# What IS Storygaming? Pt II tags: #thoughts You guys remember blog rings? I remember blog rings. They were one of my favorite things of the ancient era. People with a particular passion would write about that particular passion on their blog, and they would find other people who shared it through various means, either meeting them in person or hanging out on the same online forums. They would shake hands and make a gentleman's agreement to link to one another in a little sidebar and refer to one another's posts when it became useful to do so in the course of one of their own. We used to have relatively long-form communication then. People would write out their ideas in more complete forms and toss them back and forth. Things happened. Ideas had their rough edges polished off. Concepts were refined. It was a better day than this of the 280-character pithy reply. Maybe we should go back to those days. Anyway, Spyder [got around to writing a reply this morning](https://allthethings123.blogspot.com/2026/10/what-even-is-storygaming-explaining-joke.html?m=1) to the **[[What IS Storygaming|What IS Storygaming?]]** response I had to his video. You know what that means. Once more into the trenches, my fellows. Am I going to use old-school quote response style? Maybe! It kind of feels appropriate. Let's roll back the days to blogrolls and Usenet. --- ![[The Complete First Edition of The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm (cover).jpg|300]] > 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. Let's start here because it seems like the right place to begin, mainly because it undercuts the whole point of the previous process altogether. It also misses the fact that my previous response was way nicer than my natural inclination is, because I wanted it to actually stand as a potential reference. It's full of grounded examples. It speaks to the exceptions. It's intended to direct people via a mechanism that they will recognize as reasoned argumentation, which they may choose to follow up on or not. I don't want Weirth to find my camp. If he's asking questions, he already knows where it's at. I want him to understand what kind of camp it is, to feel its shape and smell the food cooking on the fires. If he wants to head that way, he's certainly capable of doing so. If he's not, he can go another direction. But more importantly, I don't care about the camp metaphor. The essential question was, what is a thing? I talk about what is a thing. I don't need to dress it up. I don't need to make it colorful and do a little dance. Here's the thing. I'm not trying to do anything per se in terms of persuasion, because that is lost effort. I don't need to persuade someone that story gaming is better than the mode of play that they're already engaged in, because either it is or it isn't. But just as importantly, that's what the OSR dickheads do three quarters of the time online, and I don't want to be one of those guys. There are things that I just won't do: wallow in war crimes, eat babies, torture old ladies for the giggles. But I won't do that.[^1] > 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. I, on the other hand, am going to point out something that Spyder seems to have forgotten here, and it's something that's kind of critical when writing this sort of thing and publishing it online. That's that *the one person that you're talking to is not the one person that you're talking to.* Your audience is everyone who reads it. In order to reach out and communicate with all the people who are reading it, and in fact, most of the people who are going to be reading it, you have to talk about the things that they know and their attitudes, and not just the single point of contact, because you chose to make that not the case when you decided to go wide with the publication and make it public. You've invited the public in, so even the guys in the cheap seats get an opportunity to be seen from the stage. Give them a chance. Talk to them. Here I'm addressing the inevitable group of people who are going to read this from outside, many of whom are going to be coming over from OSR lines because a search turns it up at some point, or they hear it talked about in a conversation. I want to be clear about my stance when it comes to one of the major criticisms that Spyder himself brings up in the course of making this argument. He brings it up, but he doesn't dispose of it. Just like a good enemy, if you don't put a bullet in the back of its head before you walk away, the scene's not really over. You've just deferred the ending. I believe in a nice, solid bit of closure at the end of the scene. Let's also take another one of my infinite diversions and talk about wargaming and its overlap with story gaming. I already touched on this in the original article, but it's worth reinforcing here. Wargamers don't need to be told what story gaming is in any real sense. They already know. They're already doing it for the most part. They're just not doing it on a character-centric level and with mechanics that focus on tactical resolution rather than narrative resolution, but much of the same influences are in play. They *don't* believe that it's reasonable to start up a session with someone having a tacit agreement that there's going to be one *particular* ending. The whole point of wargaming on multiple levels is play to find out, which is a phrase I'm sure you'll find very familiar.[^2] It's also one of the biggest arguments that I hear repeated from the inhabitants of the OSR denigrating story gaming as a methodology, and so it needs to be addressed any time the question of what is story gaming comes up, and it doesn't matter to whom that reply is being crafted. Someone is going to run into the accusation. Get ahead of it. Solve a problem before you have a problem. > 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. Again, you're thinking short term. You're not thinking about solving a broader problem, which is not great, and it leads to the idea that if you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. If you have a hammer and every problem looks like a nail, you're going to be driving nails for the rest of your life. For the record, I essentially disagree that mechanics are a concretization of philosophy. Mechanics can be guided by your philosophy, but they aren't strict reifications. The philosophy has to come first. It's what motivates and grounds, so we have to talk about the philosophy absent mechanics first. Just as when we're talking about **[[NUTS!]]**, we have to talk about World War II and the Two-Hour Wargames line in tension with the **[[Chain Reaction 2023|Chain Reaction]]** rules, which are fast, lightweight, and low complexity. The philosophy comes first. The discussion of what we're trying to do comes first. You establish that, and everything else can be seen through that lens. The mechanics are not necessary to discuss once you get the philosophy communicated. That's not to say that discussing the mechanics will not come, but it's not central to the question. It doesn't answer the question. In fact, it obfuscates the question, and the later you can put it off, the better off you are. > …. 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. Now, if we're going to talk about the difference between 1824 **[[Kriegsspiel]]** and the 1876 Free Kriegsspiel, then we have to talk about the fact that the original did in fact have custom dice, unit hit points, and fog of war, and was quite rigid. Why did fifty years later Free Kriegsspiel come onto the scene and rapidly dominate to the point that it essentially drove rigid Kriegsspiel out of the training space for quite a while? Because the philosophy is fundamentally more effective at doing what it is intended to do, to address the story of the training exercise without over-defining the narrative. The philosophy prefigures the mechanics, and if you can't nail down and understand the philosophy first, you have no chance with the mechanics. They become meaningless, just some numbers or words floating in a directionless haze. First, start with the direction, then put your feet one in front of the other. Again, you're not just talking to a single person when you post to the universe. Just like right now, I'm not only speaking to Spyder. I'm speaking to every reader who comes across this, either as a direct response or later, possibly years later, maybe decades later, when they're looking at a history of role-playing games and who was talking about what and how. Don't think small if you're posting large. > 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. All explanations are ridiculous at the heart of them. Why are you trying to explain a thing? Why are you trying to communicate a thing in the first place? If you're trying to communicate a thing that has been repeatedly mischaracterized for decades, it behooves you to harp on the central themes (ironically) and hammer them specifically in this case. It's a direct example of how everyone at a certain level comprehends the basic philosophy of story games. The example exists in order to communicate it to people who don't know that they know yet. Again, I'm talking to a larger audience. I know this is going out on X and Facebook and Mastodon and Bluesky. It's going everywhere in the world. There are people who are going to read it who need this reiteration. We're going to argue about a particular point here. I don't believe that stories are narratives that evoke theme. That's too reductionist, and it doesn't really take into account that travelogues are stories. The evocation of theme needs to be differentiated by intent and accident. When I say accident, I don't mean *something bad that happened without planning*. I mean *something unplanned that happened*. A travelogue can have a theme, but that theme emerges because the person is traveling and talking about what they've seen, what they've done, and how they feel about it. They aren't necessarily *trying* to evoke a theme, but regardless, a theme will emerge.[^3] This is looping back to my differentiation between narrative and story. In a certain way, from another direction, it's the difference between intentional imposition and emergence from below. A wargamer understands that in the course of multiple sessions, possibly in the context of a campaign, certain themes will emerge because sometimes the dice like you and sometimes they don't. Sometimes they like a particular character and sometimes they don't. Sometimes they love close calls and skin-of-your-teeth escapes, and sometimes they just love to watch you ground down, to watch men fight through the blood and the mud with their friends dying all around them, looking into the face of hopelessness. Sometimes they even break and run. A wargamer understands that story, like theme, is inevitable. Story happens whenever we tell one another about a series of events that happened after the fact. That's where the story actually lives. Themes are subsidiary even to that *ex post facto* manifestation. > 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. Actually, let's take *another* diversion to the side and talk about this Dumas illustration, because I think it is central to the failure of Spyder's presentation. As far as I can see here, he can't decide if he wants to evoke the *feeling* of a Dumas story, or if he wants to talk about the **[Count of Monte Cristo](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1184)** in particular, with its elements emerging from the architecture of gameplay. The problem, for the sake of the discussion of *what is story gaming*, is that introducing those specific elements with the intention for those *specific* elements to come about is exactly the negative that story gaming has been accused of since the first derogatory words were put down about it decades ago. Repeatedly going to the well of the **Count of Monte Cristo** is a failure of this piece, and it may be the *crux* of the failure of this piece. If Spyder had instead talked about evoking the themes, motifs, and feeling of swashbuckling literature as embodied in **[The Three Musketeers](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1257)** or the **Count of Monte Cristo**, then we'd have a significant and serious argument. At that point, we could move on to talking about particular scenes and how they might come about in the context of play. That would be reasonable, and it would provide a mechanism for grounding the ideas in the proper context, but he skips that part, which is vitally necessary, and goes right to "I want to make the scene at the end of **The Count of Monte Cristo** happen." What he means is *"I want to allow the scene at the end of **The Count of Monte Cristo** to happen."* This is a very different thing. I know what he means, but then I also can read what he says. You have to be able to say what you mean. When I say that, Spyder does this all the time. I mean it any time the philosophical and phenomenological, for lack of a better term, grounding for story gaming comes up. He wants to go straight to *"look at this cool thing you can do"* and not *"here's why this cool thing will happen, given this context in philosophy, no matter what."* We can get very particular here if we want to and point out that the phrase *"and trying to convert it to Dumas"* is a failure of communicating what story gaming is about. He's already bought into the beginning of the discussion, supposedly. You don't need to try and convert what he already knows to Dumas. Now should be the point at which you talk about how story gaming, a concept that's already been communicated to him, then *allows and facilitates* the emergence of things like scenes from Dumas. But that, again, Spyder didn't do. > Once. Again. With. Fucking. Feeling. > > WEIRTH KNOWS ALL THIS ALREADY. *SO DO MOST OF THE BROSR*. This. Doesn't. Need. To be. Said. Objection, Your Honor. Failure of imagination. Moreover, telling me what someone else knows, thinks, feels, or is capable of expressing. We've gone well beyond the issue of whether it was a single discussion with someone else, again because it's been posted publicly and expressed within social media. Besides, given what the OSR in particular knows and says, I'm not sure I'm willing to grant that they do, in fact, know the basis of the underlying philosophy, or that you can play **[[Dungeons and Dragons|D&D]]** as a story game. In fact, in my experience, they expressly, actively, and vociferously object to the idea. Not only that you should, but that you can. That's anathema. It's crossing the streams. You can't be allowed to do that. In fact, you shouldn't even consider it. So it is reasonable to express it, not just for the conversation of the moment, but as an evergreen resource going forward, which, again, some digital archaeologists may uncover in a hundred years and want to think about what this weird discussion is all about. If you're going to write in public, think about tomorrow, not just the moment. When someone is talking to you on a grander scale than the single conversation that you're having, because they weren't part of it, they weren't there, and they don't care, maybe that's not the angle to pursue. > 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. Now this is just wrong, and not only wrong, but an underhanded jab. A mistake did not lead to the creation of the Forge. An intentional choice, grounded in the experience in the TRPG hobby of the time, driven by men of both ego and capacity,[^4] led to the creation of the Forge. The Forge itself led directly to what is a significant backbone of the theory and practice that is responsible for the modern indie RPG hobby as the cottage industry that it is. Note the careful evasion of actually defining what that "mistake" was. If you're going to call it out, you've got to call it out. If you're going to evoke it, you've got to evoke it. Speaking of threads that never got tied off. Perhaps the largest mistake here is to think that this is a personal message. What's the title on this particular growth in my digital garden? "What is story gaming?" That's not about a particular conversation or a particular person or even a particular story. That title is consciously chosen, along with the cover that goes with it. I specifically picked up the idea of the fairy tale, the quote "fairy story," as central, an illustration, because it's universal. I want to talk about universal themes, not of stories necessarily, but of design. What is story gaming? How do you approach that question? How do you present the answer? I do it by starting to talk about the underlying philosophy, to establish the premise, to explain the reasons, and to follow that up by just providing universal examples. I'm actually trying to answer the question. I'm not trying to persuade any particular person of anything. Now I will say that I have a significant and weird urge to actually deconstruct a scene from an established **D&D** module that's well known and well loved and show how it would be run from a story gaming perspective. Really, I already have the start of that with my **[[The Solofull Fane|SoloFane]]** play that I haven't gotten back to in far too long, which takes a very nice **[[ShadowDark]]** scenario and begins to change it into an **[[Ironsworn]]** experience.[^5] > 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. You asked a question. I answered it. I didn't have any context to live up to. I had a question. It's a subject on which I've given considerable thought and murdered considerable electrons trying to talk to people about over the decades. What, you didn't think there was going to be a treatise attached to it? It's not just an explanation for you. It's an explanation to everyone and posterity, like everything else is. The problem for this paragraph of yours, this penultimate point, is that you didn't actually provide a practical demonstration of the philosophy of story gaming. You talked a lot of hype about how it could happen, but you didn't show how it does happen. You never grounded it. You never landed the plane. You could have easily done it from the beginning. Your 24-minute walk could have been a 10-minute distillation, especially given the "he already knows that" bits, which really are the actual explication of the process and thinking of story gaming. If he already knows all that, then you didn't need to have that conversation in the first place, and you certainly didn't need to make it public. If he didn't know all that, then my approach of explaining the philosophy and the grounding motivations followed by more literal examples is far superior to your hype-man approach. That's before we even talk about the failure of the **Count of Monte Cristo** illustration. That was just a dud across the board. I don't convince a wargamer by doing anything. I don't need to convince a wargamer, especially if they're asking questions about what it is. I don't need to persuade them. They're already doing it. All I have to do is say, *"Hey, the same methods that you're using to think about tactical gaming, if you apply those to think about how the story moves and why the story moves —maybe with some mechanics that help you with that along the way — you're golden. Keep doing what you're doing."* That doesn't make for much of a discussion. [^1]: Appropriate soundtrack ensues:  [^2]: I've said this one a few times in the last six months, and I'll keep saying it: [[RPGaDay 2026 - 05 - Burden|RPG a Day 2026 - 05: Burden]], [[RPGaDay 2026 - 08 - Resolve|RPG a Day 2026 - 08: Resolve]], [[RPGaDay 2026 - 10 - Secret|RPG a Day 2026 - 10: Secret]], [[RPGaDay 2026 - 29 - Labour|RPG a Day 2026 - 29: Labour]], [[Reddit - First time GMing CBR-PNK|Reddit: First time GMing CBR+PNK]], and [[Running Breathless]]. [^5]: I've been meaning to get back to that for literally half a year and still haven't done it. Apologies to CF, I don't know why it hasn't happened. I've got all the tools to do it now and to do it in a very clear and readable way, so that is moving to the top of my "I should do this" list. [^3]: At the very least, one — and probably several — if you have any thoughts at all beyond being an empty-headed travel blogger. See: every empty-headed travel blogger. [^4]: No small amount of ego and a surprising amount of capacity, all told.