Quote:
Originally Posted by Dalin
I do believe that most games have satisfying stories embedded in them. They just may require more skill to extract than many tellers have. (Or more time to dedicate to editing and rehearsal.) This, to me, matches real life. Many people bore me with rambling stories from their lives. But the people who captivate my attention with their tales don't necessarily have more exciting things going on; they just know how to build dramatic tension in the telling.
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This seems when I read it to take the position that a story is, for example, something written down as a novel, or a script, or the like, and that an RPG is simply raw material from which a story can be extracted and polished. I tend to define things differently. For me, a story is a
narrative structure. A novel is a means of recording a narrative structure that an author has created (sometimes in the process of writing the words of the novel, and sometimes beforehand; different authors work differently). But a narrative structure can also be embodied in the play of an RPG, during which the narrative is created.
What you are doing when you write a novel based on an RPG is translating a narrative structure into another medium, just as if you were turning it into a film, or a graphic novel, or an opera, or an epic poem (or turning one of those into a novel). And the fact that a novel, or a script, can be polished at leisure before it's presented to an audience makes it capable of more economy than an RPG session, where the narrative comes into being as the audience experiences it and participates in creating it. (There's also the factor that a novel, and still more a film,
needs that economy, as few audiences will hold still for spending as many hours on either as players spend in a campaign's play.)
But the RPG session has a theme, and conflict, and characters, and a setting, and props, and dialogue, and perhaps even a climax and dénouement. Really pretty much all the elements of "story" are there.