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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Nisarg" data-source="post: 1892874" data-attributes="member: 19893">Here's where we have to get into some jargon of our own.. however, unlike Nobilis, White Wolf, or the Forge, I'll try to give the definition without resorting to unnescesarily big words or other jargon.Story-based gaming doesn't mean gaming where there's a story. All RPG gaming has some kind of story, even if its just "you're going into the dungeon to kill stuff".Story-based gaming is a term that describes the kind of gaming that was popular through most of the 90s, and was used by White-Wolf as its main model for setting design and marketing (though some have said it was invented by TSR in the dragonlance series.. i think that the DL modules were an example of the granddaddy of story-based gaming, true, but story-based wasn't adopted as the one-trick pony of the industry until WW's massive success with Vampire).Story-based gaming is when the emphasis in a game is put on the story over and above the characters. The PCs become "vehicles" for the unfolding of a supposedly "really interesting" story the DM wants to tell, and while they are arguably the protagonists of the story, there is really very little freedom in what they can actually do, because story-based gaming depends upon the story actually getting told. So the DM is encouraged to force the players in a particular direction ("railroading") to make sure the story goes the way he wants/the module says so.What's insidious about the story based gaming in the 90s is that even the DM didn't really have any power... his campaign and adventures were limited in what he could do by the fact that the settings had a story of their own (a "metaplot"), that was slowly unfolding in each new sourcebook. So if you did something different in your campaign, all the subsequent books that came out for the game could be useless.The writers of these sourcebooks tended to put the emphasis on their own stories, and their own NPCs, something that reduced the DM to the lector of the designer's story, and reduced the PCs to cheerleaders for powerful NPCs.That's why story-based gaming is bad. Its disempowering. It gives a bunch of second-rate failed novelists the chance to tell their b-grade stories in the form of adventures and sourcebooks, forces gamers to buy those books if they want to get all the "secrets" of the setting (by the late 90s it was so bad that there were games, like Brave New World, that weren't really a complete RPG, ever.. each sourcebook was absolutely nescessary to give you another tiny little clue as to what was REALLY going on in the world, and the main book only had about a half-dozen superpowers, if you wanted anything else you'd have to buy more books), and basically makes the players into spectators in their own game.Nisarg</blockquote>

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