Let's talk about "plot", "story", and "play to find out."

[pemerton]

As far as flashbacks are concerned, these seem to be rather ubiquitous in RPGing. For instance, here's a post from a couple of weeks ago suggesting that a "flashback" approach to knowledge skills is the standard way of resolving them, in D&D and similar games: Difficulty Numbers: Scaling, or Static?

 

[VHawkwinter]

This started in another thread but I thought I would spin it off into its own thread before it goes wild.

What do you think of TTRPGs (broadly) in relation to "story." Are RPGs "stories." Are they "story generators"? Something else? How do the particular mechanics of a game interact with what you think the relationship is? How about adventure structure, particularly for campaign length adventures, from At The Mountains of Madness to The Enemy Within to Curse of Strahd?

For you, personally, are you telling a story when you play a TTRPG?

I am not. "Don't Prep Plots, Prep Situations" is solid advice.

For my part, I think you are creating a story through play, but that story is not what happens at the table per se. Rather, the story is how we talk about it after the game is done. Stories have a structure that does not really work in play. RPGs are messy, ephemeral things in play, with terrible pacing and contradictory plot elements. But once play is done, the thing that remains with us is the story that RPG play generated. Perhaps most interestingly, that story is different for every participant.

Definitely. Though you can obviously record it, much of what's happening is internal. If you were to record it and then edit it and then do a movie commentary track with the other players to get what was going on with them, you could compile the story as a compilation of everyone's experiences, but that is a bunch of extra work nobody does except maybe for the Critical Role people.

Every single element that makes play more like a story makes it less like an RPG -- because RPGs are defined by their embrace of player agency. In trad games this is mostly the GM, but more modern games give players tools to put their fingers on the scale as well.

Agreed

As is probably obvious, I am an advocate of playing to find out and presenting situations rather than plots or adventures.

Same-ish. I might have "Adventures" planned, but I normally plan them as a list of events that happen if the players don't interfere, and then have what the different factions have for resources they can mobilise to respond if the players do interfere. Throw out 4-7 of them happening on a clock simultaneously, and the game is what the players choose to do. The story is a retelling of those events.

I have run published adventures which are not that - but often those go off the rails and the adventure just gave me crappy prep to handle it and I have to wing it from basically nothing.

 

[VHawkwinter]

As far as flashbacks are concerned, these seem to be rather ubiquitous in RPGing. For instance, here's a post from a couple of weeks ago suggesting that a "flashback" approach to knowledge skills is the standard way of resolving them, in D&D and similar games: Difficulty Numbers: Scaling, or Static?

Huh. That is so unusual to me. I have never used knowledge skills that way.