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Message: <blockquote data-quote="howandwhy99" data-source="post: 6309496" data-attributes="member: 3192">Mearls was one of the three founders of The Forge though to his credit I don't think he was looking to design what they and you call narrativist games. The Gaming Den I've been unfamiliar with so that's news to me as to that term's original source. It still doesn't erase the prejudice with which it's been used against other gamers for many years by Forge followers.Most of this I know quite well, but this last. And perhaps from a gamer's POV some storygame play could be seen as including this behavior. But I've never heard the "post-Forge" (aka storygame) designers admit that games aren't stories or storytelling, but patterns and pattern recognition instead. And I simply cannot agree those games are actually "all about" pattern recognition and not actually all about group story creation. Pattern recognition happens in those games ironically, incidentally. It is not a focus IME. Just like the story aspect of life happens only incidentally in all games not designed to be storygames. It simply isn't in games because it is not part of the defined activity. Besides a litany of other abuses, what the Big Model did was attempt to conflate the story aspect of life with games, which is a dissolution of games and game theory. Not a growth. In its effect it has become a kind of final conclusion for amateur game theorist who can't puzzle out how to get out of the philosophical arguments it borrows from Post-Structuralist thought. Which has led to an atmosphere of "final conclusions" about games (and pathetically RPGs entirely) rather than a diverse and open-minded gaming community where dissenters don't need to be brutally convinced by... by practices the few of us now aren't engaging in at the moment.The confusion here is that there is a story being made separate from the game in RPGs, especially in D&D (and let's not conflate gameplay with more storytelling just to agree.) Playing games just like living life doesn't ever result in stories. Games result in scores, wins and losses. They are the actualities of people acting in the moment within a pattern created by a series of rules. If anything, we need to create stories about games after the fact (because storytelling, unlike in Ron Edwards' opinion, isn't some unavoidable inevitability of being alive). Storygames OTOH are designed to create good stories. That is the Big Objective in all those games, though what counts as a good story is more defined in the rules by most of the better ones. RPGs may have been billed in the 1990s as telling stories, but D&D and all its rules were never designed to be so (which was obvious to pretty much anyone even then). They deliver on a hardcore gamer's dream of having the ability to game everything they can possibly imagine (and capably convey to the DM), not a nightmare scenario where gameplay itself is refused to even be acknowledged when playing (The "no rules are necessary for games" mantra).</blockquote>

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