All activities produce stories, that is just a natural byproduct of events happening in a sequential order.
Yesterday, I played Team Fortress, I flirted with this girl playing Soldier, and then I popped kritz on her and she bathed me in the blood of the enemy team. Story! Or, in-universe: yesterday, a group of 12 mercenaries hired by Builders League United took control of a gravel processing plant in the New Mexico desert with minimal casualties, soldier Jane Doe (callsign "♡Diana♡") and known war criminal Fritz Ludwig (callsign "Alice can't hit pipes") earned commendation medals from the corporation. Story!
OK, I know I'm being cheeky. But in, say, Warhammer, people been writing, uhm, literary (?) battle reports where unit movements and shootouts are woven into narrative since before my ma even decided she wanted a kid, but calling Warhammer a storytelling game would be lunacy.
D&D isn't a storytelling game because it provides no tools and no incentive to engage with Shared Imaginary Space through the lens of storytelling, and the rules themselves don't act as such a lens either.
The best storytelling game I know of is probably Daniil Shipaev's
MUJIK IS DEAD. It directly provides prompts for situations (like "Falling in love" or "Money problems"), and the players purposefully weave a tragic story of suffering and misery. One player takes on the role of the titular Mujik (translated: rough, tough, "real" man), the others are playing as his destructive drives. At the start of each scene, a random prompt is chosen and Mujik describes the situation, the other players tell what they think should happen next, they all roll dice and the winner narrates the outcome.
The story isn't just a byproduct of the gameplay, it
is the gameplay. The dice are rolled not to determine success or failure, but to decide who has narrative authority.
A more mainstream example would be Fate, where
- The players can directly declare facts using Fate points (like "I'm a *Seasoned Explorer, so of course I find a secret passage here, hidden behind a loose brick wall") and gain Fate points if the fact is detrimental (like "I'm a *Wanted Fugitive, so of course our contact will recognize my face").
- Storytelling concepts, like genre, tone, tropes can be codified directly into aspects, and leveraged in the same way. Your game being an *Amateur neo-noir webseries, or your character being a *Designated Love Interest are all part of the mechanics, and players can and should leverage them.
- Most importantly, players have an option to back out of pretty much any situation, so they can safely raise stakes and create trouble.
An example of a game where rules act as a storytelling lens would be Horror Movie World (or Dread that you've mentioned upthread): the rules are specifically designed to replicate slasher flicks, where a colorful cast gets picked off one by one, being competent is the easiest way to die, all that.
Mujik Is Dead is incredibly focused and I can imagine that it would produce extremely intense game sessions. As a writing teacher, my first thought was that it is very imaginatively constraining - there is an implicit (actually fairly explicit) narrative expected, with the outcome obviously predetermined by the title, but the major story beats are also fairly inevitable (that is sort of the thematic point). Thematically, this is a game intended to have narrow appeal. The game is designed for one-off play, which makes sense as this does not seem like an experience that players would want to repeat on the regular.
These are not criticisms; it seems to me obvious that these are all very intentional choices by the game designer, who has their own powerful authorial vision and wishes to see it executed during gameplay - it is almost an authorship by proxy situation, which I find fascinating, so that even though all players have a say in the storytelling, the designer retains a powerful role. I think you could only play this game with an extremely copacetic group of players, consent would be very important, and everyone would probably want to have a drink afterwards.
Okay, so D&D is obviously not that.
Since we are both familiar with
Dread, I will say what I like about that game, hopefully leading us back to the topic of D&D, because this is a D&D sub-forum and it seems only polite. Again, I emphasize that I am trying to share my own ideas and learn from others, and underlying premise is that "good" and "bad," with regards to art, are always contextual statements.
I use
Dread in my creative writing class specifically because it helps young writers better understand the importance of building dramatic tension. As their decisions make the "Tower of Dread" (it's just a Jenga tower) more unstable, their character's choices become more and more important, and this does a great job of replicating the emotional tension found in a good thriller or horror movie, which is the intent. There is a central author, a game master, who prepares the story set-up and acts as the more or less omniscient narrator, which is similar to D&D. Players, as in D&D, narrate what their characters do, and the Tower replaces dice as the chance mechanism, but with an added skill element (this is significant; it turns out I am terrible at pulling Jenga blocks).
What I love about
Dread is that it is an intuitive game, so that it take virtually no time to start playing, and the Tower of Dread acts as an obvious visual metaphor so that everyone understands immediately what the stakes are. The fact that there is a central narrative authority gives the game focus and makes it much easier for players to participate without needing to assume a lot of storytelling responsibility. This immediately widens the appeal of the game, but it also reinforces power structures that could be problematic. The game is a fast, fun way to get players involved in shared storytelling in a limited way. Students love it.
Narratively, D&D and
Dread are basically the same. So D&D takes that basic structure of a paternalistic game master and then overlays a complicated rules structure. Because it
is still a an improvisational storytelling game, the rules are never going to comprehensively cover every possible situation in a detailed simulation kind of way, but they go a lot further than "pull a block to see if you succeed."
The result is a kind of hybrid game.
Mujik is almost pure story, in some ways quite limited in scope, where everyone is a more or less co-equal storyteller.
Dread is also almost pure story, but the narrative agency of all players but one is tightly constrained. D&D is story plus game, where knowledge of the rules plays an extensive role, and the DM has control to a significant degree, though contained by rules and dice roles (to a debatable degree).
One way of looking at this is that D&D doesn't do any of these things particularly well. The reliance on gameplay makes it an unwieldy storytelling device, particularly during combat, which is when it becomes its most game-like. But the reliance on storytelling means that the game rules can seldom perfectly replicate what the players or DM want to be happening. There is some structure, but not enough that any particular situation can be perfectly optimized.
Another way of looking at this is that D&D's potential flaws are actually behind its appeal. It has
enough story to give a sense of purpose and continuity to the session, so that players want to keep coming back. They want to continue the story. It has enough gameplay elements so that players can engage in creative problem solving within various tactical and narrative restraints, and can aspire towards improvement if not perfection. Could it not be that D&D's "jack of all trades, master of none" design manages to strike a happy medium? It is, at its heart, a kind of half-assed game, and my conjecture is that Arneson, Gygax and co. kind of caught lightning in a bottle with this sort of game structure, in ways that work really well to trigger more or less addictive reactions in human brains.
Humans love stories (I would argue that humans
are stories), and we love to see ourselves, or idealized versions of ourselves, in them. Humans enjoy tangible, measurable improvement. All creatures with brain stems enjoy intermittent rewards. D&D-style games give us a lot of things that poke at our brains in pleasurable ways.
Why is D&D the gorilla in the room, instead of Shadowrun or Call of Cthulhu or Pathfinder or one of any number of other games that are, design-wise, more or less the same? I don't think marketing is the answer; D&D has a history of crap marketing. I think it was there first, colonizing brains, and none of those other games are really different enough to overcome that basic fact. I also think it involves themes that are inherently conservative, so the game basically feels safe. A game like
Dread is going to have an inherently smaller niche. A game like
Mujik significantly more so. And neither of those games, especially the latter, push those same brain buttons.
None of which, in my mind mind, makes any of them good or bad. To me, this becomes very much like an argument about whether or not pop music or big budget blockbusters are good or bad. At a certain point, this just becomes a discussion about politics. Aesthetically speaking, they offer different things. I love playing D&D, but I love a good game of
Dread or
Fiasco even more. On the other hand, those games don't give me the long term pleasures of a D&D campaign.
