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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Guest&nbsp; 85555" data-source="post: 7668129">I get what you mean here. Personally I think the issue is the word 'story' has become loaded and can also mean a few different things. I have no problem with using the word to describe 'stuff that happens in the game world', same with plot or whatever. Where it becomes an issue is when it goes  from 'stuff that happens' to 'stuff that you must do'. Where the idea of story takes over. I also get why there is resistance to the term story, because there are folks who go from "stories must happen in RPGs" to "RPGs should be played/run toward telling a good story" and that leads to all kinds of problems if you are more interested in letting things unfold without any particular concern for the shape of the story, for themes, etc (i.e. if your primary interest is just playing a character or running as setting). I tend to fall in the camp that favors emphasizing the game and setting aspect of play, not the story. However I don't think WOTC means story in anything but the loosest sense of the word. One problem I ran into initially when we started Bedrock Games was I was unaware of the different connotations this word has online. In my regular day to day gaming world, people might throw that term out casually but not really mean much beyond the setting events and the things their characters did. So we just talked about 'story' in our first rulebook like we do in our own game group. This really confused people because we had missed the online discussion about story, narrative mechanics, immersion, railroads, etc and I think a lot of folks thought we were in a particular camp when they read our sections on GMing.</blockquote>

Verification