Perhaps we should take a closer look at what actually happens at the table when we play RPGs.
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The basic unit of RPG play is what I'm going call the situation (as opposed to scene, which has more baggage than I'd like, descriptive as it is). So the situation begins with the GM who provides the players with the necessary information to explain the current state of affairs, mostly in the form of evocative description. This might be bolstered by the players asking question to clarify or expand on the information. Then the players have to decide what to do - they must act. But how do they decide?
Obviously, a big part of that decision is framed by the GMs description and clarification, but that's only a part. Another part of player decision making is informed by their understanding of the setting and genre of the game, and this part is based on experience. In addition to setting and genre, the players might also act based on context clues within the GMs description - for example what the GMs spends time detailing vs the other, fuzzier and less well realized elements. In addition to all this up front stuff is that very human story telling drive - they fill in bits here or there, make unstated connections and inferences, and generally weld the bits together. These merged elements form the basis of their understanding of the situation and their decision is based on this new understanding. But they don't actually act, they state their intention to act, a desire to change the situation in one or more ways.
The situation now passes back to the GM who takes both his initial description, and the actions description of the player, and feeds it through the heuristic of the rules (to decide about die rolls etc). The GM then describes a new state of affairs that include the player actions and the consequences of those actions. Newly reframed, the situation is handed to a new player and we begin again.
I feel that this description of play is foregrounding an approach to play that is "no myth" or "shared myth", but also somewhat GM-driven.
When it comes to the initial state of affairs, how is that established? Does the GM read (or paraphrase) from their notes? Or do they extrapolate a description from their map-and-key? Or do they pick up on some player decision in the building of their PC - say, the player's authorship of a Belief or a Best Interest - and riff on that in some fashion? These are pretty different ways of getting a RPG session going, and produce pretty different play experiences, that are also going to be pretty different in how "story" results from them.
When it comes to "necessary information", what does that include? Does the GM tell the players why their PCs are motivated to care about this situation? Or is the PC motivation implicit in the way the game is set up (eg in classic D&D, characters want treasure because players want XP)? Or does the player provide the motivation? If the last-most, what is the order of operations between
the player authoring a character motivation and
the GM authoring an initial situation? Reversing the order of operations radically changes the play experience.
Another aspect of "necessary information" is
what the GM describes. And this is very different across different approaches to RPGing. In classic D&D, the GM describes architecture and some furnishings. Anything else is colour; and a lot of potential colour is left undescribed (eg it's pretty rare, in my experience, in classic D&D play, to try and describe the patterns in stone walls, or even the sort of stone the walls are made of; or the cut of a NPC's clothes; or the shape of a NPC's nose: whereas these are all things it would be pretty common to describe in a novel dealing with similar subject matter). And in classic D&D play, the GM is also, to an extent,
hoarding information - the players are expected to work to get it. Whereas in some other games the is typically trying to shovel information out the door, because play is not at all about investigation or exploration, but about evaluation and response (Vincent Baker talks about this in DitV; and I'm thinking also of my own experience of Prince Valiant).
When it comes to describing
what happens next, it's not always the GM feeding things through heuristics of the rules: eg in Burning Wheel, if a roll succeeds then the player's description of what they were hoping that their PC would achieve establishes the new state of affairs. And in map-and-key play, the GM typically doesn't feed through heuristics of the rules, but rather consults their map and key - so the phenomenology of play includes a lot of
the GM looks down, consults their papers, and then looks up and says what happens, or what the PCs see. And there is non-dungeon-crawling play, and even non-map-and-key play, where a lot of the time the GM looks at their notes to determine what happens next.
I think there some solid reasons why the idea that in RPG play a story is being told hangs around as it does. You have a group of people exploring a shared imaginary space and taking turns deciding (to some extent) what happens next. You also have characters (often heroes and villains no less), and even something that looks a lot like scenes that play out in linear fashion. That all looks a lot like a story. But I don't think those similarities make it so. Perhaps some of the difference might be covered by the difference between story and story telling. The latter might be closer to the truth of what happens at the table. I'll come back to that idea.
The appeal to plot, and its presence or absence often appears in these conversations. We do indeed have some types of RPG play that have a lot of 'plot' preloaded into the GMs prep, and we have others where nothing or only the faintest sketch sits premade. That suggests to me that the activity of roleplaying isn't dependent on pre-plotting (to any extent) but that the activity can support it to some extent. I say to some extent because, first, I feel it's pretty plain that in instances where the GM uses a lot of force to keep the players inside the tracks of the pre-plotted prep that the resulting gameplay is often unsatisfying for some or all of the players involved. Second, I think the sheer number of games that have been designed specifically in part to eliminate this idea of pre-prepped plot suggest that rather a lot of players don't much care for the idea. That said, it's still a very popular style of game. The important point is that while it can be used, it's not necessary.
Admittedly there is a whole lot of nuance between no-prep and massive prep. Things like fronts, or even adventure hooks, are at least plot-ish to some extent. So where does that leave us? I think that actual RPG play contains some story elements but that doesn't actually get us to 'story' proper. So RPG play might be described as similar to story-telling, but not quite the same as even there the participants in collaborative story telling are using their understanding of other stories to craft their elements in turn, but I think it's a stretch to say that RPG players are doing that same thing.
I agree with you that it move from "shared imagined space" to "story" is a common one. But I think it's a bit of a non sequitur: because telling stories together is only one way to establish a shared imagined space.
For instance, in a high school physics classroom, the teacher tells the students to imagine such-and-such a mass sitting on a slope of such-and-such an incline and such-and-such a length. Ignoring friction, and treating the mass as a point, how long does the mass take to slide to the bottom? Of course this can be solved purely mathematically: but part of the goal of these sorts of exercises is also to cultivate, in the students, a "physical imagination" which isn't just about being able to perform the calculations but also about being able to make sense of, and correlate, actual behaviours and properties of actual things.
And there can be similar sorts of non-story-related shared imagined spaces that aren't defined or explained primarily by reference to mathematics. Eg suppose you found yourself having to cross a fast-running river of such-and-such a width, and had nothing but <this list of stuff>, how might you go about doing it? And what difference would it make if you had to do it in a hurry because your friend has been bitten by a snake, and so you need to get medical help ASAP?
That sort of exercise gets closer to some forms of wargaming (free kriegsspiel-esque ones), and I think is also closer to the spirit of classic D&D as that is set out by Gygax in his rulebooks. The story aspects are more like colour and trappings placed over the solving of imaginary problems. And this point is not just about the history of RPGs: a lot of the procedures (including how prep is done, and is used in play) of classic D&D
make sense primarily in the context of this sort of exercise: they are focused on how the GM can best establish certain sorts of imaginary problems/puzzles, and then on supporting players in engaging with them, and the GM in deciding how to adjudicate those efforts.
Playing the sort of game described in the previous paragraph is not much like storytelling, any more than someone explaining how they would use an axe and a bedsheet torn into strips to make a raft is telling a story.
I think recognising the gap between this primordial form of RPGing, and
story (cf
fiction or
shared imagination) also helps understand why some other RPGing takes the forms that it does. I think Eero Tuovinen gets it right, for instance, when
he describes the Dragonlance modules as "pushing the AD&D content delivery chassis to its extreme ends and beyond in an effort to deliver a true high fantasy epic". I don't think anyone who was starting with a clean slate, and trying to come up with a game of shared imagination whose play would reliably produce a high fantasy epic, would come up with the AD&D rules based around map-and-key resolution plus a single-person-per-figure wargame system for resolving combat.
Adventure hooks can also be looked at through this lens. In classic D&D the real adventure hook is the desire for XP; and so the in-character motivation to enter the dungeon can be lampshaded with the flimsiest of lampshades (see eg White Plume Mountain, or The Isle of Dread). Take away the motivation to get treasure out of dungeons, however - while maintaining a procedure of play which involves the players moving across a map (literal or perhaps, increasingly over the decades, figurative) to learn what the GM has noted about it - and hooks become more important. (Or else lampshades not to hang over a gameplay motivation - the desire for XP - but over a social motivation - the desire to work through the material that the GM has prepared.)
I think the difference between adventure hooks and Apocalypse World's front is pretty stark. As the rulebook for AW says, the purpose of prepping fronts is to give the GM something interesting to say. And as the principles say, the GM should always say what their prep demands. This is a way of "disclaiming" decision-making - which strengthens the sense of the shared fiction's "externality"/"reality"
and means that the players are playing in and against a concrete situation rather than the GM's moment-to-moment whims. So, while very different as a procedure from classic map-and-key, I think fronts have more in common with it than with adventure hooks. But instead of the goal being
to explore and then beat the GM's prepped dungeon, the goal becomes
to find out what happens to these protagonists in this conflict-riven apocalypse world. Which is something much close to a
story, albeit not pre-plotted, than to solving a problem in an imaginary space.
I'll try and be concise: you cannot have a story until you have a plot, and a plot is the series of events that make up the story. Therefore, there is no story until the thing is done. After the last die is rolled, the aggregate of what happened at the table, tempered by the recollections and perceptions of the participants defines the story.
RPGs generate story, but you don't play one.
My point is that when a story emerges from play, by definition that story (the tale of our band of weirdos liberating gold from a dragon's hoard, for example) is not complete until the game reaches some sort of resolution.
Some RPGing clearly does involve a pre-authored plot: eg, many modules, with the DL modules as the classic example.
Some of these modules include instructions to the GM about how to do things that will ensure the plot is preserved in the phase of potentially disruptive player action declarations. This can be instructions to suspend the rules of the game (eg DL's "obscure deaths"). But it can also take the form of instructions about how to frame scenes or narrate consequences (eg If the players don't search the body and find the note, then such-and-such a NPC comes up to them and tells them what it is that they need to know to move on to the next scene in the story).
But anyway, when thinking about
story in the context of RPgs, I don't think that focusing on the
completed plot is very helpful. First, as many others have posted, a plot can be resolved or completed to an extent, yet still be very amenable to continuing on (serial fiction, in whatever form, is an obvious example).
And second, once we focus on the
resolution of a plot we can see that a RPG can generate that sort of resolution even though it is obvious to all the participants that the "thing" is not yet done. It's quite possible to design a RPG so that, in play, it will reliably produce
rising action in respect of a protagonist's concerns/conflicts which then result in a
climax/crisis with a resolution. And this can be done so that the relevant time scale is on a part with the presentation of stories in other media, so that - in play - it is experienced as a story. We don't have to wait until
after.
