Ryan Dancey on Redefining the Hobby (Updated: time elements in a storytelling game)

[MoogleEmpMog]

However, "rpg-style" console games (later-generation ones from the 90s-00s at least) are frequently cited as direct competition for tabletop rpgs (and even as rendering tabletop rpgs "obsolete"), because they do have a lot of the same appeal -- explore a fantastic/imaginary world, participate in a story, take on a fictional role, kill things and take their stuff, etc. -- and because they have several distinct advantages over tabletop rpgs -- cool graphics, you don't have to read a rulebook in order to start playing, you can play at your own pace and don't need to gather together a bunch of like-minded friends in order to play, etc. But these advantages are balanced out by (among other things) the fact that they're finite and generally have minimal replay value -- it's assumed that once you've finished/beaten the game that you'll move on and buy another one.

FWIW, most dedicated console RPG fans I've met, myself included, play the classics of the genre many, many times. I would assume that's the driving force behind releasing, for example, Final Fantasy 6 on at least four successive systems whose fanbases largely overlap. I've played FF6 seven times and know of at least one person in my family who has played it nine times. At least among the console RPG market dedicated enough to post about it on message boards, those numbers aren't out of the ballpark by any means.

 

[mmadsen]

Then you haven't played a storytelling game; you've played a bad imitation of one done by people who 'don't get it'. 2E modules were especially bad like that, but so were a lot of GM's.

I think this points to the fact that storytelling games aren't easy for most people to run -- or, at the very least, that storytelling games haven't been presented in a way that makes it clear how to run them.

How do you make storytelling as easy as dungeon-crawling?

 

[Irda Ranger]

Two new posts:

Step 3: Redefine the Game World
Time Out: Gamer Segmentation

To me it looks like Ryan has anticipated many of the "but, but, but ..." posted here. At this time I only have two comments:

1. "Adventure Game" is waaaaaaayyyyy better than "Story Game." Way better. If I really tried to express how "way" better it is, I might run out of "a"'s, and I need those. Despite what some posters here may think "Story Game" should mean, or what it means to them, it means to me (and many, I expect), being "told" a story, like in Kindergarten or when your buddy is telling the story about how drunk he got in Cancun. Stories have "tellers" and "listeners". Listening to a story can be fun - but not for 4-6 hours at a stretch once a week. D&D doesn't have "listeners", but I'm pretty durn sure it has "adventurers."

To quote:

We don't tell no stinkin' stories during D&D; we tell stories about D&D, afterwards like ... if they're worth tellin' and there ain't no "hip" posers around to make a scene.

Right on.

2. Co-GM-ing sounds nice at first, but I don't think it works most of the time (session to session maybe, but does the "Mapping GM" share information with the "Monster GM"? At what point is everyone sitting behind the (metaphorical) GM screen, and there's no players left? Part of the joy of playing D&D (as a PC) is that you can pretend that the world is "complete", and that your PC simply doesn't know it all yet. Once you've seen behind the curtain, some of the magic is gone. I have "farmed out" some GM work, like making churches, towns or organizations, but I think only one person can really be in the driver's seat at any given time.

I withhold all other comments until after Ryan has had his full say. I'm sure that he's given this a lot of thought, and I want to see the whole picture before I respond. Or even think about it too hard.

 

[ST]

Well for one thing, a "storytelling game" should probably have the rules (the game part) actually deal with story elements. In the way that you can use D&D 3.5 to arbitrate combat and skills use, these games arbitrate how the story comes together.

The indie games that do this already (not too popular on these boards, admittedly) work off the English 101 idea that a story has a theme, or premise. Other games, like Buffy or Primetime Adventures, work more on "We're simulating a TV show" and put a story together like they would.

The complaints people have had on the last few pages are mostly dealing with the suck that happens when a GM's trying to impose a story. Something like D&D, where the rules deal with a simulation of what is happening, don't give the player access to the same story elements as the GM, so they have to work at it to get you involved in co-creating the plot and theme.

One example: No matter how high your skill roll, you aren't going to find somebody in D&D if the GM's decided they're not around. In some of the storytelling games out there, the outcome of that skill roll might determine whether the person's there, or they're there but uncooperative, or your nosing around got you into trouble -- the mechanics are helping the story develop rather than trying to simulate an objective reality.

I'm afraid that's not a very good explanation; you'd be better off looking up something like Primetime Adventures or The Shadow of Yesterday and looking at how they explain it.

 

[Irda Ranger]

The Basic Set would feature a stripped down version of the core rules. It would be fundamentally the same game, but without the bells and whistles and options which lead to inaccessible complexity. Most importantly, it would be a complete RPG in its own right.

No doubt some clever fellow at WotC thought of that.

And then some suit thought "But if we sell them a working game, they may never actually buy the Core Rule books! Sell them something broken and useless instead, so they have to upgrade! Yeah. Profits, here we come."


...

Cynical? me? Why do you ask?

 

[Jim Hague]

No doubt some clever fellow at WotC thought of that.

And then some suit thought "But if we sell them a working game, they may never actually buy the Core Rule books! Sell them something broken and useless instead, so they have to upgrade! Yeah. Profits, here we come."


...

Cynical? me? Why do you ask?

Undoubtedly because you're a) misinformed and b) jumping on the bandwagon with the 'hate WotC' crowd.

 

[Rothe]

I'll have to pass on what I see Ryan saying.

In the 'ole adventure format I thought players created the story by the actions they chose. That is, the story is your classical campaign journal entry. I find these storie more intriguing as you never know as player or GM exactly where things are going. I view the GM's role as setting the stage (setting, adventures and politics and regiosn preped) where many stories are possible for the players to create. A attuned GM will try to make sure he has the stage set for the stories his players like best, be they average joe adventurer, save the world, solve the mystery, hack and slash, exploration of the world, exploration of character and self through moral conumndrums, role immersion, etc.

There is still plenty of story told by PCs and the idea of the GM being the only one telling the story is backwards from my experience with OD&D to present.

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

I'll have to pass on what I see Ryan saying.

In the 'ole adventure format I thought players created the story by the actions they chose. That is, the story is your classical campaign journal entry. I find these storie more intriguing as you never know as player or GM exactly where things are going. I view the GM's role as setting the stage (setting, adventures and politics and regiosn preped) where many stories are possible for the players to create. A attuned GM will try to make sure he has the stage set for the stories his players like best, be they average joe adventurer, save the world, solve the mystery, hack and slash, exploration of the world, exploration of character and self through moral conumndrums, role immersion, etc.

There is still plenty of story told by PCs and the idea of the GM being the only one telling the story is backwards from my experience with OD&D to present.

Considering that Ryan is pretty clear about advocating GMLite or GMLess play, I'd say what you see him saying is very much not what he's actually saying.

Ryan is advocating a system in which the players take a more direct level of control over the story via metagame and narrative mechanics, distributed or nonexistent GMing and other methods of shared authority introduced in the indie gaming scene.

 

[Glyfair]

Although this will probably get lost in the 3E news, Ryan has posted part 3: Redefine the Game World. Along with a related subject, Gamer Segmentation

Bits and pieces

The truth is that the RPGA didn’t factor in much of our planning prior to 3rd Edition, and it certainly didn’t factor into much of TSR’s planning. Interestingly, while reviewing files at TSR prior to the acquisition, I found a document I believe was written by Gary Gygax which described in detail the modern model of a successful support organization for the players, with extensive detail on the kinds of programs it should run and the interests it should serve. That was a pretty good platform, but for a host of reasons, neither TSR nor Wizards of the Coast followed that model.

I believe that Storytelling Games need to be tightly coupled to a large shared world environment. There might be many such worlds, or a few, and there might be “forks” or iterative versions of such worlds, in many combinations. The market will sort that out. But on a go-forward basis, I think that we need to consider the game & the world as one cohesive, integrated entity, and design accordingly.

The place we stand & fight is on persistence. The MMORPGs have a big problem with persistence. In effect, they are a write-once, read-many application. That means that the developers spend a lot of time creating an environment for everyone to play in at the same time. If the participants are given the power of persistence, a small group of players (those who play the most, or those who spend the most time figuring out how to manipulate the game game environment) will dominate, and new players, or less active players, will find themselves in a nearly incomprehensible environment.

 

[subrosas]

Just a few thoughts regarding the growth of games such as WoW vs. the decline of table top games:

The fundamental differenced between CRPGs (massive or not) and table top rpgs is that of pacing. Computer games will never be able to adjust pacing on the fly to keep the interest of players. Never. It isn't a computable problem. At best you might be able to set some sort of interest measures along with some sort of narrative generation to heuristically alter the flow of game-time, but it will always be weaker than the table-top version, since computers are notoriously bad at detecting player boredom

This is what table top games should be emphasizing: teaching gm's how to on-the-fly alter the narrative flow (time granularity, etc.) as the players gain or lose interest; providing support for quick changes in narrative flow (i.e. quickly resolved rules for when players are bored, detailed rules for when players appear intensely engages, etc.). I should be able to quickly and easily convert a mook into a boss, and vice versa.

Everything else will be evenetually duplicated by CRPGs. This includes story, tactical challenge, avatar advancement, socialization, even player empowerment re: setting, persistence.... The only thing a computer cannot and will never be able to do is to look you in the eye and decide to hurry up the description of a journey from Random-Rpg-Town to Random-Rpg-dungeon.

Whether or not this distinction will be sufficient to maintaining a viable rpg market will be determined in time (I certainly can't speak to the facts on that).