Storytelling Games

[Doug McCrae]

Over the years there have been those on both sides of the story<->game divide (if it truly is a divide) who have tried to say they are doing something fundamentally different from those on the other side. The first edition of Vampire seemed to set itself up as something very different from, even in opposition to, D&D, when in reality it wasn't very different at all.

I never liked it or agreed with it, whether it was being done by 'story guys' or 'game guys'.

That's something that's good about the GNS analysis. G, N and S are all roleplaying games and it doesn't try to say that one is better than the other.

 

[RyvenCedrylle]

First off, storytelling games are generally (not always, but generally) a subset of RPGs so I don't think it's one or the other. From my experience, 'storytelling game' is not so much a strict, technically defined term applied to RPGs as much as it is a sort of loose category. Games I usually hear defined as 'storytelling' are Monsters and Other Childish Things, Blazing Rose, Trail of Chthulu and then depending on who you ask, Feng Shui, Spirit of the Century, Dogs in the Vineyard and anything put out by Luke Crane. They do have some common features, though, that are worth mentioning:

1) Minimal mechanical growth: most characters in 'storytelling games' don't experience a lot of solid mechanical increase - levels, stats, etc. There are a few bumps here and there, but it's nothing compared to D&D, GURPS, RIFTS, etc.

2) "Pass the Stick" mechanic - 'storytelling games' often have a core mechanic that structures how much input players have in the narrative rather than characters in the game world. In Shadowrun, I kick down the door in time to stop 'generic terrible event' from happening to my love interest only if my character has enough Strength. In Blazing Rose, I can do it because I as a player won the most recent trick (card-based system) and so I get to resolve the conflict.

3) Disregard for 'physics': This is sort of the natural outcome of (2). In order to have a cloak that deflects missiles in D&D, I have to find the specific magic Cloak of Missile Deflection. In Dogs in the Vineyard, my ratty old jacket can bounce bullets because I have the plot power to say it does. The next time, I might decide the shot tears a hole in the very same cloak hit in the same spot. In GURPS, I might need three or more separate skills to make a flipkick attack by planting my hands on the enemy's head, springing over him and kicking him in the base of the skull on my way down. In Feng Shui, not only do I not need any specific skills, I get bonuses to the attack for describing in detail the way it's executed.

Hope that helps.

 

[Achan hiArusa]

At first I thought that the White Wolf games were special in how they developed story and made it more important than mechanics, but when I went back to D&D the way I ran games changed. I originally ran D&D with a dungeon or wilderness map with a single goal in mind. It wasn't exactly on rails, but I tried hard to pull the characters back to the goal. After I ran White Wolf for awhile, the goal became less a room with a capstone encounter and more that the characters should have fun in the game. Instead of making intricate dungeon maps, I made NPCs with intricate plans and a place for them to unfold.

As for storygames, I have been in a game where there was a definite story, but the plot was as contained as any dungeon party going down a corridor. The storyteller had written the game and darn it, we were going to play it how he wrote it. This included sitting down and listening to him run his dialogue between his NPCs while we checked the time.

Some games can have mechanical straitjackets. I found Tactical feats to be one such. Since possible maneuvers were mapped out, it took away a possibility for characters who wanted to improvise. So I only used them as guidelines for players to use. One friend of mine used the term "rules transparency" to speak about how rules can fade into the background while you are playing. But then again, it doesn't matter how transparent the rules are, a rules lawyer will bring them back up.

 

[Ariosto]

Well, Greg Stafford certainly had something in mind when he insisted that Prince Valiant was not an RPG but a new species called "the story telling game".

Before then, without any example, I set out on my own to create a new kind of thing that I called a "dramatic" or "narrative" game. It looks to me as if the distinction I saw was in line with what Stafford and others have seen.

The fundamental feature of an RPG is role playing. "You are there; what will you do?" The perspective is effectively first-person. One's role is Conan the Barbarian, or at least oneself in Conan's sandals. Playing that role is not an optional "artistic flourish" with no concrete relevance; it is in fact the essential means of playing the game.

Now, playing Bugs Bunny is a bit different because Bugs seems to know he's a cartoon character. All sorts of wacky stuff can happen because the "world" is a Loony Toon, and Bugs and company can make things happen for comical and absurd reasons because that's about as consistently "in character" as anything.

Getting back to Conan, the normal RPG expectation is that he does not see himself as a fictional figure any more than we so see ourselves. Further, he is not delusional when he imagines that fire burns, water drowns, and so on. If he lets a T. Rex chomp on him enough, then he'll end up on a journey through the saurian intestinal tract rather than to the intrigues of a lost city. Unlike Bugs, he won't miraculously reconstitute as good as new after coming out the back end.

Actually playing Conan, in the Hyborian Age as Conan would see it, with failure and even death real possibilities, takes us a long way from ensuring any semblance of a story as carefully crafted as Robert E. Howard's.

But what if we step back? What if one's role in essence is that of R.E. Howard? What if the rules that govern outcomes are not even superficially those of verisimilitude -- but rather those of dramatic necessity?

Well, the formalization of actual rules of drama fell by the wayside and I actually ended up with a more or less abstract game of getting (or not) "authorial control" over what happens next. That's more or less still the standard, from what I've seen.

 

[Umbran]

And, just to return to a point - I think we have amply demonstrated that there's no solid agreement on what the terms actually mean

 

[Ariosto]

One of my first touchstones was, "What's the purpose of element x in the world?"

In an RPG, a cigar was just a cigar. The purpose of a bear happening by in the woods was to gather food, or get back to its den, or whatever.

In a story, or (I figured) in a story-telling game, the author has some purpose for the bear's appearance. Is it a sign of something? How are the characters supposed to react? The point is that there is some "right" -- or at least very strongly expected -- consequence.

Likewise, if the characters lose a fight and are captured, then it is not because the enemy was too powerful. The enemy was too powerful because the characters were meant to be captured.

 

[Philotomy Jurament]

I agree with those who say the terms are ill-defined. I wouldn't say that storytelling games are not RPGs. I think of storytelling games as being primarily concerned with collaboratively telling a story. Because this is just an approach, any RPG could be played as a "storytelling" game, but I think that the better storytelling games have mechanics and structure that actively facilitate that goal.

When I think of a storytelling game, I think of games like Prince Valiant, In A Wicked Age, The Pool, et cetera.

 

[Barastrondo]

Well, White Wolf's system and the term as used here don't have much to do with each other.

We actually have two systems, "Storyteller" and "Storytelling." The latter's an outgrowth of the former. Admittedly, the two of them are probably as close together mechanically as two very different games who both call themselves d20, but they take more than a little conversion from one to the other, so we used different terms to emphasize the evolution.

As for "storytelling games," lower-case (and with "game" rather than "system"), I don't believe in a definition that puts them at odds with RPGs. There are storytelling games that are not RPGs, there are RPGs that are not storytelling games, and there are games that are both. Sometimes it's intentional, sometimes it just turns out that way. D&D might be a storytelling game in one campaign where there's a deliberate attempt to create a narrative. But in a game where the roleplaying is so thick and well-done that narratives emerge naturally are also kind of storytelling games in the broadest sense. And I don't really believe in the narrow sense.

So yeah, I think the divide is really artificial. You can't really get rid of storytelling in this hobby of ours as long as we tell one another stories about interesting things that happened in our games. Some may try to make it a bad word that's synonymous with trying to exert narrative control at the expense of player fun, but I think it's a little hypocritical for anyone who's ever enjoyed reading the infamous Tucker's kobolds editorial or anything ever published in a Story Hour forum to do so. It's a basic human urge, both to tell and to listen. "Story" is not a bad word.

 

[pawsplay]

"Storytelling games" is an ambiguous term. It could refer to,

- Games that creature a story, such as a game where you take turns adding to a story
- Games, which are similar to freeform roleplaying games, but the players remain authorial rather than inhabiting the role of a character, such as Once Upon a Time, or Capes.
- Improvisational roleplaying, which is similar to an RPG but the range of permitted player actions is limited. Example: Many play-by-post "RPGs," Adventures of Baron Munchausen, murder mysteries.
- Freeform roleplaying games that eschew a lot of mechanical resolution, although I discourage this use of the term
- And finally, a family of RPGs that begins in 1991 with Vampire, which codified a number of new trends in roleplaying games and created a branch with a distinctly different focus than traditional fantasy wargaming

In reflection, I am not always as precise with the term "Storytelling game" as I could be.

 

[Barastrondo]

One of my first touchstones was, "What's the purpose of element x in the world?"

In an RPG, a cigar was just a cigar. The purpose of a bear happening by in the woods was to gather food, or get back to its den, or whatever.

In a story, or (I figured) in a story-telling game, the author has some purpose for the bear's appearance. Is it a sign of something? How are the characters supposed to react? The point is that there is some "right" -- or at least very strongly expected -- consequence.

In the purest storytelling games, maybe. In games that are a hybrid of RPG and storytelling game, things that appear tend to be relevant, but that doesn't mean there's a "right consequence." I don't know if you're at all familiar with Ben Robbins' work, but here's a sample of very story-based play. There is a whole lot of narrative device used to frame each scene, but it's clear that the scenes don't have an ending planned.

Likewise, if the characters lose a fight and are captured, then it is not because the enemy was too powerful. The enemy was too powerful because the characters were meant to be captured.

That's a GMing power trip thing — specifically, if the characters are meant to be captured, to play through the fight. When you get people who take story-motivated games seriously talking about things like capturing PCs, the accepted procedure is to start a game or a session asking questions like "So why is your character in jail?" Or maybe "So what was the scene like when you were captured?"

The difference is not between "storytelling games" and "RPGs" at all. The difference is between "I am telling all of you a story because I am on this side of the table" and "We are all telling this story together." People who like the latter kind of game don't like the former any more than you do.