Pundit-Notes From the Great Forge Reunion Battle of 2015
Wherein Ron Edwards Complained That People Still Remembered "Brain Damage", and Were Still mad at him for it;
and Wherein Ron Edwards Tried to Take Credit for the OSR
Part 2
It's not inappropriate here to use "Potemkin village", then, in reference to how Storygames treat Setting. It is a world that doesn't exist; storygaming's treatment of "setting" is of no more significance than what alleged setting the latest German Eurogame uses. For example, Cataan isn't about settlers on an island or the age of exploration; it could be set on a space station or underwater or in a fantasy milieu or even on just a bare board with the pieces and mechanics having no 'decoration' whatsoever, and the game wouldn't change at all, because the "setting" in Cataan is just pretty pictures superimposed on a system of entirely dissociated rules that do not ultimately interact with the alleged setting at all. The setting is only a backdrop for a process.
Storygames are the same way, for the most part. "Setting" is only relevant in as much as it affects the story-creation process. If something hasn't entered the story yet, it doesn't exist. Waterdeep isn't a place if it hasn't been mentioned or visited yet. And in many storygames, if it's important for the story, a player can just suddenly "decide" that there's a Magic Shop around the corner, or that the shop is now owned by his cousin, or that his cousin is now dead.
In an RPG, the world is an actual world. Waterdeep is a place. It doesn't matter if the PCs never cross paths with it; it's full of people and they're doing stuff there. There either is or is not a magic shop around the corner, it has fuck all to do with whether or not a player wants there to be or whether it is important for the story. A player can't suddenly decide what relation his character has to people, and if he wants someone to be dead he'd best have his character attack them with a sword, because he can only interact with the world of the game via his character. He doesn't have "authorial editing" powers over the world because he isn't an author and the world isn't just a backdrop for a story.
RPGPundit
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I like this explanation.
ReplyDeleteRPGs in my view are about presenting imaginary experiences not imaginary stories. The fact you can only interact with the setting as your character is part of that imagined experience. The point of it really. From reading the accounts of the first RPG session under Arneson and Gygax what struck me not anything to with acting as a different character to trying to make a stories with a group. Rather what everybody seemed to be excited about what was the experience of adventuring in Blackmoor and Greyhawk whether it was approached seriously with with goofiness.
ReplyDeleteVery good point.
DeleteIm not exactly sure about this. This is I see intersection between the two. Sometimes a truly 100% simulationist experience can result in just pure boredom. Lets say there are 5 taverns. 1 of them contains interesting plot hook guy, whilst the 4 others don't. And if the characters never pick the right tavern, they never get anything interesting. The plot doesn't get so much going if you get what I mean. I mean, there is railroad, and then there is that things just get boring because the world is designed to be realistic, and so the characters never find anything interesting.
ReplyDeleteYou have clearly missed a great deal of material written by people in the OSR, Rob among them, but others too, about just what a Sandbox is and how to do it right.
DeleteYour example is of a Sandbox Done Wrong, which represents significant mistakes on the part of the GM. Furthermore your use of things like "simulationism" and "realism" are both mistakes too. The former is a nonsense-word invented by the proponents of a failed and incorrect theory; the latter is NOT the goal of setting-creation. Emulation, not realism.
Im just confused. Im no pro, and I just don't fully know this terminology. Like for example you call Vampire the Masquerade storygame type, but what you described as storygame was vastly different then what I played. Like we had dynamic events that changed the whole world on the roll of a die, and we never effected the game world like you said they do.
DeleteNo, sorry, you've gotten a couple of things confused there. Vampire (and White Wolf's games, and many other 90s games) were NOT storygames; they called themselves 'storytelling games' but were standard RPGs.
DeleteOh. Sorry. Again, just confused. Anyway keep up the good work. I enjoy reading your stuff immensely. I have a sort of love hate Relationship with White Wolf. I find their Politics disgusting and vile, but the philosophical ideas behind their games are kinda brilliant (Which are purely accidental). I also remember you mentioned you disliked point buy. Mind giving a link to which article explains why?
ReplyDeleteI utterly don't get it.
ReplyDeleteI once ran a 3 year long AD&D campaign set in Forgotten Realms. The PCs never crossed paths with Waterdeep, they never even happened to meet someone from there, I believe the name itself has never been mentioned during any playing session. So, what does it actually mean that "Waterdeep existed" in any sense relevant for our campaign? Or were we storygaming?
Because the Potential for you to go there always existed. I think what the Pundit means that a Storygame is where everybody works together to make a "Story" and not a emulated world. Lets say there was an Evil villain. In a story game, as everybody agreed to make it a cinematic story, the heroes just storm the castle. But in an emulation, the heroes instead decide to buy explosives from the Alchemy town that exists nearby, load it on an airship and send it crashing into the castle. Anticlimactic, but more open ended.
DeleteIf you were running the game the way you ought to, even if Waterdeep never came up, it should be a real place, with real people in it doing real things in that world. It should not be somewhere that 'doesn't exist until it becomes important to the story-creation process'.
DeleteIn my Dark Albion game, "India" has only been vaguely mentioned. The players have never come close to visiting (the furthest away from albion they've gotten is Transylvania), no one they know has ever been there. But it EXISTS. It is a real place in that world; it couldn't suddenly not be there, or suddenly be different, because of "story" or because someone spent a point.
OK, I see two (unrelated) parameters at work here:
Delete(a) Whether or not the players have any say in setting creation.
(b) Whether or not setting elements can be invented during play (vs. pre-planned).
Am I right? Do these exhaustively explain the difference?
I just figured it out. The issue is not "Storygame". People like a story in a game, especially ones you control the destiny of yourself. I think the word your looking for is "Dramagame". The direction and the style of the game has been determined beforehand. Your in a play, and the dice are only formalities. If your story is a "Dark Depressing one", no amount of good decisions and actions on the world will make a difference. Not that you will try to. Your decisions would have been made beforehand that everybody would be dark and depressed. So everything will be dark and depressed. Am I getting you RPG Pundit or misrepresenting you?
DeleteDmitry: those are two very central points, yes. Though in theory, you could make an RPG setting where players get input BEFORE the game starts on what the world looks like, and it would still be an RPG.
DeleteDirector: Not really getting me, no. Most "storygames" do not determine a 'story' beforehand, though they do often put extreme constraints beforehand on theme and setting. Nor does it necessarily have to do with "dark and depressing" as such; you could argue Midnight is a 'dark and depressing' game setting (it's basically Lord of the Rings where Sauron won), but it's still in every sense an RPG setting.
DeleteYou almost seem to be intentionally misreading what I'm saying here...
Im not! I just have no idea what your meaning! You bash it so much but I have no idea what exactly your talking about! Authorial editing powers? Thats it?
DeleteNo I found an even better example. Example:
ReplyDeleteIn Captain America 2, Why didn't Cap Call apon the Avengers? Because it made a better story. That is the ruling dynamic of a storygame vs an RPG.
It's pretty much impossible to apply your example, because Captain America 2 is not an RPG at all, it's a movie. In a movie, things happen because of the chosen plot, and because of things like budget constraints.
DeleteBut, to try to apply this to RPGs:
a) In a "captain america" RPG, the player for Cap says "I'm going to call on the Avengers!" and the GM says (something that amounts to) "you can't, because they're not in my story!", that's Bad GMing. (likewise if he Railroads by just making up convenient excuses as to why none of the Avengers can come help)
b) In a "Captain America RPG", the player gets to spend a Story Point to suddenly make Thor show up, even though Thor isn't actually even on "midgard" at the time, or to make it that some HYDRA agent suddenly turns on his bosses because the player claims Cap once saved that agent's grandfather, even though that hadn't actually happened. That's Storygaming, because the world isn't an actual virtual world, it's whatever the players want to make of it for the sake of 'crafting the story'.
c) in a Captain America game, the guy playing cap decides he wants to try to contact the other Avengers. The GM then figures out just where the other Avengers are, how likely they would be to be able to receive Cap's distress call and respond to it, how long it would take them to arrive, and what they'd do about it (and what HYDRA would do about it), based on the various realities of the setting-world and what is already established about the facts on that world and the personalities of the NPCs in question. That's a proper RPG being properly run.
I thought that a Storygame player would not call apon the Avengers because it would make for a better story. Like you mentioned in Rustbelt that it encouraged players to get into trouble to create more drama. So in Storygame Captain America the Players would not call apon the avengers because it would ruin the deeply personal drama of Bucky and Cap.
DeleteThis is just what Im getting from you. I may be wrong.
It doesn't matter which they do; it only matters if the players have the power to make sudden changes to the universe, to things in the setting or other characters/NPCs.
DeleteThis Director fella is clearly just baiting you...
ReplyDelete