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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6415337" data-attributes="member: 42582">I don't really use or understand the term "story game", except that I often see it used as a label by those who don't like them to characterise the things they don't like.But 4e does at least incline towards a defined end-point: 30th level and the resolution of a PC's epic destiny. Admittedly it doesn't have the mechanical tightness of Nicotine Girls or My Life With Master. It relies much more upon ad hoc GM management via scene framing and the narration of consequences.Does having an end point managed via GM adjudication rather than mechanics make a game less of a story game?I prefer your second go to your first, if only because a well-designed modern RPG will have mechanics that, with appropriate adjudication and player/GM negotiation, will permit the resolution of any move declared by the player.Furthermore, I don't think that the second clause in your first go is right: Tomb of Horrors clearly counts as an RPG scenario, but no one playing ToH is meant to have regard to intangibles such as PC motivations. In fact, if you're playing ToH and you give your PC a personality or motivations you've already missed the point of the exercise! (Much the same is true of many of the classic modues, eg Barrier Peaks, White Plume Mountain, Ghost Tower etc. I would say that the GD series and KotB are on the cusp.)What is key to RPGing, and is as present in ToH as it is in a Burning Wheel session or something more to the "story game" end of the spectrum than that, is a shared fiction. An imagined state of affairs, which imposes no limits on permissible moves other than those that the players (with the GM taking the lead) can envisage as feasible within that fiction.If you read the original tournament report on ToH you can see the shared fiction being crucial to resolution when the players hammer spikes into a wall and stand on them before pulling a lever - thereby ensuring that they can't fall if the lever makes the floor drop away.Of course, in some games the shared fiction is meant to inform not just the resolution of actions, but which actions are declared. This is what is happening when you have regard to PC motivations (themselves part of the fiction) in deciding what moves to make.</blockquote>

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