The question is, what are those additional techniques?
KidSnide's provided a good rundown. Personally, here's a couple of the ones I use most often:
Themes. Choosing, for instance, to stock a dungeon with critters that are all thematically related and omitting anything that, while logical, is more distracting from the overall motif. For example, the choice not to use ice toads in a Viking-themed frozen north game; although they're a viable mechanical choice, it's not terribly Norse to fight giant amphibians.
Dramatic pacing. Setting up adventures so that you start with minions and outriders, the tension builds as you fight more and more dangerous foes, and finally having a big dramatic conflict at the end. To use examples from as far back as AD&D, the GDQ series and A1-4 are good examples of dramatic pacing: the hill giants lead to the frost giants, who lead to the fire giants, and then you're in the Underdark, and it all culminates in a climactic battle against a demon queen.
That is the case in the non-storytelling game.
This will happen a fair amount. The definition of a storytelling game is not "the diametric opposite of a non-storytelling game." You will see elements common to both: dice, character sheets, orcs. I'd guess there are very few RPGs out there that use no storytelling techniques whatsoever. The most telling distinction is that storytelling games make more active and conscious use of them.
Well, as a matter of fact some prior concept of "the story" is necessary in order to "guide" anything toward it and away from something else. You've got to know the way to San Jose before you can choose it on that basis! Otherwise, you're right back to the old "non-storytelling" game in which whatever happens is -- after the fact -- identified as "the story". The arrow of time and causality here is a fact of life.
Bear in mind that the story does not have a fixed point as a goal. It's not like locating San Jose on a map. It's about opportunity. Consider the "lean forward"/"lean back" discussion. If I'm leaning forward, so to speak, it's to add some extra tension or drama to a scene for the purposes of that scene. Where it ends up, I don't know: but I will raise the stakes a bit if I think that's going to engage the players more and get some more narrative juice out of the story. Enhancing the story is more a matter of encouraging one of many "highly appropriate" things to happen than one required thing.
Again, no difference is addressed. The difference that I would like to see addressed is that you are moving the GM from a disinterested judge to a judge with an agenda. The exceptional powers remain, but not the critical distinction in role.
Yes, the difference is definitely a change from disinterest to interest. However, the judge's agenda doesn't have to be tyrannical. It is an agenda of "make things interesting and exciting." And the judge exercises those powers on that agenda. Exercising those powers to a more personal or self-serving agenda such as making the players adhere to a pre-prepared script is an abuse.
When a GM is forcing events to conform to a "story", he or she is acting like a theatrical director -- not a game umpire. The contrast between what the 'players' are allowed by Orson Welles and the decisive decision-making many people associate with playing a game is the point here.
First, a caveat that I believe the "director" metaphor is implicitly imperfect. That said, you have to understand the distinction between a director and a scriptwriter, and the duties that a director may have other than giving directions to the principal actors. Thinking of a director as principally a scriptwriter and dialogue coach for PCs is going to give you the wrong impression. It's the other duties of a director (and stage manager, and SFX, and central casting, and producer) that make such a metaphor close to viable.
So, rules example from AD&D of guiding a character's personal story: Name level. The rules are actually guiding you to move into a "become a lord of the land, attract followers" evolution of your character story. They guide you in that direction by scaling back your hit points and making the option of attracting followers tied to that level. But they can't force you to become a lord. They just make it an attractive option.
It's pretty much like that. You nudge by providing more rewards for following a thematic character arc, but you don't demand obedience. Characters who pursue romantic subplots get extra, and appropriate rewards. Vikings who chase Viking-themed stories get extra rewards for doing so. That sort of thing.
Yet more avoidance of actual dialog?
It doesn't get any more complicated than that. No group is required to justify their desire to play D&D to anyone else. "Why aren't you playing Storyteller instead?" is a valid question if the group is not having much fun, particularly if the person asking knows and likes Storyteller and is earnestly looking to help. But if the group
is having fun with a story-informed D&D, then questioning their motives just comes across as "why are
you people in
my game" petulance, which is the opposite of productive.
Someone could "have a desire for his tractor to fly". However, simply repeating that statement of desire would not answer the really interesting interpretation -- the common-sense interpretation, I think -- of the question, "What makes a tractor a vehicle of choice for flight?" The restatement adds nothing to the conversation!
Going ad absurdum here isn't common sense, and won't help you understand. But the tractor's a good starting point, because it's a multi-purpose tool. It can plow a field, scrape a dirt road, mow a pasture, move hay bales, pull a cart, all kinds of things. That's D&D, all right. And a version of D&D that's built more for storytelling purposes is like a tractor that's being packaged for the rancher rather than the farmer, with all the attachments for a cattle pasture pushed and the ones for plowing and planting and harvesting other kinds of crops on special order. It's aimed at the ranchers who bought all those ranching attachments for the tractor (like the GDQ-model mower and the Name Level(tm) hay bale spike and the Forgotten Realms shovel), and it's aimed at the up-and-coming generation of agriculture students who seem to have an interest spike in ranching.
Though now I admit I'm very entertained by the mental image of a tractor messageboard where a few farmers are posting that a model that wasn't purchased for plowing might as well have wings attached to it. I kind of want to write up a sample thread now. (I may be influenced by
this.)
As opposed to everyone playing all those other games the same way?
No, as opposed to D&D being the only game out there that is played in one way for one reason (which would
really be bizarre, given all its editions and settings). The premise that D&D doesn't work with storytelling techniques because it wasn't specifically designed for that overall experience is an interesting theory, but the diversity of active D&D campaigns disproves it.
I don't see that. Neither do I see how that is any argument at all for doing a 'makeover' of D&D instead of trying to do storytelling with, say, The Storyteller System.
At this point you'd really have to be the one making the argument for why someone is better served trying to add D&D elements to the Storyteller system than adding storytelling elements to the D&D system. They're already doing (and may have been doing for decades) what they feel they enjoy best and would work most elegantly. Therefore, they've found the "right" solution. How do you prove otherwise? What aspects of the Storyteller system in particular would you cite, and how would you recommend implementing them?
Last but not least, I do not see how "people not playing the same way" gives such self-evident -- for so you treat it -- privilege to those who think that playing it as the designers designed it to be played sucks. How is that a warrant for them to dictate what the game shall "Officially" be to those who have made the mistake of choosing the game because (madness of madnesses!) they actually like it as it is?
The purest "privilege" comes from someone having spent the money to gain the rights to publish D&D, pure and simple. If you were to spend the money to do so, the privilege to shape the latest published form of D&D would be your own. This is of course distinct from to the privilege to play the kind of D&D with your friends that you like best and still call it "D&D", which everyone possesses.
However, the fact that people play D&D in different ways is relevant for multiple reasons. For one, it explains how designers might create the sort of D&D that they enjoy playing, and that other people enjoy playing, and yet that you do not. With the understanding that people play D&D differently, nobody is lying: they're not lying when they say they enjoy it, I'm not lying when I say I enjoy it, and you're not lying when you say you don't.
It also means that there is a market for different styles of D&D. With the business motivation of keeping D&D as a viable brand that is relevant to new gamers every hear, that's an important consideration.
Help me out here; throw me a bone of logical reasoning.
(sigh) At some point I hope to have a discussion without this disagreeable tone of voice marching into it and demanding I salute.
Somehow, it does not appear to me that AD&D became the #1 RPG on the basis of how many people thought it was the wrong design with the wrong design goals.
Well, you absolutely can't discount being the first and having the most name recognition as reasons it became #1. That said, it retained that crown because it could be played in a lot of ways. If there were no concessions to other play styles, if there were a way to enforce all players to play it in exactly the same fashion without emphasizing storytelling techniques or de-emphasizing some of the more exception-based rules, I doubt its hold would have been anywhere as constant. You'd perhaps find that there were probably about as many people playing "true" D&D as there are currently playing Savage Worlds.
But -- once again -- D&D is a thing of many elements. You can use 75% of the elements as published in any given edition, and change or omit the rest, and you're still playing D&D. Nor is it a new thing for the creators to feel that a significant feworking of the rules would present the experience of D&D better to a different audience. There've been a lot of editions that depart from the old brown box despite the fact that diaglo doesn't need anything else.
And as I said way back, given the wide variety of people who enjoy D&D, even to the extent of owning and playing different editions, that's pretty awesome.
