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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8500620" data-attributes="member: 82106">OK, I'm not sure why this is significant or controversial. Again, unless the evocation literally has weight on the mechanical part, then the evocative part is merely 'color' and not part of the game itself.I'm not talking about story quality. I'm talking about the difference between NARRATING and STORY TELLING. You can narrate any activity, but that doesn't make it a story, just a narration. A story, as I'm using the terms, has to have certain dramatic form in order to 'work'. This is pretty non-controversial and has been commented on thoroughly since at least the classical Greek period where writers and critics of Greek plays and dramas certainly understood these concepts and indeed invented terms for them which are still in use today. You can NARRATE a game of chess. Maybe you can weave a story out of that too, potentially, but the story is not inherent in the chess game, it would have to be devised as a separate activity, after the fact. This is completely different from a Story Game style RPG where the very mechanics of the game rest on some process of allocating dramatic forms to the pieces of the narrative DURING THE PROCESS and IN ACCORDANCE WITH RULES. You can see how this is utterly QUALITATIVELY different from chess, right? I don't know what you mean by 'canonical story' here exactly. I think that an RPG which qualifies as a Story Game really cannot have the story and the game separated in any profitable way, not during play at least. So, I doubt that in a Dungeon World game for example you could take the formal moves and their outcomes and create some 'non-canonical' story around it that was a convincing narration of DW play. Even if this were possible (maybe it is) you certainly cannot for that reason call DW the equivalent of chess because the fiction, the story, still fed back into play via rules! "Because your character wants to find the gold to cure his sister; the Spider King stole the gold!" This is literally the sort of way that DW plays, and is a CAUSAL DESCRIPTION of a GM game move. With the first clause removed it is no longer coherent in DW game rules terms.</blockquote>

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