D&D General DM Authority

[Maxperson]

One can tell bob a story about what happened in the superbowl as well. That doesn’t mean the Super Bowl was a story. I think you’ve got to be careful bringing up what you are doing the next day and calling that a story. Everything is a story in that perspective.

The difference is I'm repeating to Bob the story we created the prior day. RPGs are just a method of creating a story. It's just done via action declarations and semi-random(generally) resolution, rather than straight out decision.

 

[FrogReaver]

The difference is I'm repeating to Bob the story we created the prior day. RPGs are just a method of creating a story. It's just done via action declarations and semi-random(generally) resolution, rather than straight out decision.

And yet There is a difference in creating a story and a story emerging. In D&D no one creates a story. Instead they play a game and the story emerges.

 

[prabe]

And yet There is a difference in creating a story and a story emerging. In D&D no one creates a story. Instead they play a game and the story emerges.

Some people (I'm one) believe the story that emerges is the point of the game, and play (or DM) with that near the front of the priority list. Even so, I don't think the people around the table are creating the story in the same way an author (or, a closer comparison: a show's writer room) does. I think the people around the story are creating story elements--characters and situations, mostly--but I think the events in the story are ... a good deal less like authored fiction, which is almost certainly at the heart of why I don't think books or movies make good comparisons to TRPG play.

 

[Maxperson]

And yet There is a difference in creating a story and a story emerging. In D&D no one creates a story. Instead they play a game and the story emerges.

It emerges through actions and declarations that create it, though. This is really a distinction without a difference.

Anyway, at least we're at an agreement that a story is happening.

 

[Mannahnin]

I think Prabe has hit on a key distinction that it's a matter of emphasis and intent. When I play D&D I can make decisions with different priorities in mind, and generally a given player will have some balance of them. For example...

Keeping my character alive
Achieving our party's objective/quest
Gaining wealth, magical knowledge, or power
Pursuing individual character goals other than the above; like courting a spouse, or taking revenge, or protecting another character
Exploring the game world and learning more about it
Doing funny things
Making an interesting story

The way I am PRIMARILY accustomed to people playing is by focusing first on character advancement and RP goals, and seeking excitement through combat and other adventuring activities, with "what would make a dramatic story" relegated way down the list or not consciously considered. Though I have repeatedly observed that if the players know the campaign is coming to an end, this will shift and they'll often lose their normally-strong emphasis on survival, and start consciously focusing on drama, to help create a satisfying end to the emergent story of the campaign.

It seems clear to me that at least a couple of us in here put that "what would make the best story" higher on their personal list of play priorities. And that's perfectly cool.

 

[Jack Daniel]

I don't have an issue with viewing the result of the game being viewed as a story. I mean..

"After defeating the goblin hordes in the Caves of Despair, Dumphwith the Bard stared at the baby goblin for some time before deciding to spare its life." - written by an author.

and

"After defeating the goblin hordes in the Caves of Despair, Dumphwith the Bard stared at the baby goblin for some time before deciding to spare its life." - after actions taken by both DM and player(s).

...are functionally the same. Both can be viewed as a story.

They aren't functionally the same, though. In the former case, an author is creating a text (a semiotic object that conveys meaning), and more specifically a narrative text (i.e. a text set apart from non-narrative texts through the use of literary devices to connect a sequence of related events). Anything that can be read to discern meaning can be a text; and any kind of text can be marked as literary and therefore tell a story. Hence, a story can be a written tale, or an oral tale, or a silent movie with no words at all, or even a piece of music. ("For sale: baby shoes, never worn." —a very short story usually attributed to Earnest Hemmingway.)

Your latter case is only a story if it's an after-the-fact account of what happened during the game, in which case there's once again at least one author (whoever's telling the story) creating a text. The actual fact of gameplay is not the creation of a text, it's just a sequence of events happening in a fictional world. That's no different from a sequence of events happening in the real world, which aren't (and can't be) a story until someone chronicles them as history or journalism or biography or whatever.

 

[prabe]

They aren't functionally the same, though. In the former case, an author is creating a text (a semiotic object that conveys meaning), and more specifically a narrative text (i.e. a text set apart from non-narrative texts through the use of literary devices to connect a sequence of related events). Anything that can be read to discern meaning can be a text; and any kind of text can be marked as literary and therefore tell a story. Hence, a story can be a written tale, or an oral tale, or a silent movie with no words at all, or even a piece of music. ("For sale: baby shoes, never worn." —a very short story usually attributed to Earnest Hemmingway.)

Your latter case is only a story if it's an after-the-fact account of what happened during the game, in which case there's once again at least one author (whoever's telling the story) creating a text. The actual fact of gameplay is not the creation of a text, it's just a sequence of events happening in a fictional world. That's no different from a sequence of events happening in the real world, which aren't (and can't be) a story until someone chronicles them as history or journalism or biography or whatever.

So, first, I don't think I disagree with your larger point, that, e.g., a novel is different than a recounting of the events of a TRPG campaign (my wife takes and types up the notes that land in the campaign Story Hour threads I post here--and she's also a hobby-level novelist; neither of us is under the delusion that her notes are equivalent to a novel.

That said ... I think the difference is subtler (I guess) than I read you to be saying. The novelist makes up the sequence of events, and narrates them; the TRPG table makes up (or generates) the sequence of events, and one of them types them up after-the-fact. The big differences I see are 1) in the process, the novelist typically makes up the events as they're doing the writing, whereas the gamers are generating the sequence of events, then writing them up later (making that more like, as you say, journalism or history--but there are novelists who work from outlines, which is closer to what's happening with gamer notes than the work of a novelist who free-writes); and 2) in the novel at least, there's more singularity of authorship than there is at (most? many?) TRPG tables, which plausibly makes it easier to control what happens in a novel--so things like theme and subtext are easier to manipulate/choose. (I think there was going to be at least a third difference, but it's fallen out of my head.)

 

[Mannahnin]

Yup. In writing a story we normally do focus on things like theme and subtext. We consciously try to create compelling character arcs, where there's a satisfying and meaningful progression from where a character starts out, go through events showing how their personality develops, and where they end up.

In telling a story about a real series of events (say,a football game, as mentioned before), such themes only exist to the extent that we perceive them in the happenstance events and rationalize the telling to emphasize the meaningful parts and impose meaning after the fact.

IME the division we seem to be talking about between "Traditional" RPGs like D&D as it is described in the books, and "Storygames" is that the TradRPG treats the exercise of playing the game more like a game, and Storygames treat it a bit more like writing a story.

 

[Lanefan]

The point is that generally having a player associate with their character too much leads to problems.

Bad things happening to the character is not bad things happening to the player.

Completely agree.

The point that I think you miss utterly, is that the term "Roleplaying" puts the person doing it in a very similar position as an Actor. They are playing a character, in a story, and deciding on what happens within that story.

Does Ronan the Subtle kill the helpless captives or show mercy? The DM can't tell you that, there is no author making that overarching decision, the player decides that. They are telling that story.

And Ronan's companion Kab is going to add to that story by reacting to the decisions of the captives and of Ronan.

OK up to here, sort of.

And collectively the players and the DM are going to craft a story about what happened when Ronan and Kab were faced with this choice. Yes, this is very different than the Collective Storytelling of things like "the Quiet Year" or "Yes, Dark Lord" but it is still a style of collective storytelling.

Quibble: it's collective story-creating, for sure, but not collective story-telling.

Why do I say this? It's a matter of intent.

With collective story-telling, as I see the term, the specific intent going in is to tell a story which fairly clearly appears in the moment as you go along. The story is the goal of play.

With collective story-creating, the specific intent going in is just to do stuff in character and see what develops; and the created story doesn't really appear until looked at in hindsight. The story is a side-effect of play.

It's a nit-picky difference on paper but a rather huge one at the table.

EDIT: and reading on I see @Mannahnin says almost exactly the same thing just upthread.

 

[Lanefan]

Is there any actual evidence that anyone has ever thought this? I mean people use language to loosely explain themselves where they say 'I' when referring to something their character did. That doesn't mean are too dumb to realize there is a difference between their character and themselves. It's loose language. So any actual evidence anyone thinks this?

I've had a few players like this, where a bad thing happening to the character was taken (and internalized) as a bad thing happening to the player.

Note that I specifically say "had" there, as those players have long since been pruned from the table.