Perhaps story games vs Trad would be a better phrase.
I was shooting for how someone would know they were playing in a story/forgie/indie game vs a trad game if no one told them.
Thanks,
Bill
Hmmm... Story Games vs Trad doesn't work for me. I've been playing a Traditional style game (house rules) since the wee-days of D&D, and I've always focused on Story in my World. So that's not quite it either, I don't think. In any case... The devilish thing about it all is that people latch on to RPG Theory and try to make it into an "academic" sounding discipline when it is really nothing of the sort. It all comes across as sounding so horribly pretentious and self-important with the "Stance" of this, and the "ist" of that, and all ... I suspect the reason why people do this is because they are in college, perhaps, working toward their Masters or PhDs, for whom it is natural to want to justify a continuing interest in something fun like RPGs by making it into something Academic sounding. It's all rather like a game, isn't it? And how it lends it all such an air of weighty seriousness that even an old crusty college professor would have to gaze down upon them with at least
some grudging respect. It also helps, I suppose, if they happen to have thoughts of turning RPGing into some sort of academic career; a Professor of RPG Theory, perhaps? Not a bad idea, at that! I could see tomes and volumes on the
"Anthropological Analysis of Midwestern Teenage D&D Players; An Addiction to the Tendency for Gamist Crunchiness" Why, to do so would certainly therefore require a sort of Academic Discipline involving the much discussed and pondered and blogged-about subject of RPG Theory! Why it all goes without saying, of course! After all, you see, it's so very important, people are talking about in quite a few universities... so it must be very ponderously impending, mustn't it? And so by adding more and more wood to the pile the Theorists are self-creating a Career Path for themselves, I should say. It is, admittedly but a hunch on my part, however I don't think it's a bad one as hunch's go. Unfortunately, because there is no actual academic basis for the wild conjectures and loose definitions bandied about as RPG Theory, it is in fact something much less academic than one would think at first blush, despite the gravely serious tones, heady sounding terminology, and deviously shifting jargon. Someday perhaps, some bright and hard working genius may come along and try to cast his life away in an attempt to assemble from this mass of smoldering chaos a true academic approach to RPG Theory. And I think that could be worthwhile, and might even lead to some interesting discoveries. But for now, I see little hope of it. Meanwhile the enormously overwrought monster is being pushed along the meandering pathways of the dark and gloomy moors by a murder of Gregorian-chanting evangelicals, deep in a night of howling winds, with sparks flying from the unfathomably flaming creature... thump, Thump, THUMP...
Boooooo!
Happy Halloween!!