There's little common ground between storygames and D&D so as not to appear as the same hobby. But I believe there always is between people, so I'm open to try.
The problem is that you are trying to define D&D. And what you personally are trying to define D&D as is a
tiny fraction of D&D - and one that even 2E recognised was not even close to the dominant playstyle of D&D as played by the end of the 1980s. There is more common ground between Storygames and White Wolf games than there is between White Wolf and your D&D. For that matter a lot of people find Dungeon World to be D&D in the form they want to play it. And the Dungeon World advice literally tells you to leave blanks on maps to be filled in by the player.
You are quite literally trying to define at least 75% of D&D players as not playing D&D. And then saying that Storygames do not play like the extreme substrain of D&D you consider to be the only true D&D. Were you aware that D&D 3.5 had in its basic set the
Sunrod? An item that costs 2GP, weighs 1lb, and sheds bright light for
6 hours. Such an item was designed with one purpose in mind, and only one. To make needing to be sure you take enough torches with you
irrelevant. Pathfinder and 4e are more extreme - in both games the Wizard can, if they so wish, cast Light
for free.
This is not what I'm saying. What storygames are is simply not the RPG hobby and conflating the two is oppressive to everyone actually in it. I'm not trying to steal away storygames, but continually calling all RPGs collaborative storytelling games kills the hobby, especially D&D.
Right now you are quixotically fighting a war that was fought and lost in the
1980s. By the time Zeb Cook was writing in the front of the 2E PHB that there were no winners and losers in roleplaying games and the point of playing was to have fun and socialise your side had lost. Utterly.
Trying to throw both AD&D 2E and White Wolf (who literally called their GM the "Storyteller") out of the RPG hobby, as you are, is a direct attempt to shatter the hobby. Dragonlance started coming out almost exactly
thirty years ago. That was when the battle you are trying to fight actually took place. When the Dragonlance Saga (the first Adventure Path) came up with the Obscure Death Rule and a near-reset after each module to get you all on track (something no Storygame I'm aware of has)
In the five years between the start of Dragonlance and the publication of 2E your side got crushed. D&D hasn't been as you describe for twenty five years. And Storygames are
all much heavier on continuity than either Adventure Paths (as Dragonlance was and Paizo is churning out at the rate, I believe, of one module per month) or 1990s White Wolf Railroads (also produced by TSR in which the NPCs do all the important stuff).
If you reject 25-30 years worth of D&D, as you do, why do you think you have the right to circumscribe the hobby?
No, I'm saying they are following the theories from a bad faith theorist and incidentally, even unknowingly in many cases, destroying the identity and even existence of a hobby they would never count themselves part of.
The hobby as you define it is moribund. It consists of a
fraction of the OSR and not much else. If there is destruction involved it happened in the late 80s at TSR and the 90s by both White Wolf and TSR. The hobby as defined under the banner of Role Playing Games includes White Wolf, who had all the creative energy of the 1990s. And even if you wish to lay claim to D&D (something to which you have no rights at all, trying to refight a war that was lost over 25 years ago), Storygames
do not claim to be D&D. So why is your argument against Storygames?
How many of them play and enjoy wargames because of what wargames do exceptionally better than storygames could?
It's impossible to tell - no such survey has ever been done. But your question is biassed in and of itself. The question would be "How many of them
respect wargames because of what they do better than storygames even if that is not what they wish to play?" And the answer would be most of them.
Still, for a quick estimate we can look at the current biggest names in Storygame design. Ron Edwards is not on that list and hasn't been for many years. By my reckoning there are three on the A list - Vincent Baker, Jason Morningstar, and Luke Crane. Vincent Baker has designed and published a wargame (Mechaton). Luke Crane recently spent six months solidly playing nothing but oD&D several times a week, in exactly the manner you indicate before producing his own version, Torchbearer that's very heavy on the logistics and tracking. Jason Morningstar (who writes GMless games) writes games much closer to what you'd consider a Storygame to be. He is also a second generation gamer with his dad and uncle both being, in his words, "hardcore wargame nerds".
So of those designing the best Storygames and right at the top of the tree that would appear to be 3/3. I know of no way of telling lower down.
Than try and understand what I'm saying.
I understand it. It just happens to all be false. As false as the claim the moon is made of green cheese. No. As false as the claim that earth is flat when I've flown enough that I've seen the curvature of the earth with my own eyes.
Their is no continuity tracking in storygames.
Strictly false. People keep notes - GMs especially. People in many Storygames track hit points and wound levels. And Continuity is
all important
No board behind a screen.
Once more you seem to be trying to throw out White Wolf. And even Rolemaster. Sandboxes are not the only thing to play.
No pattern whatsoever carried over for absolutely everything in every way the game covers.
Bwuh?
Storygame situations are irrelevant to precedent and and outcome.
Storygame situations are
all important to both precedent and outcome.
A person's ability to play those games is in no way impeded by having zero memory or forethought (major game play traits).
Zero forethought I can agree with. Fiasco is a game that bills itself as being about "... and poor impulse control". On the other hand a story is
all about narrative continuity. If you have no memory you have no story. So this is strictly false.
Unlike strategizing in any actual game story makers refer to context now with future and past being reinvented right along with it.
Once more this just isn't true. Even in Retrocausality (
a game where you rewrite the past a la Bill and Ted) what happened matters. In fact what happened in the past gets looked at
more critically in Retrocausality than in most other games because you get fragments of spiralling continuity.
No progression occurs ever.
Once more you are talking through your hat. Stories have a beginning, a middle, and an end - and characters in Fiasco or Montsegur 1244 end up in a position
utterly unlike their starting positions. So there is always progression. A lot of Storygames, like both Vincent Baker's Apocalypse World and Dogs in the Vineyard and Luke Crane's Burning Wheel have Experience Point mechanics. Jason Morningstar's Grey Ranks both had a start, a middle, and an end
and tracked character advancement and destruction. And Grey Ranks was unequivocally a GMless Storygame. (Monsterhearts, which calls itself a Storygame on the cover also has XP).
Which does contradict your assertion that that narrative is ongoing.
A string of
objectively false statements might contradict my assertion that narrative is ongoing. But they are objectively false meaning they are utterly worthless.
I think often collaborative storytellers want them to be, but what mechanics support this? Actual games via actual game mechanics do do this.
And Storygames are actual games with actual mechanics. Pick up a copy of Monsterhearts. It shows that it's a Storygame right there on the cover. And you'll find the
subject matter very different to ones you are used to. But the actual mechanics? Skill rolls? XP and levelling up? Patterns within each of the character classes and mechanical synergies? Show your assertions to be strictly false. Your accusations here show nothing more than that
you do not know what you are talking about.
These are not varieties of the same type of game. They are two fundamentally different acts. You're not helping anyone by conflating the two.
What isn't helping anyone is you passing off outright strictly and objectively false information as true and then blaming other people for not following your misunderstandings and misrepresentations and treating them as if they were true.
As a DM you have a pattern behind a screen like the schematics for a Rubik's Cube. You have all these blueprints, notes, numbers, all to help you with current positioning, timing, and what to answer players' attempted actions with as they take them.
As a Player you might only have a blank sheet of paper and a pencil on your side of screen. But you need to actually learn how to solve that Rubik's cube / play that game functionally, if you have any hope of accomplishing anything at all within it not by accident.
There are differences in tracking. As a DM either you can choose to ignore continuity and leave e.g. a static dungeon or you have many, many pieces to track the location of. It's a different sort of challenge. The DM's job in a small scale sandbox is a juggling act. The players job is somewhat different.
In a storygame everyone is an author, not even a player. Sheets and pencils aren't required at all.
This has not been true for any Storgyame I have
ever played, even one page RPGs - where you do have stats and do take notes. Please stop passing off your false assertions as if they were true.
And prep is laughable. Just bring anything you want to tell a story about.
This also isn't true. It isn't even true for
Freeform. Prep is normally low for a Storygame
once the rules have been written. But that doesn't mean that you can just bring anything.
These aren't even the same practice much less hobby.
Indeed. Storygames as you describe them
are close to a figment of your imagination. There might be a Storygame that fits the descriptions you have given. But if there is I have literally never encountered it. I will accept that figments of your imagination that do not show up in actual popular storygames aren't part of the same hobby as actual RPGs. But I have never played a figment of your imagination. I have played possibly dozens of storygames.
And no PM-prejudiced theory should confine all gamers into narrative absolutism to "abash" those who don't get on board with the "good" games.
I don't think you're in role play circles when outside "the minority".
The majority these days
is split between modern editions of D&D. I'm currently in two Pathfinder campaigns, one 4E campaign, and waiting for my copy of 13 True Ways (which I backed on Kickstarter) to arrive. I also play Storygames and run Fate now and then, and was involved in an OSRIC campaign a while back. Yes, all the RPers I play with either live in or commute to London. But I've a pretty good idea of what's common in the field and of the top 12 games on the hot games list literally the only one I haven't played is DCC. And this is in multiple non-overlapping groups.
I would, however question how you fare on such a list. What you have experience of playing.
I suggest you don't mean gameplay here, but emergent story. These are two very different things. Gameplay doesn't emerge. It exists prior to play in every kind of game.
And this isn't true either.
That's a game I wouldn't want to ever be a part of. It's deliberate storygaming masquerading as an RPG with all the storygaming stuff advertised as "so much better than what came before". It's selling hotdog as steak.
No.
You're not playing role playing games. Stop telling people your practice is in any way the same as any to do with RPGs. Storytelling is not role playing. Stop pretending your minority viewpoint and minority community in the hobby is the vast majority and everyone else is actually defined by them.
Telling other people their identity is one of the key oppressions put forth by PM theory. [/quote]
I don't think that I have seen as ironic a juxtaposition in my life - certainly not this year. You are telling me point blank what I am doing based on a series of misunderstandings, misrepresentations, and fabrications, and then have the sheer nerve to claim "Telling other people their identity is one of the key oppressions put forth by PM theory."
Quit thinking anything you're hobby is doing has anything to do with the RPG hobby.
I am quite happy to say that nothing I do is what you would describe as a Storygame. This is down to your descriptions being strictly false.
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I'm not clear on why the hate-on for these "storytelling games" you refer to. That said , does calling or defining RPGs as collaborative storytelling games kill the hobby, or expand it? (I suggest it might do both at once, draw new people in one end of the spectrum while driving some out the other end)
I'm going to say expand. Because there isn't a highly trained team of ninjas stealing all your old books.
There has to be continuity tracking, otherwise how does anyone know where to pick up the story next session?
Being fair Fiasco plays in a single session. It's also arguably not an RPG. (And if you haven't already seen it I'm going to recommend the
Tabletop playthrough).
I don't see them as all that different - they certainly overlap at least. My game at the table may consist of lots of dice rolling some nights and exploration-mapping other nights and treasury-bookkeeping other nights, but in the long run it ends up telling a story; a story that everyone involved has had a hand in creating.
Yup
Ah. You're defining storygame as something done completely theatre-of-mind style with no rules or prep, where I (and probably others) see the word 'storygame' in a RPG context and think of the type of game often seen in the 2e era where the story is king but there's still rules and pens and dice etc.
And the sort of people who talk about Storygames as something that we ourselves do are actually talking about option C. Games which superficially look like the type of game often seen in the 2E era but where the story is not pre-plotted in advance; following the rules of the game and playing them as hard as possible will lead to and intensify a story of the type you were expecting, but there's no clue where everyone is going to end up when the hurley burley's done.
