"What Even IS Storygaming?": Explaining the Joke

HUGE Shout-Out to Alex for Using THIS Edition of Brother's Grimm to respond to me!

One of the hardest things to understand about how I operate is that, for all my verbosity, that my goal is always simple: truths found are better than truths told. If I can get you to the water, without knowing that I left a trail of breadcrumbs for you to get to it, I count it as a success. Weird thing to do, I know, but I have learned that truths told don't sink into the skull correctly. Better to miss and look like an idiot than look like I accomplished my goal, only to have it go poorly later. I think of this as a respectful way to deal with people.

So, I've been in something of a conversation with World of Weirth for a little while, both publicly and in the DMs of Twitter. I thought, while on a walk, to try and produce a rambling stream while I walked. And with the exception of finding out that there's not one but two dead spots near my home for service, I think I did pretty well!

 

The aim of the video was to make a reasonably-educated BR/OSR person start asking questions. Most of the time when I am talking to someone, actually talking to them, I sound them out, first. I don't deal in arguments, I deal in people, and therefore I first see what happens when I start shaking trees.

Weirth's response was perfect: he DM'd me the following. He ran a Google search and asked if this was what I meant.

My goal was to create a desire to go find out more, and then start talking about what was found.

My mission for the night was accomplished.

So, I was happy, and posted it to Twitter, because why not? Who knows what will come of it?

I woke up to a magnum opus from Lex, who politely posted a really good summary of storygaming... and missed the point of what I was attempting to do.

Because I suppose Lex doesn't know I talk to people, first.

Well. Time to talk to him.

You know, every religious philosophy on the planet generally has an admonition against the summoning of demons, devils, or other negatively aspected spirits. There's a really good reason for that, actually, because if you draw a seven-pointed star in salt, surrounded by two circles with the text SOMEONE IS WRONG ON THE INTERNET written between those circles in the blood of a schoolgirl, and then you set a silver brazier fueled by hawthorn and dragon's blood with a pair of d10 and a d6 on top being slowly melted, you will actually summon me, and it never ends well.

So we have to talk about this.

He's right, of course! I tagged him, openly. I started this. It's my doing. This will be fun! 

Spyder means well and he seems like a good guy, but he is absolutely the worst possible person to be discussing this, in part because he gets lost in the weeds so easily, and also because he's trying to keep one foot in both worlds, somewhere between the OSR and story gaming.

When he's having a conversation with them, he gets entangled in their expectations and promises without actually making the argument he needs to. Fair enough, he's a lot younger. He's not as bloodied.[1] I've danced this dance before, so let me get my big feather fans out, because we're going to do it again.

For the record, this is the footnote. And yes, it's awesome.

I think I'm a bit more bloodied than Lex expects. My style of engagement is because I have drawn blood being right (and wrong) before, not despite it. It is not "niceness" that drives me, but a desire for actual truth.

My goal was not to present my camp, but to get Weirth to find my camp, on his own, in his own good time. It is the most respectful way I know to address someone, from very bloody experience. But, Lex couldn't have known this, and therefore.. here it is. The explanation. 

Ish.

He starts talking about the perception among the OSR that story gaming is about telling a specific story. He almost gets somewhere with that, but I think the connectivity failure drags him off the important point, which is that the OSR and D&D itself specifically, historically, have been far more about running and telling specific stories than story gaming ever was.

In fact, story gaming in part came about as a reaction to and reactionary movement against the railroading and specific storytelling of D&D in particular. You may wonder, Lex, what is your grounding for saying that D&D of all things is about telling specific stories?

I will simply step to the side and point at all of the pages that have been published in the last 50-plus years devoted to modules and scenarios, many of which are very specific as to what you need to do, in what order, where, how, and what the outcome should be.[2] That, in and of itself, almost defines story gaming by representing its antithesis. That is explicitly not what story gaming is about, so we can discard that right off the top of the deck.

Here's the footnote:

Truthfully, you can only love Expedition to the Barrier Peaks so much before you have to acknowledge it wants a single path through the module and it will enforce it with colored keycards to get it.

Now, this is where the advantage of my style comes out. I know that Weirth would roll his eyes at the above. He's a dyed-in-the-wool wargamer. This would bounce right off him, because he knows he's not being talked to.

I knew this.

So I skipped it.

Weirth agrees with Lex and I about this, pretty hardcore. This is simply superfluous. It's a waste of space.

So now we need to talk about the affirmative. What is story gaming about? What is its central mechanism of practice? Spyder makes a vital mistake, and it's one that he's prone to, by first and foremost talking about mechanics. That's just wrong. It has very little to do with mechanics at all, at any level.

First and foremost, story gaming is about a philosophical approach to the practice of play that is essentially different from many games that came before, and became the inspiration of the indie gaming movement. That philosophical practice is a focus on the character as prime mover of play and not externally applied architectural pressure.

This is not a completely umbrella truth when it comes to story gaming, however. There are many games that fall under the rubric of story gaming that deliberately subvert that assumption. Bluebeard's Bride starts with a very specific situational setup and narrow specification of who the protagonist is.[3]

Notice the philosophical approach: that it is about the actions and exploration of the character within a specific situation, and that character's motivations and how they change over time, which is the center, intentionally, of the experience.

Ah, now we start to actually talk. 

Lex. Lex. Mechanics are a concretization of philosophy. And I know you know this. Pitting philosophy against mechanics is the thing that the Forge was reacting against, which is at the heart of modern DnD! One of the old guard shouldn't be making this mistake. And yet, here we are.

The mechanics are the ludogical side of the situation, the experience.

And, if you listen to my rant, you will see me trying to breadcrumb back to this. My references to Bath are not accidental. Bath is actually a perfect expression of what Lex and I hold in such regard, he just has a different goal: to present a series of tactical situations. If  I could get Weirth to see this, with something he knows, he then knows it in his way, which is what I want.

This philosophical approach didn't originate with the Forge, of course. It was reified in many ways, written down, presented in actual games for the first time to what was rapidly growing as the alternative RPG hobby. The roots go further back.

You can make a good argument that 19th-century Kriegsspiel in Prussia was one of the first manifestations of what is modern story gaming. After all, Kriegsspiel was played by a group of players and run by a set of referees who had no set of mechanics to adjudicate the results. Instead, they used their understanding of the game space, of the setting, of the capabilities of the things being discussed to judge whether or not the intended result by the players would be reified within the sphere of play.

It just so happened to be that their sphere of play was 19th-century field warfare, and the referees were experienced officers and subject experts. But that's not truly different.

From the modern manifestation of story gaming, the biggest difference is that in the ensuing time we have developed tools and methodologies, technologies for making that job easier, codifying expert knowledge, and making it easily referenceable.

But now I'm doing it. I'm getting lost in the weeds talking about mechanics. It's not about the mechanics.

.... I know this, Lex. Quite strongly. If anything, I got a pretty good education on this from Jim Parkin, the FKR RPG afficiando. And, remember that Free Kriegsspiel was a later development in the Kriegsspiel, and that the philosophy you're talking about was originally pretty damn crunchy, because philosophy and mechanics are not opposed. Mechanics express philosophy. And I know you should this.

Let's talk about another game, which I would consider a predecessor of the modern story gaming experience. We'll even throw in a moment about mechanics here while we're at it: Toon.

I know. You're confused now. How in the world is Toon a story game? Well, look at how it's actually intended to be played, and one of the central axioms of how it is to be run by the GM. "Is it funny? It happens."

While there are some fairly crunchy mechanics that describe characters, they're not overly extensive. This is the critical bit of GM advice that cements the whole book: "Is it funny? It happens. "What kind of a story are we telling? It's a comedy. It's a Saturday morning cartoon."

It's the kind of thing where ludicrous events happen, and if the intent is funny, odds are good that it works. If there's a question, err on the side of funny. This is, in its own fumbling way, a movement toward story gaming, because it is about the story that is being woven at the table.

It's not about the narrative that's being woven at the table, but about the story that's being woven at the table. The differentiation between a story and a narrative is critical. If I refer to something as a "fairy story," odds are good that you know what I'm talking about immediately. More so if you've studied the Brothers Grimm and understand the history of the term fairy story through the Victorian era into today.

You might even be familiar with the way that Tolkien used the term fairy story. But every fairy story is not the same. In fact, if I tell you that we are about to share a fairy story, you don't have any idea exactly what's about to happen.

Any number of narrative elements and a million billion narrative combinations could hit the table next, and you just don't know. But you do have a feel for the themes, for the way stories are structured, and for the way characters interact within the framework of a fairy story.

The word themes was bolded, italicized, and underlined by me, because at this point Lex's explanation gets a bit ridiculous. What's the word I keep using in my video, over and over and over and over and over?

THEME

At some point, if it's not obvious that Lex is explaining my own theory to me, I'm not sure what to say but "Seriously?" I know the word story trips Weirth and his kind up, and so therefore I use the word theme. Because that's what a story is! A narrative with thematic coherence! Really good stories use theme in genius ways.

Stories are narrative that evoke theme.

Put a pin into the word evoke. We're gonna get back to that.

That knowledge that you can understand what kind of story we're telling is the essence of what story gaming is. That there are kinds of stories and that we can look to them to help guide our decision making, no matter the mechanics or absence thereof. Not only can we, within the context of this game, we should.

Take a moment to sit back and imagine the equivalent of Kriegsspiel for fairy stories. Imagine you're sitting down with one of the Brothers Grimm, and he says, "All right, you're in a big dark forest. Who are you?"[4]

Now it's time for character generation. Who are you? What kind of character fits into a fairy story? You could be a talking fox, or a child who's been abandoned by his parents, or a troll, or a wise old owl. All of those are characters that fit into the context of a fairy story.

You're probably not a grizzled soldier wrestling with his PTSD or a wizard who's just shown up to try and get some gold pieces so he can level up.[5]

Here's Lex's footnotes, for completeness.

As an aside, this actually leads into one of my favorite bits of online accidental punditry, which supports story gaming while pretending to be D&D. It's where Deborah Ann Woll sits down and invites Jon Bernthal to play D&D with her, but what she does is not how D&D is conceived as being played by many of its advocates.

What we have here is pure story gaming: setting up a situation and then asking someone who they are, why they're there, explaining what they see, asking what they intend to do, making the character the core driver of the experience with no preconceived idea of what the outcome should be, but instead deciding where the narrative power resides.↩︎

Though I'm not going to lie, the idea of a D&D wizard wandering into a proper fairy story and getting absolutely fucked up, given the rules of the fairy story universe, does make me laugh to contemplate.↩︎

Yes, Lex, I know this already, because I literally talked him through taking Bath, something Weirth understands, and trying to convert it to Dumas. The contrast is purposeful. It's meant to get Weirth thinking as to how to do it.

The philosophy of story gaming is taking that general idea that you know what kind of story we're talking about, and you can judge the probability of outcomes by not simulating a physical mechanical world, but by thinking about the themes and styles and nature of a story, and just playing that out.

You also may rightly object and say that you can certainly play D&D in that mode. You can play D&D where your outcomes and actions and choices are guided by the kind of story that you're in. After all, that's why Appendix N exists, right? It exists to provide a flavorful stew of influences and stories, which should, and some would say must, guide your decision making as to how outcomes of decisions that are in doubt can be resolved.

I would say you are correct, but that is not the philosophy by which D&D has been played for 40 years at most tables.

Once. Again. With. Fucking. Feeling.

WEIRTH KNOWS ALL THIS ALREADY. SO DO MOST OF THE BROSR. This. Doesn't. Need. To be. Said.

Now we're going to get around to talking about mechanics. Having established the philosophical premise that the story framework itself should be what guides the methodology for deciding what comes next when a question comes up, free of any illusion that we're actually simulating a physics, then what is the point of mechanics within story gaming?

After all, you could certainly run it like a free Kriegsspiel with the GM simply deciding. Collaborative storytelling, it's called. It works. It's fun. You should give it a try sometime.

So why mechanics? Because we're not simulating the physical processes of a world. Instead, mechanics exist to help simulate the story mechanics of a story. Are there story mechanics?

Anyone who has seriously studied writing can tell you there are many, and the number of books that try to teach people about those story mechanics almost rivals the number of teachers who have a class to convince they have the secret of writing the next great story, whether it be a novel, a short story, or a screenplay.[6]The focus on simulating the architecture of stories is one of the things that differentiates story gaming from more traditional forms of tabletop RPGs.

His footnote is amazing.

Did you pick up on the fact that I have very little respect for most books about writing intended to teach people how to write? It may have been too subtle.↩︎

That being said. I know. Like I said, Bath is a really good example that Weirth alreayd knows, which is why I went there. The rest of the post continues on from there, and I don't have anything really constructive to say beyond this point. Lex made the very mistake that created the Forge, and then more or less restated a core philosophy that I have a great deal of love and respect for. While thinking I missed it. 

Regardless, that's probably enough on that subject for now. I'm sorry, Spyder. When you summon the devil, sometimes you get the horns.

As any good Christian does when he meets a demon. I shrug. Chuckle a little bit. And go about my business.

In the end, this exchange has been ironic. Lex wrote a essay to explain story gaming philosophy to me, while missing that my entire approach was a practical demonstration of it. You don't convince a wargamer by dumping a decade of Forge terminology on their desk; you lead them to a familiar shore—like Bath—and let them notice the water for themselves.

Mechanics aren't opposed to philosophy; they're philosophy made tangible. And if you have to explain the joke, it usually means you missed the punchline.