I wonder if folks are voting for "game" because often the "story" in most #ttrpgs is conducted by one individual?

Story is less inclusive in most role-playing games, than game is.

Socialism for the GMs, Capitalism for the players.

@herrold Game is something you play.

Story is something you receive. Unless it's produced by playing a game.

@Yora @herrold The problem is this is a false dichotomy. They are orthogonal axes and it is disingenuous to conflate them.

Story is a pattern of narrative. It may be externally imposed, as in a lot of traditional tabletop RPG architectures with strong centralized narrative power in the GM. It may be procedurally emergent with no central GM and mechanics which allow for all the players at the table to introduce new elements of setting and events so that the story per se is in the retelling of what happened, in the very process of being manufactured by play. "Play to find out entirely about story.

Game is about mechanics which isn't necessarily about narrative fiction first and foremost but about providing the buttons and levers and switches for players to manipulate to engage with the process of play.

I won't recapitulate the entire GNS Theory debate here (because I was there for the first time and still have nightmares), but there are elements of deconstructive truth in the idea.

You can have a very game-driven story. You can have storytelling without very much game. You can have a lot of game that generates the story. And you can have not very much of either by mostly having an excuse to hang out together with your friends.

#TTRPG

@lextenebris @Yora @herrold

> You can have a very game-driven story.

That screams Burning Wheel to me. Read it and thought "yup that is what BW does". It takes game incitaments (Artha) to push the players to drive the story and while driving the story they spend Artha making them want more.

@tissek @lextenebris @Yora it just doesn't feel that way in play... for me. And I believe Luke would say that rpgs don't create stories in the present tense, but only when described later(past tense).

I've never played in a role-playing game session that created a story as competent as the worst episode of The Love Boat.

@herrold @lextenebris @Yora

I think I remember reading or hearing something similar and I tend to agree. That "the story" is often something we tell after the events that created it. There are also two stories created. One of the fictional events that happens in game and the other of the game at the table. These often bleed into eachother, gets intertwined. And I find from that is where the "best" stories come.

@tissek @herrold @lextenebris Plenty of GMs and adventure writers try to write a story in advance that the players will then get to experience.
Which will be amazing because everything will be set up to be dramatic and properly described.

But I am convinced that this always leads to an inferior experience that has everyone missing out on why we want to play RPGs in the first place, and what makes them unique among all narrative media.

#ttrpg