What Do You Think Of As "Modern TTRPG Mechanics"?

[soviet]

See, a big part of our difference here is that I do not see the core activity of RPGs being collaborative storytelling. Instead I see RPGs as a way to create and experience a consistent imaginary world through the lens of a creature or creatures within it, moderated by mechanics designed to model said world and all the features in it. Hopefully that world is interesting, and features situations that my character can interact with in a fun way, but the setting and the interaction are to me the central activity of RPGs.

Is a travelogue not also a story?

 

[Micah Sweet]

Is a travelogue not also a story?

when you're telling it afterwards, yes.

 

[Pedantic]

"game" is a vague term. I would still call it a game, given that I would call a LARP a game too, and those often have basically no rules.

Not when I use it. I'm quite happy to take Suits' definition:

To play a game is to attempt to achieve a specific state of affairs, using only means permitted by rules, where the rules prohibit use of more efficient in favour of less efficient means, and where the rules are accepted just because they make possible such activity.

I don't really hold with the notion of "non-Suitsian" games, I just think a lot of people use "game" very loosely to indicate a great many forms of play that are not ultimately games.

 

[soviet]

when you're telling it afterwards, yes.

Does the telling of it have to be to someone else? Does quietly remembering it afterwards make it a story?

 

[MichaelSomething]

See, a big part of our difference here is that I do not see the core activity of RPGs being collaborative storytelling. Instead I see RPGs as a way to create and experience a consistent imaginary world through the lens of a creature or creatures within it, moderated by mechanics designed to model said world and all the features in it. Hopefully that world is interesting, and features situations that my character can interact with in a fun way, but the setting and the interaction are to me the central activity of RPGs.

The problem is that both of you want to play D&D and in order to make the game better for yourself, you could end up making the game more hostile for the other.

 

[pemerton]

Vincent Baker has an interesting blog about the relationship, in Apocalypse World play, between the core activity of "the conversation" - that is, a structured way of generating shared imagining of some people doing some things in circumstances of conflict - and the more technical and mechanical rules that the game offers for generating content for the conversation: it's section 4 of this blog post.

At the end of the discussion in section 4, he observes that:

Deep hacks' is a term we sometimes use for PbtA games that don’t follow Apocalypse World’s template here. . . . the conversations are structured so differently at the core that they require a whole different structure of elaboration and collapse.​

The reason I'm pointing this out is because it reminds us that not all RPGs have the same structure in their play. For instance, if someone wants to play a RPG that is similar to classic dungeon-crawling D&D, I think it would be a mistake to focus on the conversation and its principles as the core, or certainly as the whole of the core. The core, for that sort of RPG, has to include the map-and-key.

I also think that this helps us understand why this sort of RPGing won't, in play, manifest a story: to allude to @soviet's post just upthread, it might produce a travelogue; but a travelogue of the sort that one sees in the examples of play in Gygax's DMG, or Book 3 of OD&D, or Moldvay's example of play in his Basic Rulebook, is not much of a story!

 

[soviet]

See, a big part of our difference here is that I do not see the core activity of RPGs being collaborative storytelling. Instead I see RPGs as a way to create and experience a consistent imaginary world through the lens of a creature or creatures within it, moderated by mechanics designed to model said world and all the features in it. Hopefully that world is interesting, and features situations that my character can interact with in a fun way, but the setting and the interaction are to me the central activity of RPGs.

A thought occurs to me.

If we play out a series of imaginary events, and recounting those events after the fact constitutes telling a story, doesn't that mean that our play created that story?

 

[pemerton]

A thought occurs to me.

If we play out a series of imaginary events, and recounting those events after the fact constitutes telling a story, doesn't that mean that our play created that story?

It's an interesting thought. To build on my post not far upthread, which riffed on your "travelogue" point, I'm inclined to say: the play provided the material for creating the story; but it was the subsequent work of editing and composing so as to deliver a recount that actually created the story.

Without that creative mediation and curation of the material by the one doing the recount, then the recount would include all the minutiae of action declaration and resolution (like the back-and-forth conversations that are part of mapping in the classic D&D game) - and that wouldn't be much of a story!

 

[Micah Sweet]

Does the telling of it have to be to someone else? Does quietly remembering it afterwards make it a story?

Sure. The point is that it had to occur first.

 

[Micah Sweet]

The problem is that both of you want to play D&D and in order to make the game better for yourself, you could end up making the game more hostile for the other.

That's just the way it is sometimes. However, neither of us play at the same table, and neither do of us are insisting the other person play differently, so I don't really see how it matters.