# What IS Storygaming? Pt IV tags: #thoughts ![[The Complete First Edition of The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm (cover).jpg|300]] Here we go again. I take a day off to go and run some errands, have some fun, eat way too much food, and I come home to discover that what I really should have been doing is working on answering some of the deepest philosophical questions in tabletop role-playing games. Well, okay, fine, if you force my hand, I suppose I can do that. [Spyder has written a reply](https://allthethings123.blogspot.com/2026/10/over-mechanizing-rpgs.html?m=1) to [[What IS Storygaming - Pt III|my previous reply]] to his reply to my previous reply to his original post. Look, you don't have to follow the logic here too far. Just realize it's a thread of conversation and exploration. It's fine. You want to read it if you have interest in some fairly abstruse ideas or intellectual fencing. I'm not here to judge. Let's get stuck in. ## Taking the Field > This post is attempting to kill two birds with one stone. We'll see how it works. Oh dear, I can see this is going to be interesting when you attempt to take on two directions. You pretty much have to either unify the fronts or realize that you should have left them separate and dealt with them one by one. This is not necessarily a bad start, but I'm curious now. > He told me to sit on it. I'm deeply amused that an alternative interpretation of this line is that I told him to shove it up his ass, which makes me look like an absolute electric fucktard. I love it. You can't hear it through text, but I'm sitting here chuckling. Again, I'm sure he didn't imply that at all or intend it. But damn it, I'm having a good time. It's at this moment that I hit the video from Driving and Dragons that Spyder had included in his reply, which is forked. I'm going to link it directly here for a couple of reasons. One, it provides useful context, and two, this is the kind of thing that I like to make sure gets a few more readers/viewers.  So if I drive a couple of pieces of traffic to his YouTube channel, all the better. I get the bizarre feeling that he and I would get along just fine, not least because we undoubtedly have the same taste in food, given his accent. We probably don't live that far apart. The only reason *I* don't have an accent is that I grew up on Raymond Burr in the original **Godzilla**. Try not to think about that too much.[^1] > I'm not sure how that could be, I'm an absolutely clear and concise person! Ross from Mythic Mountain has never spent *hours* trying to decode my rantings and musings to see if I'm crazy or secretly brilliant! Somehow he got more out of what I was saying than I did. Figures. Wait, you get some crazy stalker who spends actual time in their life sitting down and going over everything you say? How do I get one of these? I'm intensely jealous. I deserve this. I've worked really hard over the decades to get a crazy, hyper-analytical asshole stalker. Some kids get all the luck. > Because I like Medieval labyrinths, I like talking about menticide/brainwashing, and I *love* being absolutely clear in everything I write. Menticide/brainwashing? My Ron Edwards sensor just triggered on the perimeter. I hope we're not going to do the *"D&D causes brain damage"* thing again[^2] this decade, because I'm not sure I could provide a useful counterargument against the assumption anymore. Once upon a time, I fought that fight in the original arena, getting bloody from the hairline down, holding aloft a bronze sword at the end, but feeling very tired. These days I'm not even sure I'd lift the blade. It's not a thing I want to believe, but damn it if some people don't go really far out of their way to make me believe it. > … but Lex is a Randian Objectivist, best of my knowledge, and that means I gotta try and say the unsaid. Let's be complete here: a militant atheist, Randian Objectivist whose father was the pastor of a Baptist church, mother was the bookkeeper, sister was (and still is) the organist. Grew up in the South and still lives there. Just so I'm positioned in the fiction here properly, because I'm really curious about what's about to happen. ## Humanity Needs No Help Hurting Itself > As an Orthodox Christian, *I don't think the natural state of man actually works that well.* Humans need *help* to operate in a way that doesn't just naturally destroy them. You have to guide human behavior. Oh. That. Well, I suppose it would be reasonable for me to say that I don't think the natural state of man actually works that well either, but it's sort of like the statement that democracy is the worst form of government ever seen by man, except for all the others.[^3] It's inherently true, but it doesn't define an answer that argues against it. Now it just happens to be that I *don't* think that humans need help to operate in a way that doesn't just naturally destroy them, because they still exist all over the planet, which means that they haven't actually destroyed themselves yet, which means we have no example of them actually succeeding.[^4] In fact, the obvious example of their success at *not* destroying themselves is all around us, taking on board a multitude of methodologies that don't necessarily imply or require guidance from without, and certainly not guidance from any of *us*. Though if people *want* to be guided by me, I am perfectly willing to be your guru, your God, or your dictator, and I'm probably a lot better than most of the other volunteer choices. I will at least pretend to do it reluctantly. > God *damnit*, Lex! Fine. You're right. I take issue with the following statement you made, which Daniel indirectly agreed with in the above video: That's right, I kick the crutches out from under cripples hobbling in front of me when they're trying to start that weird four-legged run. I am the Reaper's Blade, the deliberate stumbling block placed in your way to force you to be stronger, faster, better in every way. I am the Devil Tiger, imbued with such inclinations by the Eternal Kami to challenge all, and in so doing, refine them in the cleansing fire. I know what I'm up to. > Whether or not humans listen when being told what to do. This is a central point of friction in enough faerie tales that making it a central mechanic wouldn't go amiss. Let's touch base on this one because we're probably going to have to circle back. There is something that I say quite a lot, and I refer to it quite a lot, not just about RPGs and RPG design, but about social media, human culture, and society in general: ***"All things are not one thing."*** I've made that both bold and italic because I think it's vital to communicate. I think it's something that gets lost in almost every discussion. I think it is part of the arrogance that comes across in a lot of people's presentation. I think it's part of the attitude that is a real hindrance to communication online and in person. It's the inherent assumption that all things reduce to *one thing*, and if you can make that *one thing* perfect, everything is solved. If you can make one perfect thing, everything is perfect. Firstly, I question whether or not one thing can ever be perfect, but more importantly for this discussion, the thought that everything might be summed up in a nice, easy little package with a lovely bow on top is anathema to the way I think about the world and how I see the world thinking about itself. Why this chunk of stuff about one single line? Because I think *whether or not humans listen when being told what to do* is a fine thing to concretize in a mechanic for a game, a very specific game, a game that is intended to be *about* humans and whether or not they listen when they're told to do things. We need to establish what it is that we're trying to do up front, before someone assumes that we're trying to describe an omnipresent solution. Assuming that we're talking about creating a single game intended to have that as a theme, then yes, it needs to be mechanized, just as most theme-specific games need to have mechanics that reify those themes.[^5] > And then, yes, pretty much stick to "we know how to make a faerie tale, we know what faerie tales are". I would argue that one piece of friction will go a long way to making it feel authentic. For a specific game that aims to be about a specific theme, really, you can get by with that as pretty much your core mechanic. It's not that far off from a **[[Loner]]**-style single operation resolution system. It probably needs some sort of advantage/disadvantage mechanic to go along with it, which I will leave as an exercise to the reader, but it's a very straightforward microgame. If I had to put together a title for it, I'd be hard pressed to do better than **Book of Job**. ## On Sticks, and Where They Come From > My issue with your statement, Lex, is that *human nature requires sticks so they think to look for (or return to) carrots.* > > And, on top of that, stories require friction in order to work. Friction is at the heart of stories! And from just a basic knowledge of human nature, *people don't like using sticks*, even if they're necessary as a funnel. Asking people to be masochistic is wrong. Mechanics are necessary to help to supply the stick, so that way people aren't thinking of ways to hurt each other. Because, yes, people perseverating on how to hurt each other is a bad thing. > > Stories need friction. Humans are bad at friction. Mechanics help take the burden of making friction off of humans. Now we're going. The engine is turning. The locomotive is starting to pull out of the station. Something is actually getting said here. I think it's wrong, but something is getting said, and I prefer that to nothing getting said. I don't think human nature requires sticks to make them look for carrots. That's built into the system. That's the whole point of finding things pleasurable and finding things painful. I don't think they require sticks. I think they will find sticks no matter what. Sticks exist. That is their nature. The nature of humanity is to find sticks, even if they happen to be in a place that doesn't have any at the moment. They will make sticks out of something else, and then they will beat themselves with it. It's an amazing thing to watch, this self-flagellating behavior, but because they're perfectly happy to introduce complexity and problems for themselves even when they don't have it, I don't think we have to introduce it. Now on the issue of stories, we have a little more coherence. Friction literally is at the heart of stories. Every good story involves the three critical questions:[^6] - What does this character want? - Why can't they have it? - What are they going to do about it? Inherently, stories require those things to be identified, presented, explored, and either resolved or subverted by the end of the experience. Stories are inevitable because people choose their own sticks and start beating themselves with them, given any opportunity. Anything that you want to tell somebody as a series of connected events, i.e. something that becomes a story, involves answering those three questions about yourself or a third party or a fictional entity, whatever. Even a travelogue, which notionally eschews story in the sense of dramatic narrative, still has a narrative that adheres to the three critical questions. A character begins in one place. They want to be in another place, but they can't do it because it requires traveling to that place. So they resolve to travel to that place and record what they see along the way. That's it. It's a travelogue. It's literally the most simplified narrative setup available, with no inherent drama. Yet somehow the good ones always stumble on evoked drama. > Asking people to be masochistic is wrong. You never have to ask them. They are going to find a way to do it sooner or later, one way or another. Humans are innately unable to be satisfied for very long at a time. > Mechanics are necessary to help to supply the stick, so that way people aren't thinking of ways to hurt each other. Because, yes, people perseverating on how to hurt each other is a bad thing. I think this is another point which is just inherently wrong, because mechanics don't have to just supply the stick. You can, and it has certainly been done, just create a set of mechanics hinging on carrots. Reward the things you want to incentivize. Ignore the things you want to disincentivize. You get an extremely different architecture of play out of it, but it's still a valid architecture of play. Looking at mechanics as purely a way to apply sticks is just wrong, even when sometimes they do exist to apply a stick. I challenge Spyder to sit down and put together a micro game that only has carrots. It can only incentivize action, not punish action. No, I don't mean it should be parodic. I mean you need to seriously think that it can be played. Humans are great at friction, quite frankly. History is made of friction between humans. Society is made of friction. Making friction is trivial. Being oppositional and devoted to simply stopping someone else is the easiest form of action. This is why adversarial GMing had and has such a hold on a portion of traditionally architected RPGs. It is the simplest thing to get across. Here are the characters, they want to do something. Here's the GM, your job is to stop them from doing that thing using these rules. Players, your job is to fight the GM using these rules. Go. How many times have you heard this being the core of game advice? It's easy. It requires no thought at all. Mechanics are not there to supply the stick. Honestly, they never really have been. Mechanics are there to resolve conflicts between people or between ideas. That's it. That's their only job. That's what they do. If we have a conflict in vision about what should happen next, in this story, rather than stab each other and the winner getting to write the next line, we pick up some dice or pull chits from a jar or flip a coin and accept that our role is to take that outcome as determinate. That's it. That's what mechanics do. They are neither a carrot nor a stick, really. They just resolve conflicts. Conflicts are where the question of carrots and sticks come in.[^7] ## Mississippi Story Flow > The structure *frees* you from your own exhaustion, carrying you just far enough to where you can get started. The repetition enables you to stop repeating yourself. This is interesting to me, not because it's inherently true. It turns out that yes, structure can free you from not seeing the forest for the trees through repetition. I'm not arguing that. I'd say it's been reified in storygaming several times through a particular aspect of mechanics. That is, highly structured turn phases or game phases in which a general type of scene plays out in the same places in every story managed by those mechanics. A lot of those lean on play and novelization structures, particularly screenplays, making use of the almost ritualistic approach to playing out stories within the context to reveal something every time it's run through. A particularly interesting example of taking this to what I think is about as far as you should is **[[Polaris - Chivalric Tragedy at the Utmost North|Polaris: Chivalric Tragedy at the Utmost North]]**. Not only is the sequence of play highly ritualized and the positions of the characters within the narrative relate to one another, but the entire mechanical resolution system has no use for dice or even GMs. It is based on ritual phrase responses between the narrative roles embodied by the player and their characters at the table. If you've never read this game, you absolutely should because it's fantastic. It's also incredibly depressing and thus wonderful for casting characters in sharp relief. Get your hands on it and the expansion. > At the beginning of every session each player asks and answers a question from the standpoint of their characters. These short conversations are used during the session, in a pre-determined "flow": I'm amused and ironically gratified that this essentially just recapitulates my critical questions at the beginning of a session.[^8] > This little structure is *not* a railroad, but a series of thematic links that let you plug in whatever you want, in an order that you can rely upon. Things do *not* get old, but instead you can riff and trust that you're going to go somewhere good because you have the structure. Now, granted, that's a very specific structure, and it's going to limit what you can achieve, but what it takes away it gives a *lot* more, if that's what you're going for. I'm going to do something unexpected: I'm going to agree with all of this. That is exactly what you've described. It provides an architecture, a skeleton from which to hang the meat of a game, where the game is a series of events that provide an experience worth retelling to someone else. Absolutely true. It's not a railroad so much as it is a riverbed. Not every kind of story fits into the riverbed, but that's why there are multiple rivers. However, there are a shockingly large number of stories that can be told between particular banks. ## Legislating Morality > ## So when Daniel wonders > > if mechanics can fix an "attitude problem," my answer is: no, but they can support fragile intent. They give willing players a path to walk when their own creative willpower runs out. And *everyone's* runs out from time to time. I would say that mechanics can't fix an attitude problem any more than putting laws in place can correct a moral issue or societal issue. I would go further and say that putting mechanics into place with the expectation that it can correct an attitude problem is more likely to make that problem worse than it is to actually solve the problem. Laws do not solve problems. Laws only encapsulate how we've agreed to respond to problems. Likewise, mechanics do not solve problems. They encapsulate how we've agreed to resolve problems, and those problems are limited to the context of the game, whereas an attitude exists beyond the context of the game, and as such cannot be addressed by mechanics in any way, shape, or form. Incidentally, this is one of my contentions with the X card and *"safety mechanisms"* in games. They are mechanics that propose to solve a problem that exists outside the context of the game. That's not how this works. That's not how anything works. You have to be an immense idiot to believe that it can, or you have to be wishing so hard that it *could* work that you're blind to observable reality. The latter happens as often as the former. But that's an aside. I'm not even sure that mechanics *can* support a fragile intent. I think the best they can hope for is to stay out of the way of one and let it grow naturally, provide an opportunity for it rather than directly intervene in it. It's more likely to strangle a fragile intent if you address it with mechanical operational action. It stops being a choice and starts being something that's externally directed. > ## And when Lex argues > > that storygaming is purely about carrots and self-directed motivation, he's assuming human beings don't need external friction to generate genuine drama. But we do. We need the stick—not as a punishment, but as a lens. We need the labyrinth floor beneath our feet so we don't wander off into the mud. Interestingly, I never argued that story gaming is purely about carrots and self-directed motivation. I would say that it is strongly directed toward carrots and self-directed motivation, far more than traditional game design is, and that's a good thing. But Spyder has conflated two things here, which I never implied or stated outright. He is connecting the idea that I have said that positive motivation is more often found in story gaming than negative with the idea that I have said that humans don't need external friction to generate genuine drama. It just happens to be true that I don't believe that humans need external friction to generate genuine drama, as you can tell by looking around the world, and in particular at the microcosm of social media, and realizing that people generate their genuine drama out of nothing all the fucking time. If anything, it's impossible to *stop* them, and yet we keep trying to use mechanics/rules/laws to do so. It never works. Funny how that is. The question in my mind is not whether or not we need external friction. We clearly don't. The question is how can we manage the friction that we generate ourselves and obviously crave while making it manageable? This is a good opportunity for another aside that is too large to fit in a footnote. One of the problems that comes up a lot in the **[[Ironsworn]]** community is that new players really want to beat the living fuck out of their characters. They will opt for a mechanical impact of Pay the Price[^9] nine times out of ten. They will keep going back to the well of consequence, eroding their health, spirit, and momentum in preference to adding story complications all the goddamn time. Then they complain about how hard the game is because it gives them the choice of how to punish themselves within the context of the system, and they keep kicking themselves in the balls. It became so much of an issue, and weirdly enough *continues* to be so much of an issue, that the **Lodestar** supplement explicitly provides an upfront Pay the Price table in the move text, where it turns out that mechanical impact is less than half of the results on that table. Most of them are fictional and positional impacts, which is fascinating. If you actually play it using this explicit expression of intention, then you find yourself getting into ever more complicated narrative positions with the mechanical results happening just enough to keep you having to move forward and out of the hole you've dug. I think this stands in stark contrast to Spyder's contention that humans need external friction to generate genuine drama. Given the choice, free of any external influence, they'll grind themselves under their own heels. This is what we see, not just in **Ironsworn**, but in other games across story gaming in general. Most people do not want to play a happy, cozy game of sitting in an inn and making tea all day, with the only conflict to resolve being which type of tea we have in most supply right now. People generate conflict for their games. They want conflict in their games, and they make hardship for themselves. For the most part; there are a few weirdos. ## Getting What You Want > ## Good mechanics > > don't force you to go anywhere you don't want to go. They simply ensure that when you take the walk, you don't have to reinvent the path every single step of the way. I will agree with this, ultimately, though probably for reasons that aren't congruent to Spyder's. Good mechanics don't force you to go anywhere you don't want to go, taking into account that most people want to go to some very painful places for themselves. They *do* exist so that when you go where you want to go, you have a mechanism for resolving conflicts along the way, whether it be conflicts between individuals who have a different vision of how the current scene should play out or how the action that you've taken is going to resolve, or conflicts between your own ideas of how the current scene should play out. You don't want to have to come up with an understanding of how that resolution of conflict should play out every time. You want that path to be relatively clear. The mechanisms may differ. The contexts may certainly change. Mechanics provide a consistent mechanism for looking at someone else or yourself and saying, "We know how to solve this problem. Let's figure out what's next." That may put its finger directly on one of the major differentiations that sets story games apart from traditional games. The traditional game is primarily simulationist from a physical perspective. The game rules exist to resolve things by way of reference to a notional external frame of reference. The conflict is about determining what the math says the world should affect one thing or another by. It's not about a conflict of visions necessarily. It's about asking the world state if this element can update in a different way. How much damage do you take falling off a cliff? When you swing your sword, does it hit? Can you sneak up behind that guy successfully? In story games, the questions are similar, but the idea is that the conflict itself has different qualia. It is not about whether or not you hit the guy with your sword. It's more often about determining the stakes of the current moment, figuring out the action and its intended outcome, thinking about the possible ways it could go awry, and then resolving the conflict between those possibilities. It's not trying to execute a model. It's about determining a process for thinking about resolving the conflict of vision. I'm probably not rolling to see if I can sneak up on that guy. My overall intent is to make our way as a party into the castle, and I'm rolling to see if the fact that I'm sneaking in helps us make progress on that goal. If I succeed, I move our progress forward a bit and we change fictional positioning within the story accordingly. If I fail, perhaps we don't advance our progress and a complication happens, which makes it harder for us to get what we want mechanically, or changes the nature of the situation, or hinders us in the fiction. It's not just about, do I sneak up on him? We try to resolve the more important question of whether or not we get the stakes that we wanted. In story games, a success doesn't necessarily mean that you get exactly what you wanted in the way that you desired. You get the stakes that you wanted to achieve. The same for failures. If the stake is we get in without complication and I roll a success when I ask if I sneak up on the guy, that means we get our stakes. I am free to describe it as sneaking up on him, having him turn at the wrong moment, get startled, and run for the bell. But my character sprints after him, tackles him, and chokes him out silently before he can reach it, fingers inches from pulling the rope. Did I succeed in sneaking up on him? No, not exactly, but I did achieve the goal and progress the aim. There's probably more meat here to be considered, but I think I'll leave it right there. (*Damn, I really do need somebody to come and chase after my posts, trying to read the secret messages in them. I am so jealous.*) [^1]: That's the 1956 American cut, *Godzilla, King of the Monsters!*, where Raymond Burr was spliced in as reporter Steve Martin to narrate over the dubbed Japanese footage. To a kid, that was the original. Surrounded by rednecks; my vocal model was Raymond Burr. You do the math. [^2]: The Ron Edwards "brain damage" line is real. He argued that traditional, railroady RPG design *literally* caused brain damage in players, then doubled down by comparing the harm to child abuse before eventually walking it back. The whole temple of joy lives on in [the Forge's archive](http://indie-rpgs.com/archive/index.php?topic=18707.0) and the hobby's long memory. [^3]: Winston Churchill, [House of Commons, 11 November 1947](https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/quotes/the-worst-form-of-government/) — and even *he* hedged, adding *"it has been said,"* the aphorism predating him. He's simply the one who made it catchy in public. [^4]: The cynic would suggest that the ones that actually succeeded aren't likely to have left a whole lot of records, being so good at destroying themselves. As a cynic, I would concede that point, but then point out that you're still there to make it. [^5]: **[[Agon]]**, interestingly, takes the exact opposite approach to the theme. The question of being subservient to the will of the gods or not is a central element, but painted as being negatively associated, though not following the will of the gods can have negative repercussions. It's a more complicated, nuanced approach to mechanizing the theme, but I think it's valid to bring up in this context. [^6]: I have written this trio down so often it has achieved the status of doctrine — see **[[The Soap Opera as Play Structure]]**, **[[The Evocation of Evil]]**, and **[[RPGaDay 2026 - 19 - Desire]]**, among others. [^7]: Now you may think that I have just subverted my own directive when I told Spyder to create an RPG that is made of purely carrots mechanically. Read down to here and you'll see that I don't think mechanics can be made of purely carrots. They simply resolve things after all. The point, however, was to leverage Spyder's own understanding as he expressed it in order to get him to do something within his own context that would challenge the underlying ideas. I do this a lot. It's a thing. It's the judo of intellectual debate, or we can live from Saul Alinsky and say, make them play by their own book of rules, whichever. [^8]: I'm also amused that I have the original ashcan edition of **[[Misspent Youth]]** in my collection. Not the actual release version, but the draft that was being handed around in the Before Time. [^9]: From **Lodestar**: "When you suffer a cost on a move, you usually see a prompt to Pay the Price. This is a special move that lets you pick a likely negative outcome, roll on a table to see what happens, or use some other random prompt. A costly outcome can involve a narrative consequence that complicates things for your character, or a combination of a narrative and mechanical cost." Note the proportion — fiction and position first, mechanics a distinct minority.