Game vs. Story

[Aus_Snow]

I agree with the rodent.

 

[T. Foster]

Game. You can tell a story about what happened in the game after the fact if you want (because you can tell a story about anything).

 

[ShinHakkaider]

If the dice “say” that a PC dies in a random mook encounter before the big climax with the BBEG:

Story tellers will fudge to keep the PC alive till a more “appropriate” moment for the story plan. They are telling a story first, playing a game second.

Game players will not fudge and just consider the PC’s death at that moment to be part of the story unfolding. They are playing a game first, telling a story second.

Agreed on those definitions and I'm definitely in the 2nd category with kind of an exception. I'm more likely to easier on PC's if they're about to die because of really unlucky dice rolling not because of story, but because getting killed because of a really unlucky dice roll in a minor encounter just sucks for players.

But mostly we're playing a game and the story comes out of that game. I've lost many a PC while playing under a DM like that but some of my best characters have come out of situations where I had to make replacement characters.

 

[Man in the Funny Hat]

Option not available. It's both. I generally have a vague story in mind that is easily altered by actual game events. Neither is as sacred as all that.

 

[Peni Griffin]

I am a professional storyteller who considers the game a shared art form and I do not fudge die rolls. If you get to the point where fudged die roll is the only way to save your story, you haven't done your job.

It is common, in a certain kind of literary criticism and even in teaching writing, to set up a false dichotomy between plot and character. The plot is what the characters do; the characters are the people whose actions create the plot. Some writers work out the plot first and (with a greater or lesser degree of success) let the characters emerge from that; some start with a character and (with a greater or lesser degree of success) chronicle the plot which that character's actions create. Only if the writer does his job badly do the requirements of one force the other into a false shape.

Most dichotomies are false. Perhaps those of us who don't find the choices adequate would be able to answer better if we understood what facet of the game you were trying to illuminate by asking the question and expressing it as a binary system.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

If the dice “say” that a PC dies in a random mook encounter before the big climax with the BBEG:

Story tellers will fudge to keep the PC alive till a more “appropriate” moment for the story plan. They are telling a story first, playing a game second.

Says who? I don't know anyone who does that.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Game. You can tell a story about what happened in the game after the fact if you want (because you can tell a story about anything).

The tic-tac-toe and jacks stories suck, though.

 

[T. Foster]

Well, most of the D&D stories suck too (at least IMO)

 

[Quasqueton]

Says who? I don't know anyone who does that.

Do you read ENWorld?

I did fudge a bit in my last session and give an NPC an extra healing potion in order to keep one of the PCs alive.

I just don't want to kill off a heavily invested in character for no other reason than the dice said so.

Ergo, there isn't much I won't do to stop a PC getting pointlessly killed.

I know our DM fudges on occasion. Last week, I happened to be standing at the instant he rolled damage for the two zombies hitting the barbarian (who was down to about three hit points)... so I saw the pair of 8s hit the table. The DM declared five damage, and the barbarian went down unconscious.

I'll cheat if the players are getting an incredibly bad (or sometimes good) run of luck. Basically, if through no fault of their own, they're getting hammered (They keep rollings 1s, I roll three crits in a row), are adjusting their plans to account for that, and are still getting beat up, I'll give them a break. Likewise, if an important enemy is about to get killed in the first round because three players crit on him after he loses initiative, I might fudge a number or two.

Very rarely, and only to save a player character from abnormal luck or for the good of the story.

I admit I have turned a lethal situation into something else for a random encounter or something not critical to the campaign story.

Quasqueton

 

[EyeontheMountain]

Agian, the poll is probably a bit simplistic.

But to answer the question, I mainly play a game, and the story is part of that game, but subserviant to it, its lapdog. The players and characters come first, and their actions have a srong effect on the story, though the story has a life of its own, and will continue even i the players ignroe it.

I don't play games where there are no dice, and the story is all. Where the players arbitrarily decide what happens in a kind of collaborative writing process. I leave those 'games' as soon as I figure out what is going on there. This is primarily in online forums, of course.