RPGs as Stories, or Board games?

[MonsterMash]

For combat things are quite heavy on the wargaming style with a battlemat and minis, but outside that there has been a bit of RP based stuff with less dice rolling, coming from a tabletop miniatures gaming background I don't mind the mini based stuff, but actually enjoy a bit more of a free form approach for RPG.

 

[Starglim]

There are many kinds of games (there are even many kinds of wargames) and not all of them resemble chess or Monopoly. Storytelling is no more than an analogy for what we do in a roleplaying game and more often than not a strained one. When the game mechanics (heavy or light, dice-based or not) produce a compelling story from out of their own workings, then it seems to me that our hobby is at its best.

This is one of the places that the appeal of "Rules-lite" games derives from, and the argument that 2nd edition is more fun than 3rd.

Beg pardon? From the structure of that sentence you seem to suggest that one of these phrases has something to do with the other. How do you see 2nd edition resembling any of the modern rules-lite games?

 

[Flyspeck23]

Like most groups, ours falls between these two extrems. I'd say more towards the story-side, but I've got two players who're mainly doing it for the boardgame aspect. But even those players want an epic story attached to their combats.

Conclusion for my game: 63.6% story, 36.2% boardgame, 0.2% other.


The d20 System, and therefore D&D, are perfect for the "boardgame approach" (DB, anyone? ), because it has one of the best (maybe the best) balanced sets of combat rules out there. That doesn't mean that this is all that d20 is good for, of course.

 

[arwink]

To me, "narrative" games and "Board/Tactical" games are far to reductive.

My groups attempt to treat roleplaying games as roleplaying games - it's a genre unto itself, without the need to compare it to something else.

 

[Zappo]

We do both, and then some more. Personally, the main attractive I find in RPGs is that they involve all aspects of one's intellect. All other types of games are focused on something, so I eventually get bored of them.

 

[S'mon]

I guess by ENW/3e standards I'm on the "story-telling" side, though I don't think of the game as "telling a story" - that way lies railroading.

 

[S'mon]

BTW I think the best 3e players and GMs are those who are comfortable with the two styles and can move between them easily. I like to think I'm one of those players, as GM I risk getting bogged down in the board-wargaming and ignoring the roleplaying side. My favourite players are those who know to kick butt within the rules, but are at least as happy roleplaying out a meeting with an important NPC.

 

[Gentlegamer]

To me, "narrative" games and "Board/Tactical" games are far to reductive.

My groups attempt to treat roleplaying games as roleplaying games - it's a genre unto itself, without the need to compare it to something else.

I agree.

 

[S'mon]

It's notable to me that while the 3.0 DMG appears to validate the two styles, which you call story-telling vs wargaming & it calls "in-depth roleplay" vs "hack n slash", all WoTC product seems to concentrate heavily on the latter and ignore the former, the WoTC scenarios I have consist of little more than a series of linked combat encounters with a few traps.

 

[Kanegrundar]

Combat plays very heavily into every campaign I run, so I picked the wargaming aspect. However, our games tend to tale a very long tale of a group of adventurers filled with intrigue and good characterization as well. While combat plays a large part, the stories are just as pivotal.

Kane