From Adventure Game to Story Game?

[Mark Chance]

Over at ars ludi, Ben Robbins attempts to define story games. Here's his basic definition:

In a story game, a player’s ability to affect what happens in the game is not dependent on their character’s fictional ability to do those things.

What sorts of things could be added to an adventure game such as D&D to make it more like a story game as defined by Robbins?

 

[Janx]

Over at ars ludi, Ben Robbins attempts to define story games. Here's his basic definition:



What sorts of things could be added to an adventure game such as D&D to make it more like a story game as defined by Robbins?

While I like story in my D&D, I'm not quite sure I buy into his concept.

to me, the player's job is to man his character. The GM still decides the external stuff that happens.

I will give the players a 3 act play based on what they do. If the clumsy fighter attempts to sneak into the castle, dice rolls will determine his likely failure, and act 2's setback will be the fighter's escape from being detected/captured.

I stick to level appropriate challenges, so if the PC dies, it's really bad luck or bad tactics (like not running away or planning a little better).


that mostly achieves my goal of "telling a story" within D&D, while still making it about the PCs and the player's choices.

 

[Tonguez]

he pretty much already answered that - action points, players framing scenes and random event cards. It is possible to take the DM out entirely and have players take turns describing scenes...

 

[Mark Chance]

Blogging about a way to let players have more narrative control over the game.

 

[MatthewJHanson]

One of my friends ran a game where the PCs were taking a journey from an isolated community to a major city. One thing he did was give us each an index card with the name of a location we might pass through. Then he asked us to fill out one challenge and one reward that could be found there. He later shuffled a drew one for each stage of the journey.

 

[Mark Chance]

Good idea, MatthewJHanson. I'm going to ask/require () each player to provide me input regarding NPCs. One ally, one enemy, and one neutral per player. Something to that effect. I'm also looking at getting hold of Microscope for the players to create a shared, group background for their PCs and the ship that they'll start with.

 

[Daztur]

For me at least, the reason why story-focused gaming and players having metagame power (fate points etc.) go hand in hand is that if you want a story game you have to make events in the game follow narrative logic rather than world logic but it's really HARD to make rules that hardcode narrative logic into the rules so that a player can just play his character and the DM can just play the NPCs and things proceed in a novel-like fashion with dramatic arcs and whatnot.

This means that if you want to use traditional RPG rules to run a story game with narrative logic (dramatic arcs, etc. etc. etc.) you've basically got to give the DM big gobs of power to the DM to overrule the rules left and right to make things more story-like and to nudge the PCs towards the plot. The problem with this is that it's hard, it puts a huge amount of responsibility on the DM's shoulders and when it goes badly it results in some pretty nasty railroading in which the DM is doing so much fudging and pulling rabbits out of the hat to keep things on track that the PCs are more spectators than participants of the story (kind of like in a good Final Fantasy-style game which in my experience following an adventure path or something along those lines often plays like).

On the other hand if you give a bunch of metagame power to the players then each player can tweak the game towards interesting dramatic directions. FATE for example does a great job of that with Aspects. It also provides a framework for pushing the game in a story direction instead of "have the DM do ad hoc to keep the story good." For me at least I've had much better results trying to wring good story out of gaming with indie games than with D&D.

OSR-style play on the other hand goes and says " that" and drops trying to shove narrative logic into D&D. I could go on, but noisms says it better than I can:
http://monstersandmanuals.blogspot.com/2012/02/you-are-responsible-for-your-own-orgasm.html

 

[Mark Chance]

I'm leaning heavily toward solutions more related to FATE than railroading, especially since I'm going to go intergalactic sandbox with my next campaign. I'm gearing up to be content sitting and GMing nothing much until the players decide what they're going to do. I want them to give me the plot hooks.

 

[Libramarian]

Get in a circle and have everyone narrate stuff for 10 seconds each, going clockwise. You don't even need dice. Storygaming is easy. And usually not very much fun.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Over at ars ludi, Ben Robbins attempts to define story games. Here's his basic definition:


What sorts of things could be added to an adventure game such as D&D to make it more like a story game as defined by Robbins?

Start off by taking Backgrounds and One Unique Thing from 13th age - factors that allow the players to write aspects of the game world. Add in a line in chargen "I hate [BBEG name] because_____" or even "[BBEG name] hates me because_____" to further allow the players to set the campaign setting - your BBEG has to be someone who fits all those points.

And that's without letting the PCs frame the scene directly.

And then there are the abilities. Tell me giving the rogue the following wouldn't just produce hooks:

Master of Disguise [Deceit]
Requires Clever Disguise and Mimicry.
The character can convincingly pass himself off as nearly anyone with a little time and preparation. To use this ability, the player pays a fate point and temporarily stops playing. His character is presumed to have donned a disguise and gone “off camera”. At any subsequent point during play the player may choose any nameless, filler character (a villain’s minion, a bellboy in the hotel, the cop who just pulled you over) in a scene and reveal that that character is actually the PC in disguise!

The character may remain in this state for as long as the player chooses, but if anyone is tipped off that he might be nearby, an investigator may spend a fate point and roll Investigate against the disguised character’s Deceit. If the investigator wins, his player (which may be the GM) gets to decide which filler character is actually the disguised PC (“Wait a minute – you’re the Emerald Emancipator!”).​

Get in a circle and have everyone narrate stuff for 10 seconds each, going clockwise. You don't even need dice. Storygaming is easy. And usually not very much fun.

Like tabletop RPGs - done badly it isn't very good. Your point?