Those are two completely different questions. What I said is that my daily life, or yours, inherently has setting, plot & character to the same extent as there is inherently setting, plot and character in an RPG session.
What I am saying is that the events of an RPG session are no more inherently 'a story' than are the events of somebody's actual life. An RPG is not inherently a story-creation medium in the sense of creating something that much resembles an actual dramatic (or comedic) story of the sort that you see in eg a film, novel or play.
But of course it can* give rise to such a story, whether by accident (just like real life), or by design. For the latter there are actual story-creation RPGs, such as the Indie Narrativist games.
*Your second question is based on a false reading of what I said.
See, I disagree here. An RPG is inherently a story-creation medium. Every single adventure begins with some sort of set up - the DM then creates some series of events that facillitate play in a particular direction based around a pre-defined theme and then, during play, you develop a plot which (hopefully) climaxes at some form of resolution.
In other words, the princess is kidnapped (set-up), the players interact with the adventure (play) and the princess is rescued or not (resolution).
Real life rarely works this way.
So, can you give me an example of playing an RPG where you do not follow this general track of set-up, play and resolution? Which is what I meant by my second question. It's not a misunderstanding of what you said, it's disagreeing with what you said.
You stated, that your daily life creates a story. Not really. Sure, I could write down the events that occur in your daily life, but, that's not a story. There's no set-up, there's no resolution (well, everyone has the same resolution, but that's a slightly different thing
).
Sure, there might be a million different things going on in your life, but, they are not set up along any given themes or planned (again, ignoring somewhat existential discussions for the moment). Writing down the events of your life, there is no real beginning or ending, other than birth and death which aren't really under your control (typically).
However, the beginning and ending of adventures are typically under the players (partial at least) control and are built with particular events in mind by the DM. A dungeon is a flowchart of a story. Playing through a dungeon crawl develops a narrative that can be traced from a concrete beginning to a concrete (usually) ending.
And most adventures work this way. You start the adventure, you have the adventure, you get the xp for the adventure, you start the next adventure.
So, again, can you give an example of playing an RPG where a story is not generated? Where the person running the game has no interest, and no control over what narrative is generated during play? I certainly can't.
I realize that there is this need for some reason to distinguish "collaborative storytelling" from "RPG's" but, I've never really got it. So, could you elucidate for me? Because I fail to see any meaningful difference between "Game where we play characters that adventure in an imagined space" and "Game where we create a narrative with plot, character and setting."
