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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6062223" data-attributes="member: 42582">I'm not sure whose position you are opposing yourself to, but your account of story in RPGs seems a bit limited to me.There is a style of RPGing called "story now" or "narrativism" that has nothing to do with a story being planned, or with the GM telling his girlfriend in advance and then thwarting player agency. It has some resemblance to your "going to a new area and talking to the locals" and "spending 3 sessions in a high society party". But the difference from (say) a lot of 2nd ed era modules that have that sort of stuff in them is that the GM designs the locals, and the parties, deliberately to trigger the thematic concerns that the players have built into their PCs. So rather than the main emphasis being on exploring and (vicariously) experiencing the gameworld, the emphasis is on generating thematically engaging story via play.This is moderately hard to do in AD&D, because the only class that really bring much pre-packaged theme with it is the thief, but the only time the thief really gets to express that thematic material is in a party of other thieves! (Hence, in my view, the distinctive character of the "all thieves" AD&D campaign. Monks, druids and paladins have the promise of similar thematic heft, but at least in my experience the game doesn't really have the resources to let their thematic elements emerge.) The first AD&D book to try to get thematic material spread throughout the classes, and throughout the monsters that the GM will be using to build situations, is Oriental Adventures. (Though it also has mechanics, like its Honour system, that are an obstacle to "story now" because they try to constrain rather than facilitate player agency.)4e in many ways resembles Oriental Adventures in its thematic laden-ness of both PCs and NPCs/monsters, but without so many of the mechanical obstacles.My own view on this is that narrativist play is not all that popular among many RPGers.I take it for granted that most players aren't very interested in a railroad game unless the railroaded plot is very much a backdrop for the real action of play (this is my sense of how the typical adventure path plays out).But it also seems to me - and personally this is a bit more surprising - that many players don't like a game in which non-railroaded story is front and centre. Getting story front-and-centre requires the players to deliberately build their PCs to be thematically interesting, and requires the GM to deliberately frame scenes/situations in such a way as to push on those thematic pressure points, thereby triggering the emergence of story. You won't get this without fairly self-conscious metagaming by the players at the PC-build stage, and by the GM at the encounter design stage, and that sort of metagaming seems to be disliked by many RPGers.My best understanding of Ron Edwards view of the situation is that RPGers scepticism about story arose from bad experiences with railroading and metaplot, and that once games were designed that reliably delivered story without railroading, via the techniques I've described, then those RPGs, and perhaps RPGs more generally, would grow in popularity. And my own tentative view, informed in part by the backlash against 4e, is that Edwards was wrong - at least among the existing RPGing base, there is a very strong hostility not just to railroading (which is entirely warranted), but to the metagame-heavy techniques that are the only known way (to date, ast least) for an RPG to reliably deliver story without railroad.The Forge used to talk about "simulationism by habit", but to me it seems more like "simulationism by very strong desire".To tie this back to dungeon crawls: one thing a dungeon crawl can achieve is some of the same results as "story now" play - a degree of pacing, some sort of narrative escalation in the stakes, etc - without the need for overt metagaming in encounter design. Instead the metagame techniques are concealed behind the ingame contrivance of "the dungeon".</blockquote>

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