I'm personally expressing doubt about the utility of the "storygame" label. I mostly see it used (not by you in this thread) to label games they don't play and don't like, typically as part of a "purity of RPGing" agenda.If you're claiming storygames axiomatically aren't RPG's, you're using the term RPG in a way I cannot fathom. There are SOME which are not
I don't agree. The distinction between "charm" and "dominate" is a somewhat recent one. If you look back at materials associated with early D&D play, it was generally taken for granted that a charmed character would follow the instructions of the mage who charmed him/her/it. This is why charming a troll (regeneration!) or charming an ochre jelly (immune to most attacks) was considered a clever move.In D&D, a charm spell never has given PC1 control over what PC2 attempts. It has given the DM authority to override PC2's choices, but not carte blanche for PC1 to dictate and narrate what PC2 does.
But if you didn't, or don't, play charm this way, the point can be made using domination, or rulership, or some comparable ability, as an example.
I've got nothing against distinguishing different approaches and techniques, but I think some care is needed in using them to characterise systems, as opposed to episodes of play and particular players'/group's approaches. To give a low-grade but nevertheless genuine example, I played a lot of "collaborative" Traveller and D&D back in the early-to-mid-80s - rolling random dungeons and encounters, rolling up random patrons and encounters for Traveller characters, etc. Not the most high-brow play of all time, but it's one of the things we were doing with those systems.Many of the edge cases, like Burning Wheel, Fate, and Cortex Plus, in their various derivatives, have elements of both traditional play {strong investment in, and strong control over, the character, only one player plays each character (but can be required to do certain things by others), strong GM authority over the narrative}... but also strong elements of player empowerment {Burning Wheel use of Wises to make things appear in the fiction, Fate and Cortex use of fate/plot points to declare things exist, Fate use of the compel mechanic to force a character to act in a particular accord with their definition, Fate and BW player input into the campaign establishment stages, CortexPlus Firefly collaborative building of the ship, BW allowing resolving entire conflicts with a single roll...}.
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Trad is strong GM, players control their characters attempts at actions, and no sharing characters as a matter of rules. It also tends to imply dice-based action resolution, and resolving actions, not scenes. once you get to systematic violations of those as regular parts of play, you're really out of the Traditional RPG playspace and into something closer to a Ron Edwards style storygame.
Storygames, as a generality, focus on Vincent's Admonition (Say Yes or Roll the Dice), player narration being as valid as GM narration, and story control being what's covered in the mechanics more than action resolutions.
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the different styles of games support different styles of play, and that's a good thing. I don't want New Player X dictating to me as a D&D DM where and when their character shows up, nor that Orc #3 is carrying a seax rather than a scimitar. If I were in the mood for that, I'd be running B&H
And in my AD&D games, players exerted primary control over their henchmen. They also got to decide their own PC backstory, including friends, family etc.
As I've mentioned upthread, I don't think that Circles in BW, or Resource generation in BW, are radically different from certain fairly standard approaches to Streetwise checks. I remember, 20 years ago, players rolling Streetwise checks for their Rolemaster PCs to meet up with drug dealers in the seedier parts of town; or rolling Administration checks to meet up with imperial officials. Circles isn't identical to that, but it's not some wild deviation either. It's a fairly natural extension/development.
In Rolemaster, too, we used social skills as one way of resolving conficts between PCs. It wasn't as systematic as BW's Duel of Wits, and in part because of that relied heavily on a sense of "fairness" between players, but again it was something we were doing with the system. I don't think it means that we weren't RPGing, though.
I don't think anyone is denying that you played, and play, as you did/do.Some folks like to say that all RPGs are and always have been storytelling games and vice versa, but it is simply not true. Some folks use the expression "trad" as a way to define certain games as World-GM-controlled or lacking in player authorial control, so I picked it up here as a way to keep us all moving the discussion along.
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Just deciding the way something is is certainly one way to handle it as GM but in RPGs back in the day and in some ways of running RPGs that are newer but, ahem, "trad" one would leave that stuff up to the gods of randomness.
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On the one hand, there is me saying that people play many ways and that the folks I know from the earliest days, including myself played without players having narrative control over the world but rather having to affect the world through their characters. On the other hand, despite my own experiences, some folks who clearly were not personally there are claiming that the things I have experienced simply aren't true.
I think the point is that your approach isn't, and has not really been, of the essence of RPGing in contrast to something else. When [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] or someone else says "RPGers have always been doing this" he doesn't mean that all RPGers have always been doing it, but that some RPGers have always been doing it, and aren't any less RPGers for all that.
In other words, if people who describe themselves as RPGers, using rules systems labelled as RPGs, for over 30 years of the 40 years that the hobby has existed, have been doing things like allowing players to specify PC backtory/family/friends etc, allowing Streetwise checks to meet up with desired NPCs, having GM accept player suggestions for backstory input, fetc, then I think that the door has shut on trying to say that those things are antithetical to RPGing.
I think that [MENTION=6779310]aramis erak[/MENTION] is correct that a strong degree of player/PC identification, if not over the long term of the game (eg Ars Magica troupe play) then at least within the confines of a particular episode of play, is pretty central to RPGing. But the sorts of approaches to play being discussed in this thread don't confict with that.