Story Games: Difficult to Sample
Aug. 22nd, 2017 01:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
madunkiegI want to write about genres, but I've encountered a problem with writing about the genre of story games. This doesn't refer to story games which include all role-playing games and other games. I'm referring to a style of game that is usually talked about in threads like, "Story game-ifying (insert name of RPG here)."
This definitely points to the existence of a genre. The threads are based on how different The Forge's style of rules are from the traditional ways of building RPGs. What they fail to get is that the experience is different because the players and GM are treated differently. Yes, the rules matter, but it's not just the rules. It appears in the how-to-run and how-to-play advice that accompanies the rules. Sometimes there are rules governing the creation of the setting. Instead of leaving it up to a GM, story games give that power of creation to everyone.
What makes this so difficult to write about is that these threads usually don't mention games in them, only rules from games. Of course, if you're familiar with enough story games, you can probably guess which game they took inspiration from, but those are only guesses.
Of course, there are other threads which call for lists of games that possess a certain rule, such as lists of GM-less games, but counting games from those threads assumes that all story games are gm-less, which is far from true. As I mentioned in my previous post, that sort of turns the concept of genre on its head anyways.
I'll have to think about this to determine what, if any, method could be used to build my research sample.
This definitely points to the existence of a genre. The threads are based on how different The Forge's style of rules are from the traditional ways of building RPGs. What they fail to get is that the experience is different because the players and GM are treated differently. Yes, the rules matter, but it's not just the rules. It appears in the how-to-run and how-to-play advice that accompanies the rules. Sometimes there are rules governing the creation of the setting. Instead of leaving it up to a GM, story games give that power of creation to everyone.
What makes this so difficult to write about is that these threads usually don't mention games in them, only rules from games. Of course, if you're familiar with enough story games, you can probably guess which game they took inspiration from, but those are only guesses.
Of course, there are other threads which call for lists of games that possess a certain rule, such as lists of GM-less games, but counting games from those threads assumes that all story games are gm-less, which is far from true. As I mentioned in my previous post, that sort of turns the concept of genre on its head anyways.
I'll have to think about this to determine what, if any, method could be used to build my research sample.