D&D 5E Wondering Monster- Once Upon A Time

[I'm A Banana]

However, I don't think that prevents us from discerning that some games are designed specifically to create interesting stories whereas in others an interesting story is more happenstance.

I don't necessarily dispute this, I just think that if this is a goal in design, you need to very strictly lock down what you mean by "interesting stories." Which already throws a wrench in the flexibility department because "interesting" is a subjective value, so if you define what you mean by "interesting stories," you're already limiting the game from what others might regard as "interesting stories." Totally a valid choice, you're just already beginning to abandon the hyper-local strength of the tabletop RPG by dictating that. It's a price that might be worth it, or might not, depending on what you do with the rest of the game.

I think "every time you roll a dice" is conflating what's happening in the table/player realm and what's happening in the character/fictional realm. That is, for most games, a roll represents a single event in the fiction. So while you or I can dramatically tell the story about how some player made some roll and it was interesting*...that's not a story within the game fiction, because stories involve series of events, rather than a singular event.

Rather than the nature of story, I think what you're getting at here is the depth of focus. A die roll is always an abstraction of several actions in the story, and the number of actions can be as narrow as "a single attempt to injure the orc" or "one lie I told" or as broad as "the three months we spent clearing out the Dungeon of Dread." Coherent stories can be as narrow or as broad as the people making them want, from Game of Thrones and longwinded descriptions of food to Micro-Fiction, where you have story-arcs in single sentences, in single words, or even in the non-words that are implied by the words that exist.

Plenty of stories involve single events, depending on your depth of focus (Leopold Bloom goes for a walk), and entire novel series can be written about the memory conjured up when you eat a cookie (Proust found eternities in a moment lasting less than a second), so there's no "quantity of events" threshold for stories to meet.

So a game that wanted to be about stories should contain infinities in each attack, and also simplicities in entire universes (FATE gets at this pretty well, I think, with the idea of a depth-of-focus for a given scene).

the thesis and antithesis have to have some gravitas (still not sure that's the right word) to make the story interesting or indeed count as a story at all in the case of truly trivial theses.

I'd call shenanigans on that, too, for much the same reason. What is "trivial" is as hyper-local as what is "interesting," so any attempt to determine that for other tables is working against the hyper-locality of the game. Again, not that it's not a price worth paying sometimes, just that you better have a real compelling reason for people to be into your idea of what is interesting and what is trivial.

I don't think I'm alone in the impression that the extant WotC editions seemed to be trying to eliminate that hyper-localism in favor of a "good" or "best" way to play D&D. I would also add that I think D&D's ability to do this in the pre-WotC editions seems to me to be more of a happy accident, rather than genius design.

I'd agree with this, which is why in 5e I see a potential to actually design FOR the hyper-localism that is going to exist regardless of whether not you design for it. I think in 3e, this was mitigated for me in the presence of the OGL and the cacophonous marketplace of ideas it generated. If I didn't agree with what WotC thought was trivial and what WotC thought was interesting, I had other publishers to go to. This is also part of why things like using this Dryad as The D&D Dryad (tm), or things like choosing One Cosmology For Everyone, would seem to be pretty bad ideas to me, and why I bang the drum of "Examples, not definitions" so loudly. Gatekeeping and strict definitions work too much against the localism that is one of the big strengths of RPG's for them to be worthwhile in the case of The Biggest RPG, D&D (smaller games would have different calculus).

Edwards believed that there was this great untapped mass of people who would be Narrativist or story gamers, but they don't seem to have appeared and rallied around the games that came out of that experimentation. At least locally, I've come to be of the opinion that they are much less common than the typical Sim/Gam D&Der.

It's a very limited potential audience to start with, just given the realities of RPG game publishing. I don't think that the trend to being very narrow helps, because it makes the hyperlocality harder to benefit from.

I also tend not to think that these categories are very useful things, that they are mostly non-existent as distinct constructs, etc., but I don't think that would hurt the business side of things that much.

 

[Manbearcat]

Forgive me, perhaps its because I only have the DMG1 for 4e. How are Quests substantially different from 2e's "Story Award" XPs? At least in practice, IME, those didn't perform any differently than how Quests are described in my DMG.

I'm going to do my best to explain this with a wee bit of brevity (even though it probably deserves a considerably more thorough post...unfortunately, I haven't the time or mental energy). For expansion I'm going to include this long article on the philosophy behind formalized Quest XP. Its long, its detailed, and it directly addresses your query. There is some stuff in there that would be extremely contentious, provocative or potentially incendiary to the point of "edition warrey". I've got no problem with it and I find it to be a fair and sound assessment but if I wrote those things verbatim on these boards it may illicit moderator warning.

To sum up the main difference between AD&D "Story Awards" and 4e Quests:

- Formalized versus ad hoc/optional bolt-on. This is a mechanical progression/incentive tool that is a fundamental, core assumption.
- Transparent to players and specific versus opaque, GM-side and nebulous/meandering. This means the players are "signaling" the GM rather than the GM trying to hook the players. The players are "queuing up the content" by telling the GM specifically what thematic interests/tropes they specifically expect to engage and resolve.

In 4e, they are formalized rewards as a means to incentivize and progress. Further, they are precise, transparent signals (either player-side outright or negotiated and out in the open) to the GM by which play is thematically, coherently guided. Whats more, (unless you're playing outright Pawn stance...which is certainly achievable) at each Tier of play there is an expectation of PC build make-up being in line with the formulated Quests (Neverwinter Campaign Setting is great at running this down). At Heroic, you have Background and Theme, Paragon Path in Paragon, Epic Destiny in Epic. These provide focused thematic material and focused tools/resources that exhibit "why you are" engaging those Quests and "how you will" engage them. Then you have the conflict resolution frameworks (Combat and stakes-driven, fiction-first Skill Challenges) for this material and these tools/resources to manifest and facilitate toward the ultimate conclusion of the Quest(s).

Whereas in other systems you're using your attributes/traits/relationships/beliefs/instincts/humanity/will, etc in conflict resolution frameworks to test your Beliefs, Humanity, ability to root out sin and mete out God's justice (eg address specific premise), in D&D (and D&D 4e specifically with respect to Quests and the mechanics that interface with your ability to pull through) you're using its analog PC-side tools in its analog conflict resolution frameworks to test your heroic mettle with respect to those Quests (eg address specific premise). Again, its just often throttled back in profundity...but it doesn't have to be...but even if it is, I'm not sure that makes it less "premise-addressey". You can certainly have a test of a Warlock's Will/Humanity in 4e as a Quest relating to bargained power and the results be derivative of PC build tools interfacing with Quest-relevant, GM-framed (but player-driven via their Quests) combats, Condition/Disease Tracks and Skill Challenges.

 

[Ratskinner]

I don't necessarily dispute this, I just think that if this is a goal in design, you need to very strictly lock down what you mean by "interesting stories." Which already throws a wrench in the flexibility department because "interesting" is a subjective value, so if you define what you mean by "interesting stories," you're already limiting the game from what others might regard as "interesting stories." Totally a valid choice, you're just already beginning to abandon the hyper-local strength of the tabletop RPG by dictating that. It's a price that might be worth it, or might not, depending on what you do with the rest of the game.
<snippage>
I'd call shenanigans on that, too, for much the same reason. What is "trivial" is as hyper-local as what is "interesting," so any attempt to determine that for other tables is working against the hyper-locality of the game. Again, not that it's not a price worth paying sometimes, just that you better have a real compelling reason for people to be into your idea of what is interesting and what is trivial.

I think most of what you're getting at here is why I was hesitant to use the word "gravitas".

I don't think that (if we are designing a story game) that we have to be terribly specific in subject matter/genre. I think that makes it easier, as we can define more elements of that genre, etc. However, I have played at least one game (Capes) in which its mechanics could easily apply to any genre I've ever conceived. One of my players even commented on this, "Its the first game I've ever played where you could do Wuthering Heights." (Literature majors, whaddya gonna do? ) I don't think Prime Time Adventures says very much about genre/premise, either. I have my suspicions about Fiasco's mechanics, as well. To be clear, I think the rampant anonymity of these games would advise against making them the core of D&D, but I think they prove something of a concept. The minimum for D&D would be much simpler, but still "bottoms out" somewhere.

I think non-universal premises are okay, when speaking specifically about D&D. We've already drawn a (nebulous) circle around "Fantasy", so a premise about computer viruses is unlikely to play well. But I'd like to pull out a bit from the Narrativism essay:

Finally, another subtle enforcer of story structure is the range of possible focus, or specification, for player-characters' abilities. It doesn't surprise me that many Narrativist-facilitating game designs don't distinguish very much among player-characters' abilities (Sorcerer, The Dying Earth, and My Life with Master characters are all pretty much alike within each game, mechanically); when they are so distinguished, however, the differences tend to lock down the range of the potential Premise(s) during play.

Which, in my head is summarized: "fiddly bits narrow the range of stories, rather than expand them." The profusion of classes, feats, (now) subclasses, races, powers, etc. is a proximate cause of losing what you've termed the "hyperlocality". (Something FATE GMs know well. The reason you come up with lists of stunts and other "Extras" rules is to define how it will work in your game, not to enable it. By default, FATE enables almost anything you'd want.)

As for "triviality", I think there are significant practical differences between analyzing literature and developing rules for gameplay at the table. I think those differences inform quite a bit about specifically what counts as a good story for D&D. Indeed, I think that disagreement on that is what was at the heart of the edition wars, as WotC (twice!) tried to draw a smaller circle than the audience filled. (Calling everything "core" doesn't help, either.) So, certainly, that circle needs to be very broad (given 5e's goals.)

However, I do think that for practical table-play, there has to be a quality to any theses/anti-thesis that gives us the ability to let it satisfyingly fill gametime and (for a game like D&D) mechanical processes. I'm not sure that I'd call it purely "complexity" either (though that's a part of it). All the very open story games I've mentioned have this property of multiple-player-engaging premises (or perhaps multiple premises). There are other story-generating games (Gumshoe games and Whispering Vault, IME) which thrive on investigative scenarios. Such scenarios, by their nature, invite tangled theories and shifting premises.

I'd agree with this, which is why in 5e I see a potential to actually design FOR the hyper-localism that is going to exist regardless of whether not you design for it. I think in 3e, this was mitigated for me in the presence of the OGL and the cacophonous marketplace of ideas it generated. If I didn't agree with what WotC thought was trivial and what WotC thought was interesting, I had other publishers to go to. This is also part of why things like using this Dryad as The D&D Dryad (tm), or things like choosing One Cosmology For Everyone, would seem to be pretty bad ideas to me, and why I bang the drum of "Examples, not definitions" so loudly. Gatekeeping and strict definitions work too much against the localism that is one of the big strengths of RPG's for them to be worthwhile in the case of The Biggest RPG, D&D (smaller games would have different calculus).

I very much agree. (Although I don't hold out a lot of hope.) I love these stories, but I think I'd rather see them in a worldbook or something, rather than in the MM. Wouldn't that be a wild idea? Have an MM which is almost purely stats/mechanics, and then the guide to the <setting> would be filled with setting-specific stories.

It's a very limited potential audience to start with, just given the realities of RPG game publishing. I don't think that the trend to being very narrow helps, because it makes the hyperlocality harder to benefit from.

I also tend not to think that these categories are very useful things, that they are mostly non-existent as distinct constructs, etc., but I don't think that would hurt the business side of things that much.

No real argument. I think the trend to be very narrow (Gumshoe, for example) is partially to take advantage of the occasional holes left by traditional rpgs, and also to serve some very specific customer bases with pdfs.

 

[Ratskinner]

I'm going to do my best to explain this with a wee bit of brevity (even though it probably deserves a considerably more thorough post...unfortunately, I haven't the time or mental energy). For expansion I'm going to include this long article on the philosophy behind formalized Quest XP. Its long, its detailed, and it directly addresses your query. There is some stuff in there that would be extremely contentious, provocative or potentially incendiary to the point of "edition warrey". I've got no problem with it and I find it to be a fair and sound assessment but if I wrote those things verbatim on these boards it may illicit moderator warning.

I didn't find the article all that edition-warry, despite its usage of some "hot-button" phrases. Maybe a little propaganda-ish here and there. I don't think its any more incendiary than some of the things I might say here might be. So please pardon me as a play a little Devil's Advocate.

To sum up the main difference between AD&D "Story Awards" and 4e Quests:

- Formalized versus ad hoc/optional bolt-on. This is a mechanical progression/incentive tool that is a fundamental, core assumption.

While formalized, it seems pretty "bolt-on" to me. You could ignore those pages in the DMG entirely and the game plays fine, and not necessarily only in Pawn stance, either. Nor is "Premise Quest Completion" necessary to level up. (I also seem to recall that the 2e Story Awards were formal, if anemic.)

- Transparent to players and specific versus opaque, GM-side and nebulous/meandering. This means the players are "signaling" the GM rather than the GM trying to hook the players. The players are "queuing up the content" by telling the GM specifically what thematic interests/tropes they specifically expect to engage and resolve.

Seems odd that the article calls them out specifically as DM "carrots", then. I'm not sure that I've witnessed too many D&D games where the nature of the next quest/adventure was a mystery (seen 'em stall in the middle sometimes, especially if investigation was needed). I've also witnessed plenty of story awards go out to players for similar things in previous editions.

The article seems colored by the 2e-era RPGA story-award experience. I'm not sure if you were around for that era, but the RPGA adventures were something of a wreck and the story-awards weren't the half of it. I'm not sure that story awards "in the wild" were as different as the article presumes. (Although the 2e guidelines made them far too small, in my memory's eye.)

In 4e, they are formalized rewards as a means to incentivize and progress. Further, they are precise, transparent signals (either player-side outright or negotiated and out in the open) to the GM by which play is thematically, coherently guided. Whats more, (unless you're playing outright Pawn stance...which is certainly achievable) at each Tier of play there is an expectation of PC build make-up being in line with the formulated Quests (Neverwinter Campaign Setting is great at running this down). At Heroic, you have Background and Theme, Paragon Path in Paragon, Epic Destiny in Epic. These provide focused thematic material and focused tools/resources that exhibit "why you are" engaging those Quests and "how you will" engage them. Then you have the conflict resolution frameworks (Combat and stakes-driven, fiction-first Skill Challenges) for this material and these tools/resources to manifest and facilitate toward the ultimate conclusion of the Quest(s).

I feel like this is solving a problem that didn't exist, and I'm not sure its adding much to a functional group. If you ignore Quests, is it suddenly impossible to address premise effectively? I mean, did players need more incentive to play and gain levels, to pursue their character's premise? Was there difficulty in the GM-player communication of interest? I'll cede that in some games there might be, but that seems a social problem that I'm not sure this solves.

If what you wrote is true, turn those last few sentences around, you'll see why some people felt 4e was much more narrow thematically than its predecessors. Read skeptically, this paragraph indicates that your PC-build choices + Quests are basically scripting your career within the limits of the available material.

Whereas in other systems you're using your attributes/traits/relationships/beliefs/instincts/humanity/will, etc in conflict resolution frameworks to test your Beliefs, Humanity, ability to root out sin and mete out God's justice (eg address specific premise), in D&D (and D&D 4e specifically with respect to Quests and the mechanics that interface with your ability to pull through) you're using its analog PC-side tools in its analog conflict resolution frameworks to test your heroic mettle with respect to those Quests (eg address specific premise).

I think I'm going to ask you to expand on that. I don't see a functional difference: (Traits & Conflict Resolution) address premise. Does 4e function in some other way? I can't say that I saw that in my limited experiences with it. What do you mean by "analog"?

Again, its just often throttled back in profundity...but it doesn't have to be...but even if it is, I'm not sure that makes it less "premise-addressey".

I don't really have a problem with the lack of profundity (I mean "Conan" is a relevant genre-source here.)

 

[Manbearcat]

Heya @Ratskinner. I'd like to focus my answer to your post. I'll respond this weekend but can you maybe clarify this question so I'm in the right frame of mind (eg so I know we're speaking the same language and making the same inferences):
Do we agree that Story Now creative agenda is basically an agenda that seeks a play experience and a system to back it that:

- Focuses, specifies and makes transparent thematic content and engaged premise(s) such that consistently coherent play is produced with respect to that (rather than meandering, unclear, or incoherent play with respect to themes and premise).

- Emergent play where engagement of those themes and premise(s) are determined by resolved conflicts that are GM-framed with results that are player-driven by way of their decisions interfacing with, and being mediated by, the system's resolution mechanics (rather than conflict results fudged, massaged, or outright determined by GM-fiat). While the GM must then interpret results and evolve the fiction accordingly (framing new conflicts), the output of these resolution mechanics are final (eg stressing out an opponent brings about certain victory conditions, and accompanying fiction, that are beyond GM-veto).

And yes, I think we both agree that Story Now creative agenda (and indie games generally) was a response to the 2e/White Wolf era where a cross-section of the gaming populace found their play experiences and results unsatisfactory.

 

[Ratskinner]

Sorry this took so long, real life.

Heya @Ratskinner. I'd like to focus my answer to your post. I'll respond this weekend but can you maybe clarify this question so I'm in the right frame of mind (eg so I know we're speaking the same language and making the same inferences):
Do we agree that Story Now creative agenda is basically an agenda that seeks a play experience and a system to back it that:

- Focuses, specifies and makes transparent thematic content and engaged premise(s) such that consistently coherent play is produced with respect to that (rather than meandering, unclear, or incoherent play with respect to themes and premise).

- Emergent play where engagement of those themes and premise(s) are determined by resolved conflicts that are GM-framed with results that are player-driven by way of their decisions interfacing with, and being mediated by, the system's resolution mechanics (rather than conflict results fudged, massaged, or outright determined by GM-fiat). While the GM must then interpret results and evolve the fiction accordingly (framing new conflicts), the output of these resolution mechanics are final (eg stressing out an opponent brings about certain victory conditions, and accompanying fiction, that are beyond GM-veto).

That seems to be a reasonable synopsis of Forge's Story Now position. I'd make a few quibbles with some details, to wit:

Scene-framing doesn't necessarily need to be done by a GM, but probably a different player from the "owner" of the thesis to be tested in said scene.

I would say that the Forge seems a little less committed to the overall resolution of the "synthesis" process. Many of the games touted as "Narrativist" do a great job setting up the thesis/antithesis part....but then go relatively silent on the actual synthesis part. I think they are generally relying on a sufficient number of Conflict Resolutions to somehow accomplish this, but...I am uncertain about that. IME, several of their games seem to fall a little flat at creating climactic moments.

I would also point out that as a reminder that my contention which started this whole branch was simply that D&D wasn't a particularly good "story" game, not anything about whether or not it could be played in a Narrativist fashion.

I hope that helps.

 

[Manbearcat]

Sorry this took so long, real life.

No problem. Thank you for clarifying. I enjoy your insightful posts even if we're in disagreement (often especially so )

I hope that helps.

It does. Unfortunately, I've got to be off and may be tied down for much of the weekend. I'll try to post something tomorrow while hopefully not watching my football team melt down further.

 

[Mistwell]

D&D isn't a storygame. It's an RPG, which is a different thing than a storygame.

Now after a session is complete, you can then write up what happened into a story. But as it is happening, it's not happening as a story, it's happening as a role playing game. The DM controls the world, the players control the PCs, and the players decide what they want to do, free of the structure or requirements of a story.

The fact that you can tell a story about what happened, once it's done, does not make it a storygame. I can tell a story about what happens in this thread - that doesn't make this thread a storygame either.

If you want to play a storygame, there are plenty of them out there. D&D isn't one of them.

 

[Cadence]

D&D isn't a storygame. It's an RPG, which is a different thing than a storygame.

Googling around trying to get more informed... is this a reasonable explanation of the differences http://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/6517/roleplaying-games/roleplaying-games-vs-storytelling-games ? If not, do you have a favorite or two? Thanks!

 

[pemerton]

D&D isn't a storygame. It's an RPG, which is a different thing than a storygame.

<snip>

If you want to play a storygame, there are plenty of them out there. D&D isn't one of them.

Thanks for this helpful post! Now I know that I've been playing D&D wrong all these years, and also that Robin Laws and Luke Crane were mistaken when they labelled their games "RPGs".