Is your D&D campaign a game or a story?

[The_Gneech]

Y'know, making up story on the fly doesn't make it any less a story. If your problem is with railroading, that's a different issue and one I suspect you'll find a lot of agreement with. But most people, whether they're good GMs or rotten ones, can't just pull interesting encounters out of their [expletive deleted].

Even a lowly dungeon crawl has a certain amount of narrative built into its structure: you generally can't get to the lower level without going through part of the upper level first! So if you put a room in the upper level that can't be avoided, you're already determining to some extent how that part is going to go.

And finally, no, I don't particularly want a game, if it's going to involve randomly verbally abusing people you don't know because you think they have Wrong Bad Fun. -.-

-The Gneech

 

[The Shaman]

But its seems like you're backing away from the position described by your given examples. You were talking about game events being created solely by random die rolls (in both the Traveler and AD&D examples). And now your widening that to allow for a referee 'bringing a setting to life', which I can't help by think includes a basic set of conflicts and sources of dramatic interest, ie plots.

Setting conflicts and non-player character goals do not a plot make, IMHO - they're background that exists independent of the adventurers until or unless the player choose to involve their characters. I don't plot "scenes" to create "dramatic tension" - the players bring that to their interaction with the setting and the characters.

The story is the adventurers' retrospective that comes from interacting with the setting and the characters. I prefer to have no expectations about what that story will be.

 

[ForceUser]

Me, too - I found it's a lot safer to just steal their stuff while the monsters are busy sneaking up on a bunch of adventurers having a deep in-character discussion...

 

[Mallus]

Setting conflicts and non-player character goals do not a plot make, IMHO

They are integral parts of a story. All that's missing are a few protagonists...

- they're background that exists independent of the adventurers until or unless the player choose to involve their characters.

So NPC's never break down the PC's respective doors? The setting should only react?

If I decide my current setting is at war, then that not merely background. It's going to have bearing on the the PC's actions, one way or another. The PC's might decide to play it like Patton, or like The Dirty Dozen, or Casablanca, for that matter. That's their choice.

I don't plot "scenes" to create "dramatic tension" - the players bring that to their interaction with the setting and the characters.

I plan encounters, call it plotting scenes if you like. I have a purpose in mind for them, but no set resolution in mind. I also randomly for encounters with important plot sensitive NPC's, encounters that can drastically alter the campaign.

The story is the adventurers' retrospective that comes from interacting with the setting and the characters. I prefer to have no expectations about what that story will be.

The very act of starting PC's in one physical location instead of another affects the potential storylines. Creating motivations for NPC's affects potential storylines. I like to think of it as plotting with resolution, which is pretty much sums up my take on DM'ing.

 

[The Shaman]

*snip*

Mallus, what are you trying to prove?

When I say that a roleplaying game can consist of encounters that are tied together by the players rather than the game master, is that really open to interpretation?

 

[Crothian]

No, I don't think so at all.

If it's purely a story, then the GM sits around a campfire and just tells a story. If it's interactive, then the other players get to contribute a bit to the story. But no dice are ever rolled. CAPES! would be closer to this style of play. It's more of an interactive story-telling experience.

Why do dice make it so a story can't happen? If I'm telling a story what is the difference between me saying Jack kills the giant or allowing for dice to determine if Jack kills the giant? All that changes is who is choosing the success of the characters. I can easily take any RPG session and write it up as a story using what the dice dictate as what happens. The story is just what happens and it doesn't matter if it's being told by one perosn, a group of people, or a group of people with dice and minis.

 

[Sammael]

There is no way my current game would have lasted 4 years and 132 sessions without a semi-decent metaplot (two of them, actually, but that's beside the point) in the background. The key, in my mind, is to evolve the story around the PCs' actions. Make their choices meaningful and make sure there are consequences - both for action and for inaction. The story I have today may still have the elements of what I envisioned four years ago, but much of it has been re-written by the players.

Needless to say, as I got to know the characters better, and the players got comfortable enough playing them, they became a bit predictable - which makes it that much easier for me to adapt the story to them.

I have about enough story left for the campaign to last another year, after which I will be ending this campaign. But the players will be free to re-visit their (epic-level) characters in the future, in a new, collaboratively-created, story - one that arose from their goals and motivations.

I voted (2), by the way. I've never been fond of story-less games, particularly seemingly random dungeon crawls. Such games bore me after a session or two - both as a DM and as a player. The older I get, the more I prefer stories to games, although I would never go as far as to turn games into improvisational drama. I've had a player request for that, though.

 

[fusangite]

Balderdash.

Offer the players a setting that responds to their actions and their characters will tell the story.

That's one way to generate story in RPGs. Some of my campaigns tend to centre on a world-puzzle; the process of play is the process of figuring out the true nature of the world and what is taking place in it. The players who enjoy these campaigns are people who want there to be something coherent and structured to figure out. You cannot make effective conspiracies and puzzles completely on the fly; they have to have some kind of underlying structure.

I watched season 2 of Roswell and season 7 of Buffy. To me, those are cautionary tales against what happens when people try to generate story about figuring something out with no clear pre-existing idea of what that something is.

Story is the product of GM-player dialogue. What the players bring to this dialogue is spontaneity, humanity and free will. What the GM brings to the dialogue is an underlying metastructure in which the story is situated. It is irresponsible for the GM to bring nothing to the dialogue and try to generate some kind of creativity vampire seat-of-the-pants metaplot.

Really, the "game-master-as-storyteller" is a lot of self-aggrandizing hooey - the players bring just as much imagination to the table as the game master.

The players as a whole may do so but the idea that the GM is "just another player" is delusional hooey (just as pernicious as the self-aggrandizing variety).

 

[fusangite]

Please forgive me if I'm misreading you here, but the implicit assumption seems that these kinds of "common threads" and recurring characters can't arise without the game master's hand on the throttle.

They can. But as we're hauling out old chestnuts regarding experience, authority and Umbran-bashing (a skill at which I personally excel ), let me haul out this one: why are you using systems like D&D and Traveller? Why not use systems like Sorceror, Burning Wheel, Dogs in the Vineyard and other indie-rpgs products that are designed to de-centre narrative control? Game systems that perceive/represent story mechanically are far more capable of democratizing it than game systems that are not so-designed.

So it seems like it comes down to the players that you have.

Spot on. I would go a step further and say "the players you want to have." I went through 7 players to get a group that enjoys solving big world puzzles after I moved to Toronto and I'm glad I did. Given the number of people who like being railroaded, I'd hazard a guess that the Shaman would find himself turning over about 2/3 of the people who joined his game to find players who want to share narrative control to that extent.

Setting conflicts and non-player character goals do not a plot make, IMHO - they're background that exists independent of the adventurers until or unless the player choose to involve their characters. I don't plot "scenes" to create "dramatic tension" - the players bring that to their interaction with the setting and the characters.

Good lord! Neither do I. Maybe we're just involved in a semantic argument. I happen to view setting as inextricably linked to story. Maybe it's this premise that is setting us at odds.

 

[Mallus]

Mallus, what are you trying to prove?

Prove? Nothing. I'm intrigued by your approach to the game, and the fact you badmouthed mine. I wonder how different our styles are, or if the difference is largely semantics.

When I say that a roleplaying game can consist of encounters that are tied together by the players rather than the game master, is that really open to interpretation?

When you say it that way, you sound a lot different from the guy who called self-indentified "storyteller DM's" practicioners of hooey...

To answer the question, yes its open to interpretation. Or rather, it begs a few more. Like, how do you have mysteries under your paradigm? If the game events are randomly determined things (or at least non-premeditated) that are 'connected' after the fact by the players, mysteries would be impossible. You can't solve the mystery you created.


Your way sounds interesting. But I can't see how the kind of transfer of narrative authority away from a DM wouldn't make a lot of common scenarios impossible (say like mystery adventures). Certain things require a DM's orchestrating hand to set-up.