Reply to thread

Message

<blockquote data-quote="Bedrockgames" data-source="post: 8254909" data-attributes="member: 85555"><p>What I mean is a term that carries lots of connotations so that it is easy to equivocate on. Both story and fiction are easily equivocated on. Take story, it can mean 'hey what's the story man'. as in 'what happened. But it can also mean a formal story, with structure, themes, etc. This regularly crops up in RPG discussions where someone takes the former meaning then shifts to the latter to assert that all RPGs are about story (I have been in countless threads where this has been the case) in order to build an argument that RPGs ought to have strong story telling tools, or that the GM ought to be trying to weave a story, etc. Fiction is a very similar kind of term, and I have seen it produce similar problems in previous discussions. It is a lot less prevalent of a term though, so I am mostly anticipating the problems it will produce if it gets more mainstream currency. Still it is very murky, I know in previous discussions with posters here it has routinely produced all kinds of difficulties for me when contrasting my style with pemerton's for example (and I suspect this is because of the elasticity of the term due to all its connotations, and how it kind of glues the events in the campaign with the setting in a way, so that the fiction is both setting and what the characters do-----at least that was my reading of some uses of it in prior discussions).</p></blockquote><p></p>

[QUOTE="Bedrockgames, post: 8254909, member: 85555"] What I mean is a term that carries lots of connotations so that it is easy to equivocate on. Both story and fiction are easily equivocated on. Take story, it can mean 'hey what's the story man'. as in 'what happened. But it can also mean a formal story, with structure, themes, etc. This regularly crops up in RPG discussions where someone takes the former meaning then shifts to the latter to assert that all RPGs are about story (I have been in countless threads where this has been the case) in order to build an argument that RPGs ought to have strong story telling tools, or that the GM ought to be trying to weave a story, etc. Fiction is a very similar kind of term, and I have seen it produce similar problems in previous discussions. It is a lot less prevalent of a term though, so I am mostly anticipating the problems it will produce if it gets more mainstream currency. Still it is very murky, I know in previous discussions with posters here it has routinely produced all kinds of difficulties for me when contrasting my style with pemerton's for example (and I suspect this is because of the elasticity of the term due to all its connotations, and how it kind of glues the events in the campaign with the setting in a way, so that the fiction is both setting and what the characters do-----at least that was my reading of some uses of it in prior discussions). [/QUOTE]

Verification