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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ratskinner" data-source="post: 6180349" data-attributes="member: 6688937">To some extent, I agree. That's why I said that stories are how humans see the world, and any sort of non-trivial activity that goes on for an extended period of time will produce something that someone can interpret as a story. I don't even think that's limited to the first school. 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 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. I would also point out that some story games are not, in fact, endless cyclical combat (conflict). Fiasco immediately spring to mind.*While I was writing that I actually recalled anecdotes about die-rolling in rpgs....is that a bad sign?This is one of those areas where I tend to disagree with the Forge interpretation (as I understand it), which I mentioned in another post on this thread. I called it "bottoming out", which is to say that: 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 think there's something to this thinking. I actually think that 4e did a little too much to say that "D&D is about going on adventures and having exciting tactical combats of a certain style." I personally chaffed a little bit under that. 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. [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] has mentioned before that he thought Ron 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. On the other hand, some board games that have rudimentary story structure seem to be very popular, some even with a fantasy theme, so....go figure, I guess.Overall, I wouldn't argue that they should somehow re-cast D&D as a strong story game. (I would listen to the proposal because...well, who knows?) Heck, saying that D&D wasn't a very good story game and should be left to its own strengths was the comment that started this OT game-theory discussion. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> IMO, letting individual groups develop or impose their own story structures over the game seems like the best route for D&D (both for sales and aesthetic reasons.)</blockquote>

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