Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 4895949" data-attributes="member: 2067">Let's define our terms.Role-playing is pretending to be a character (in some context).Storytelling involves, er, telling stories. Stories frequently have characters in them. Stories also have other elements, like conflict, resolution, setting, etc. (a basic narrative structure, avant garde stuff aside). You can be creating the story as you tell it, or the story can be created before you tell it, and then remembered by you. Role-playing can thus be an element of storytelling (though it doesn't always have to be - you can play a role without any story, really). This is, essentially, what an actor does: plays a role in a story. An individual monologue, however, isn't a story, but is still role-playing.You can also tell a story without any role-playing by not involving anyone else who is pretending to be a character. A written story, or a verbalized epic poem, or even a completely computer-programmed movie, has no role-playing.Of course, if you have a voice actor, they're playing a role, so then it is. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> In the context of RPG's, it is hard to play a role without simultaneously telling some story. RPG's, by their nature as games, have conflict, so they have a basic 3-act structure: establish, conflict, resolve. In this way, every game is also a story. Most of the time, the story is about the players themselves: a game of poker is a story about one person at the table cleverly out-smarting and out-lucking the other players at the table. This is exactly what happens later, when, after the game, the winner talks about how he won: he tells the story of the game. In an RPG, the story is about the characters that the players role-play as. Even a game of D&D that is only combat is still a story with role-playing: it has players pretending to be characters who are fighting for their life against things that want to kill them. You can't effectively make a game without the basic elements of a story, so while you can role-play without a story in general, you can't play an RPG without also telling some kind of story (even if it is a simple or shallow one). You could play a game without any role-playing (like Poker), but then you wouldn't be playing an RPG. Thus, there is no dichotomy between "storytelling" and "roleplaying" in an RPG. Playing an RPG is automatically doing both. D&D, as an RPG, is doing both. Every time. Even if you don't specifically label it, you are going through both of these activities. Later, when the guy is telling you about the session, it's probably only storytelling, but if the guy acts out the session with his friends, it's both again, and if the guy dresses up like his character for sexy times with the missus, it's probably only role-playing.When you play D&D, you do both.If you don't want to call what you're doing "storytelling," that's needlessly re-defining what storytelling is. The timing doesn't matter: you're telling the story of D&D as it happens. If you don't want to call what you're doing "role-playing," then unless you're really just adding up numbers, you're probably re-defining that, too. Even if you're yourself, but transported to a strange fantasy world, you're playing a role that you don't actually have (you're pretending to be something you are not; a poker player just is what it is, even if they're telling a story). It seems to me that EW is needlessly re-defining "storytelling" so that he is not engaged in it. But he is. When my scrappy local little league team goes up against the rich kids from suburbia, it's a story.When I play a game of Chutes and Ladders with the kiddies, it's a story.When a team of adventurers goes into a dungeon, it's a story.A story is not a codified, strict, structural thing. Essentially, anything with a beginning, middle, and end (and ideally a conflict) is a story. Anything that moves through the fourth dimension. The entire universe can be seen as a story, as can an individual life. Heck, in a strict definition, even sexy times and monolgues can be stories (though they don't have to be seen that way, and usually aren't).</blockquote>

Verification