The Spurious Novelty of the Story Game

Since awakening from my long, gameless slumber, I have discovered that gamers have come to differentiate two tribes among themselves that did not exist in the time before: OSR gamers and Story Game gamers. It seems that this distinction developed on the internet over the last fifteen years.

For those of you who have participated in this development, the present musing will seem out of touch. That is the point of it. What you have done is strange to me.

In earlier musings, I remarked about a spurious history that has developed concerning the OSR scene. “Old-School” is a retro-clad innovation, not a true return to the old. OSR games are often presented as a revival of the one true authentic Original Game, but they aren’t.

Story Games are, by contrast, seen as edgy and innovative, introducing deep stuff that will just blow your mind!

It took me a while just to understand the name “Story Games,” and even to realize it was its own thing, because old-time role-playing games were always story games, with rules, moreover, made for breaking and adjusting and reworking for the purposes of making a fun, interactive story in which everybody collaborated.

From my perspective, the Story Game, often precious and pretentious, presented as artsy, smart innovation, the opposite of “traditional,” is often not nearly so novel as some participants seem to hold.

When did this happen?

According to one authority named Andy about eight years ago, who runs story-games.com, the term Story Game gained distinct life around the end of 2005 and people ran with it. It was born from a negative reaction to a new role-playing game called My Life with Master (which looks fun to me).

As I have pieced it together, thanks to all the chatter of gamers in blogs, “Story Games” refer to a sect of gamers playing role-playing games that emphasize features that were supposedly not built into “traditional” role-playing games.

It strikes me, though, that many of the characteristics of the “Story Game” were there already, in the old “traditional” days, at least in my group and many other groups I knew. It is both a matter of how we played and of how the games we played were designed. This is not to say, “I was into the cool stuff before you kids were.” Even if I was. It’s to say that the divide between the groups is based to a large extent on a collectively understood spurious history of how “traditional” things used to be before the cool, smart gamers created and sold their products. If OSR generally means D&D clones and Story Games mean the new, “indie” stuff, it appears that dozens of innovative old games have been forgotten in this schema. A Stone Age of Neanderthal faithful D&D players has been dreamed up to fill the gap. That’s not how it was.

A list of supposedly distinctive Story Game features

Four years ago, These Heterogenous Tasks compiled a list of features to explain what makes a Story Game different from a “trad game,” as I’ve seen them called. Below, I reproduce the bullet points collected there to represent “Story Games,” and I add my commentary on whether or not I think these features were part of the role-playing game scene in the ’80s and early ‘90s. The upshot is that Story Games do present some novelties, but not nearly so many as gamers today seem to think.

I’m pretty sure that These Heterogenous Tasks did not intend this to be an authoritative list of features, but it will do for this discussion.

• Weakened, atomised and distributed GM authority.

As a built-in feature of role-playing games, this is genuinely a new feature of the new-fangled Story Games—except that there were already many playing groups early on in which the GM role rotated. People occasionally took turns GMing from session to session. That is different from multiple demiurges in a single session.

Ars Magica, which deserves far more credit than Vampire (by one of the same authors) for pioneering story-oriented mechanics, was explicitly designed to allow GM rotation and the creation of a “saga” (rather than a campaign). This brings us back to 1987. When I played Ars Magica in its second edition, we players actually did rotate as GMs, and player characters changed hands. Again, this is something from the late ‘80s.

It is true, however, that GMs were generally regarded as the lawgivers in the old days, without much variation. If Story Games have overturned this and empowered players to determine more about the direction of the story, then, yes, this is a new feature.

• An emphasis on collaborative creativity throughout play. 

Don’t tell me that gamers in the ’80s did not emphasize collaborative creativity!

My players often worked with me like this. I’d tell them to make up a background for their characters in the games I was organizing, and they’d invent countries and whole cultures that we would incorporate into a setting. Somebody would put them on a map. When I played games with other GMs, it worked the same way. We normally collaborated, unless it was a purchased game supplement that fed us a setting. Players would ask other players about the backgrounds they invented, and they’d riff of each other’s ideas.

Of course, role-playing games are always collaborative in play, from beginning to end.

• Low level of required preparation.

This is an odd thing to oppose to “traditional games.” We all played games that we sometimes organized extemporaneously on the fly. Knowing the rules and wanting to have fun was enough if we had the energy to be spontaneously creative.

• No Myth. (Meaning no prefabricated back-story.)

We often played like this in the old days. When I ran Keep on the Borderlands out of the red box, as a boy, I had no idea about the Grand Duchy of Karameikos. The world was unknown to the players and to the DM alike. We shaped it and created it through play.

I usually hated the settings that other people published. They were usually terrible, in my view. Still, I bought them, hoping for something good.

• Explicit narrative structure. 

We often explicitly talked about narrative “scenes” in our games in the old days. We would pause to set scenes and used them as narrative units to organize play. We were aware of when we narrated chunks of time quickly for the story’s sake and when we slowed down the passage of time for close-ups on detailed action. They were not features of game mechanics, but we talked about narrative structure consciously.

• Player success detached from player-character success. 

Here again, this is both old-time and OSR. I guess players do not want to identify with their characters, these days.

My groups had great fun with failures. Some of my players loved to play troubled heroes, flawed characters, screw-ups, and even characters who looked forward to a certain kind of death that would tie up their stories with a narrative bow. Success was in the story-telling, not “winning.”

• Non-immersionist

Some of the hardest-core OSR bloggers insist that they aren’t acting, but they are playing a game. Sounds “non-immersionist” to me! I think our degree of immersion in the old days varied by game, by session, and by player. It was a matter of personal taste—as it is today.

• PC – PC conflict. 

This is really a matter of what a story calls for, not a feature of “Story Games” per se.

Anybody who played Paranoia (1984) has witnessed conflict between PCs!

I will never forget the fantasy game I ran in which one player from one of my gaming groups agreed to join the other, close-knit group that he had not played with before. Suddenly, there was a new and highly experienced player at the table. He brought a mysterious new wizardly character into the story. He quickly made himself useful, so they grew to trust him… but eventually it became clear that his character was a villain! Ha ha, he and I had planned it all along! The guest from my other group (also an experienced GM) delighted in playing an antagonist as a PC. When the original group killed him off, he had fun, too, and everybody knew it was for the sake of the story. No hard feelings.

 

Generally, though, conflict between PCs in the old days was avoided because players didn’t want to fight in real life. Role-playing games that enshrine PC-PC conflict in the rules must be a new thing.

When I ran Pendragon, characters competed for the same tournament prizes and fought over brides. It was what the story called for. Surviving a dungeon together doesn’t call for conflict between PCs, if they want to live.

• Simple rules.

How is this a “Story Game” feature? Early games had simple rules. That’s part of the point of the OSR: a return to simple. Sure, there were early games like Powers & Perils (now with a few fans remaining) that had atrociously opaque complexity. But then, you probably never saw this game, if you ever even heard of it. It was expensive and complex, not a winning combo.

• Little emphasis on simulationist mechanics.

All early role-playing games self-consciously abandoned an attempt to simulate everything. Just think of hit points. (Not again!) Gygax wrote on p. 34 of the Players Handbook (1978) that it would be “ridiculous” to regard hit points as a realistic device (even though some people do), adding that “the majority of hit points are symbolic of combat skill, luck (bestowed by supernatural powers), and magical forces.”

The whole OSR is based on a game mechanics model of hit points per level. Scarcely any feature of the earliest games is truly “simulationist” in its mechanics.

• No dice.

One of the points that OSR players constantly make is that dice should not be necessary when “player skill” suffices. You describe what you are doing and the DM makes a ruling. Once again, it looks like OSR style is Story Game style. And yes, that’s how we often played. You didn’t roll for things that were obvious. It wasn’t no-dice, but it was low-dice. Story Games with no dice are not so different.

• Low focus on combat.

Check. This is generally different in Story Games. But not entirely. We had games like Teenagers from Outer Space (1987) that were not about combat, and the sensational Call of Cthulhu (1981), which was about investigation of horrific mysteries—even if players of the latter were often allowed to turn it into a game of Dynamite & Shoggoths.

• Failure-driven narrative.

My groups had plenty of games about struggling losers. Even in the heroic games, the best moments were often those in which terrible losses occurred. I’ll never forget the quest to save one of the character’s sons that ended in failure. The hero had to watch his son die after months of play. Everybody in the room was crushed.

We always expected some failure as a part of our stories, and its unpredictability made it delicious. This is not new.

• No power curve.

A-ha! Here is another new thing. Almost all the old games assumed that characters should grow in power, not in some other personal dimension (even though they did).

• A focus on political and social themes.

It’s silly to say that this is distinct of Story Games. In no way did early role-playing games lack political and social themes. Often there were too many kids in the games to go deep, but when we matured, we insisted on these kinds of issues.

• A focus on the interpersonal. 

We had plenty of this in the old days, but usually it emerged through play rather than being programmed in from character creation.

There were games like Amber: The Diceless Roleplaying Game (1991) that emphasized these features almost a decade and a half before “Story Game” became a thing. Nobody I knew thought Amber was really playable, though, and I only knew one player who had read any of the novels on which it was based (to the game’s detriment).

• A focus on the intrapersonal. 

Champions (1981) introduced rules for Dependents and other traits that invoked intrapersonal issues in game mechanics. Pendragon came out in 1985, a game in which a second core set of characteristics is required for each character: competing virtues and vices that come into play. Players roll against them and act on them. GURPS (1986) is the game that comes to mind with the most- and best-developed intrapersonal mechanics. I think mid-’80s games count as old-time and “traditional.” Intrapersonal mechanics are nothing new.

• A heavy emphasis on player safety. 

As in “safe spaces.” This is a new feature of games, but that is because this concept of safety did not exist under this name in the days of early role-playing games!

• Designed for single-session play.

Many of the most famous “classic” D&D modules were designed for single-session play at tournaments. They even say so on the cover. People would drop in, take a pregenerated character, and play for one session. It was standard for early games to come with pre-generated characters for single-session play. It still is. Not untraditional.

• Experimental and indie.

Needless to say, all early role-playing games were experimental and indie. Everything was amateur back then. Every new game was an experiment. Game companies sprouted, failed, and folded with frequency.

• Informed by movies and TV.

This, too, is pretty obvious in all early role-playing games. It was the premise in games like TSR’s The Adventures of Indiana Jones Role-Playing Game (1984), or the James Bond 007 role-playing game (1983). Modules for these games literally followed movies that players had seen already, scene by scene (with the term “scene” used in modules. You were playing the movie, get it?).

The feedback loop between table-top role-playing games and visual media is still roaring. This is not a “non-traditional” feature.

Assessment

When you boil these remarks down, it seems that there are only a few features that truly distinguish the newfangled Story Games from actual old-time, “traditional” role-playing games. It’s something like this:

The so-called Story Games are more likely to tell encapsulated short tales about things other than fighting and acquisition of power, such as human personalities and emotional needs, and to do so with a weak GM or without a GM.

That’s all. Yes, these include some real, creative developments in role-playing games. Well done, everybody! But it’s not nearly as much innovation as it’s made out to be, a break in tradition. The tendencies were there before, often realized in games published long ago. Let’s not make myths about it.

Some of the characteristics of Story Games, therefore, are new, but marginally. Mostly they had clear antecedents. From this view, the split between the OSR and Story Games is just a matter of recent preferences. What is new is the audience for games like that due to a change of demography among gamers, both a maturing population and newcomers. It’s a recent divergence of popular playing styles that turned into two distinct social scenes. OSR and Story Games both have much in common, but each one exists only by contradistinction with the other. OSR would not exist without Story Games, and vice versa.

In the ’80s we already had games like Toon (1984) and Teenagers from Outer Space (1987) about things other than fighting monsters in dungeons. I ran both of these briefly. These were “indie” games then. Paranoia was like that when it came out (1984). We thought of it as an art game more than something we’d actually play (although I did run it). In the ’90s, it seemed obvious to me and other gamers that there were role-playing groups playing games solely about interpersonal interaction and relationships, where powers were just window-dressing. We were playing games around 1990, 1991, that did that. Whole sessions without combat were common and unremarkable. Champions, GURPS, Pendragon, and even our dumb swords & sorcery games had levels of drama driven by story sense that would push them well into Story Game territory by these standards.

In conclusion

Role-playing games have always had plenty of “Story Game” features. That is because the time before the Two Tribes was not “Old-School.”

Therefore, both tendencies are presented and understood falsely, to a degree. It seems to me that today, Old-School is taken to mean practically just D&D clones and hacks, and Story Game might just mean almost everything else. That is not a useful distinction, and it does not describe “traditional” versus “indie.”

Ultimately, what varies is what players are seeking from their games. You can play any edition of D&D to run a soap opera story without combat, ending the story with a divorce and profound musings on the nature of isolation and death. You really can. Maybe you should. Maybe you already have, if you are lucky.

Meanwhile, everybody keep making fun games that make you think and feel—as we always have.