It makes sense, sure, but it includes boring, unfun games, like sitting in a circle narrating stuff going clockwise.
And RPGs include
FATAL. Your point?
What's the definition of a good story game (if you like)? That would be more useful. Where do good story games tend to be different from RPGs, where do they tend to be similar, and why?
This is a whole new set of questions - and I don't think a good story game has any one set definition other than that it inspires people to tell better stories and more easily than sitting round in a circle with no rules would.
Many of the posters so far, including yourself, seem to be take it as an assumption that a story game will resemble an RPG in some respect, that you should never go "full story game" as it were, but it's not clear in what respect.
Most story games derive from RPGs - but I'd hesitate to call
Fiasco an RPG although it is very definitely a Story Game. It is, however, an outstanding game. In fact it might be a platonic ideal of story games - it has an almost defined length of time (about half an hour per player), and creates a story with defined beginning, middle, and ending - and in which one of the focal characters can die in the first scene
and it doesn't matter. The characters have no meaningful stats (merely a list of needs, important items, and locations), and there's a defined tilt point in the game at which point everything goes pear shaped for all the characters in a semi-arbitrarily chosen way. It also has no GM at all (the facilitator is merely the person who owns the book and makes sure you have enough black and white dice).
Story games are almost all like RPGs becase almost all stories are about people and with a group of people identifying with an individual is a good way to push a story along.
I'm not that experienced with, or interested in, story games (I'm more of an OSR guy), but one thing I've noticed is that mechanics that give the players influence over the story beyond the influence of their characters work better if this capacity is still related to their characters in the sense of their emotions and desires if not their physical capabilities.
e.g. a story game mechanic that gives your character extra fighting capability if they're fighting to save a loved one. That feels right, so it's not as jarringly meta as a mechanic that allows the player to gain the same combat advantage by reframing the scene or something like that.
Pretty much this. Trad RPGs generally concern themselves with measuring the measurable and more or less ignoring the rest. My standout example here is GURPS on alcholism where the rules for alcoholism go into detail about the effects of alcohol on the character's body - but don't say why (other than because of addiction) they might want a drink.
Story Games generally work on the basis that intangibles matter. "Take the universe and grind it down to the finest powder and sieve it through the finest sieve and then show me one atom of justice, one molecule of mercy." But that doesn't make justice and mercy unimportant - and the type of story games that are close to RPGs generally involve putting an arbitrary weighting in to account for these intangibles which are, after all, the driving factors in many stories. The
stats in the offical RPG for superpowered angst-fest TV show
Smallville are literally your values and your relationships with PCs and significant NPCs. And for the RPG of a show where Clark Kent can leap small buildings in a single bound and Lex Luthor can buy the whole place, these are far more important in the show than those powers and abilities unless it's a Monster-Of-The-Week episode.
The only game I can think of that's got a mechanic that's as jarringly meta as the one you describe is
Wushu - and the way the Wushu rules work in practice is that everyone always rolls all possible dice; the meta-mechanic simply draws evocative descriptions out of all the players (fitting half a dozen elements into your description isn't too hard).
That's an example of a good, sophisticated story game mechanic, whereas stuff like asking the players to stat their own enemies is just lazy DMing, imo.
Other than Fiasco (where the PCs are their own worst enemies and there is no GM) and Paranoia (where the PCs are each others' worst enemies) I'm not aware of a game that asks this. I am, however, aware of a couple of games that ask you to tell the DM why the BBEG is after your character as part of character creation to assist him statting it. This is a compltely different matter.
[MENTION=11821]Obryn[/MENTION], I refer you to the
Story Games Forums. Hardly Tarnowski's favourite place.
