I think this analogy makes sense, at least to people from Cricket playing countries.
Story games are the equivalent to limited overs one-day Cricket compared with traditional RPG’s long form of the game.
A game of Cricket in the long form takes place over the course of several days, five in the case of international games, three or four for domestic games. Connoisseurs of the game will always maintain it’s the higher form, where the story unfolds across multiple days. It’s true that some games do peter out into dull draws when neither side can press an advantage, but the best games ebb and flow with occasional dramatic reversals. Games like the 1981 Test Match at Headlingly where England came back from a seemingly hopeless position to beat Australia after heroic performances from Ian Botham and Bob Willis have passed into legend.
The one-day game, in contrast, cuts to the chase. It’s all over in a single day, appealing to a wider audience who doesn’t have the attention span to follow a single match over multiple days. It trades drama for spectacle, and tends to produce more exciting close finishes. But it also tends to result in far more cookie-cutter games, especially the ones that don’t end in close run chases. There is no one-day equivalent of that 1981 Headingly Test.
Like all analogies, it’s not an exact one, but does illuminate some strengths and weaknesses of two different forms of a similar thing. There are, I think, some definite parallels.
Well, if we’re talking cricket then, like Radio 4′s Test Match Special, surely there ought to be some mention of cake? How about, you get a rewarding eating experience from making & baking your own cake as opposed to the appeal of immediate gratification from shoving a slice of Mr. Kipling’s finest into your gob.
Does that help? I always find cake helps.
Do you remember the game Doc Bob ran at Stabcon in which she promised “There will be cake”. Fully signed-up in about 30 seconds flat…
Talking of which, I didn’t see you at summer Stabcon this year. Was I just being unobservant or didn’t you make it?
Couldn’t make Stabcon this year, just too busy with too many things going on. Will try to make next year.
# Do you remember the game Doc Bob ran at Stabcon in which she promised
# “There will be cakeâ€. Fully signed-up in about 30 seconds flat…
But was the cake a lie?
Schroedinger’s Cake
To return to the original posting, I’m not too sure this distinction works.
I once worked a Druid to 13th level under AD&D 2nd edition rules. Many of the players, including myself, were playing in the war game style. It wasn’t until nearly the end of the accademic year (yes, we were students) that I discovered the GM was playing story rules. I had given up using the more potent spells because the never worked. The reason they never worked is because the GM wanted longer fights. What he got was booring ones as we evolved a combat style which didn’t grant the bad guys any saving throws.
Both styles of play work, but the whole group has to agree on the style!
That’s just out-and-out abusive GMing.
Having your signature spells constantly failing because the GM was rigging the saving throws in the monsters’ favour would make an incredibly frustrating game. Why on earth did you keep playing long enough to reach 13th level rather than walking out of the campaign and finding a DM who wasn’t a dick?
The sort of Story Games I was really talking about wasn’t D&D played in a story-centric style, but systems where the mechanics are strongly story-based; they’re more metagame rules about the player’s ability to direct the narrative rather than their character’s ability to have an effect on the game world.
TORG’s possibilities and FATE’s Aspects and Fate points are an example, but many explicitly Story Game based systems take it much further. Umlaut; The Game of Metal, which I’ve blogged about before (It’s a great game) is a good example.
If the mechanics are good then you can use them in a story based style.
If the mechanics are flawed than you can use them in a story based style until you need to invoke them.
I was once in a “Mercenaries, Spies and Private Eyes” campain which ran for many episodes until the first true fight scene came up. At this point the mechanics let us down and the campaign crashed and burned mid-episode.
The Druid I referred to above was actually my third ever AD&D character, and at that point we were still exploring what RPGs were all about. There were some classic sessions as well as some poor ones. I will never forget the evening I was feeling frustrated with being regarded as the healing machine and loaded my spell list with the most obscure stuff I could think of: purify water, snakes to sticks and the like. I drove the DM scatty – I found good uses for them. When I cast the snakes to sticks he even asked to see my spell list, but then conceded that it did apply.
On reflection, he could have made both styles work if instead of announcing “no effect” in response to my Finger of Death he had made an amulet explode and made the bad guy gloat about how his magic defences demonstrated his superiority.
As it was, the mages were researching spells with clauses like “There is no saving throw and if you do get a saving throw then it is at -4″.
Your experience with MSPI sounds like a mismatch between the combat system and the player’s expectations.
That’s one reason I like convention-style one-shots; you have far less to lose if it all goes pear-shaped in the final scene. Or perhaps I just enjoy playing Call of Cthulhu, where PC survival is a bonus, and they GM is actually aiming for a Total Party Kill.
Convention style one-shots have their place, and they are the only conditions where Call of Cthulhu and Paranoia make sense.
For most of my RPG playing life I was in far longer running campaigns. AD&D was usually 30 weeks at two or three sessions a week, or for RQ several years running fortnightly or monthly.
Only one RQ character completed his full story arc, and he was the one who failed his power gain roll every fortnight for two years with a 40% chance of making it each time. This totally destroyed my faith in RQ’s random character development mechanism.
I was very miffed when the longest running AD&D campaign stalled with my MU 36K exp short of 18th level. If I ever GM again it will be in his universe, though I won’t tell the players why I know the senior NPC running the good guy’s organisation so well.
Knowing the background stories of my characters is important to me, no matter what the mechanics of an RPG are. Convention one-shots are not really “my” characters and therefore less satisfying to play.