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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Greg Benage" data-source="post: 7213029" data-attributes="member: 93631">Here are Mark Twain's rules of storytelling. My D&D games almost invariably violate each and every one of them. Especially #8.1. A tale shall accomplish something and arrive somewhere. 2. The episodes of a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help develop it. 3. The personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others. 4. The personages in a tale, both dead and alive, shall exhibit a sufficient excuse for being there. 5. When the personages of a tale deal in conversation, the talk shall sound like human talk, and be talk such as human beings would be likely to talk in the given circumstances, and have a discoverable meaning, also a discoverable purpose, and a show of relevancy, and remain in the neighborhood of the subject in hand, and be interesting to the reader, and help out the tale, and stop when the people cannot think of anything more to say. 6. When the author describes the character of a personage in his tale, the conduct and conversation of that personage shall justify said description. 7. When a personage talks like an illustrated, gilt-edged, tree-calf, hand-tooled, seven-dollar Friendship's Offering in the beginning of a paragraph, he shall not talk like a Negro minstrel at the end of it. 8. Crass stupidities shall not be played upon the reader by either the author or the people in the tale. 9. The personages of a tale shall confine themselves to possibilities and let miracles alone; or, if they venture a miracle, the author must so plausibly set it forth as to make it look possible and reasonable. 10. The author shall make the reader feel a deep interest in the personages of his tale and their fate; and that he shall make the reader love the good people in the tale and hate the bad ones. 11. The characters in tale be so clearly defined that the reader can tell beforehand what each will do in a given emergency. If your definition of "story" is the dictionary one, "an account of imaginary or real people and events told for entertainment," you can describe a D&D game as such by fudging the meaning of "account" and "told" a little bit. If by "story" or "storytelling" you mean some intentional art or craft guided by rules, traditions, conventions, etc., and with expected structures, objectives, and so on, then D&D games really don't qualify at all. That is, if you use the storyteller's understanding of story, then D&D games aren't.</blockquote>

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