details of the plot which will (after the fact) define which of the possible stories ultimately unfolds.

Quote from: atpollard;708772I just prefer to entertain the possibility that a plot can be created more like a pick-a-path book so that the characters have complete freedom to go where they wish and do what they wish and their actions will shape the details of the plot which will (after the fact) define which of the possible stories ultimately unfolds.

In a pick a path book, you can ONLY pick a pregenerated path.  It is STILL Railroading.  Just a couple more tracks added...  to a PREGENERATED story with a few outcomes.