Storytelling and RPG "War Stories"

[Evan Waters]

An interesting subject cropped up on RPG.net recently, and I wonder what the game-theory people here might do with it.

Here's the thread: http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?s=&threadid=19972. To sum it up here, basically it started with "Monkey0574" making an observation about how just everyone who games has stories about their characters and what happened to them. Not stories of what happened around the table (though people probably have those too), but things like "we couldn't fight the trolls head-on, so the thief rigged up a trap while I caused a diversion..." Even if you're not the kind of person who goes around telling people about your character, chances are that if pressed you could- if you've played an RPG you've got a story to tell.

This got some others, including me, to thinking that, well, this seems to be one of the end-products of RPGs: it gives you a story. Now, of course you're familiar with the definition of an RPG as "group storytelling", but maybe it's more along the lines of "story-generating". I'd never made this connection before, between the whole "storytelling" aspect of it and the actual psuedo-memory you have thanks to the game and your imagination. Maybe it's all just stating the blindingly obvious, but well- the poster "Caudex" came up with a nice quote (from someone else, possibly Paul Mason): "the purpose of all role-playing games is to generate anecdotes."

EDIT: The reason this isn't in GNS Discussion is that I don't think this is strictly a narrativist thing. You tend to get stories out of game sessions regardless of the dominating mode of play or your own particular orientation.

[Mike Holmes]

EDIT: The reason this isn't in GNS Discussion is that I don't think this is strictly a narrativist thing. You tend to get stories out of game sessions regardless of the dominating mode of play or your own particular orientation.

You may have ntoed that we try to be careful with the term Story around here. That's because many people have different definitions of what the term means. That said, it would seem to be a general consensus of most gamers that RPGs tend to produce something that could be seen as a story by some POV. In fact, your description of it in the retroactive sense is one of the more common ways to look at the term. The Narrativists are looking for soething very specific, however, and that's story created in-play, not retroactively be recalling the events as story. Thus these people would disagree with the poster about creating anecdotes.

Does that help at all? Am I on target with my discussion?

Mike

[Ron Edwards]

Hi there,

I think Evan gets that, Mike. We're apparently using "story" in this thread as sequence of imagined causal events, and in that sense, yes, there are lots of people who match with Paul Mason's phrasing.

So I'll stick with that most-general-possible definition of story for my next points.

As far as story-telling vs. story-generating activity is concerned, you'll find that this is solid ground at the Forge. I don't have much to say except, "Right." In other words, most of the discussion here is about the act of role-playing, which is to say, imagined events are being generated. All our discussion of context (e.g. Social Contract, which seems to be given a workout this morning) and game design is oriented toward these moments in application.

So, practically by definition, your insight is central.

Best,
Ron