# What IS Storygaming? Pt III tags: #thoughts ![[The Complete First Edition of The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm (cover).jpg|300]] I think the irony here is that we're headed into a part three. If you've been strapped in for the saga so far, I'm sorry. The suffering will pass, the nightmares will fade, and you will eventually regain that lost SAN. I don't know when and I don't know where, but we will meet again some fine day. On that golden shore.[^1] For the moment, though, we are dealing with a response to [[What IS Storygaming - Pt II|the last article in this series]] because [a reply has been created](https://allthethings123.blogspot.com/2026/10/what-is-storygaming.html?m=1).[^2] Oh boy, you know how much I love this sort of thing. It's my life's blood. If I actually get to discuss game and narrative theory in general, I'm going to be pretty happy. If I get to discuss strategic positioning, I'm generally pretty happy. Ultimately, it's got to be a win-win, right? --- > So, far as I'm concerned, regardless of whether I "win" or "lose" the argument, *what is occurring right now is a win.* This is genuinely the right attitude to bring to the table. Of course, the problem is that there's not an argument. The question is a matter of conceptualizing, communicating, and pedagogy, which means there's no winner or loser. Admittedly, this does diminish the pleasure of going knives out against a worthy adversary. Being in violent agreement takes a bit of the edge off, pun fully intended, but you do what you can do. > And this is where that first "Our goals do not align", comes in. An *essential* part of how I do things is to allow people to come to a conclusion. What you're calling dressing it up and dancing is saying that a trail already exists, and that maybe Weirth can find it. Here we come to an actual problem, which is that somehow there's an expectation that our goals could align. Now I would remind the casual reader how we got to this point. Spyder posted a video that he made explicitly responding to a question from a third party that we had no connection to, but did carry on at great length in said video, holding forth with certain attitudes and positions, and just as importantly, a means of delivery. None of us were included in that, except that I, your humble correspondent, was tagged in that video response. One might reasonably assume that said action, the summoning of the devil, throwing open the windows and shouting, *"Somebody is wrong on the internet,"* can only have one result. Said devil would manifest and make commentary on what's in front of him, not on what he might imagine or could envision, ironically, but purely on what's there. It then becomes somewhat questionable to say that the goals of the response do not match the goals of the inspiration. How could they? It would be impossible. The intent from the beginning is very different. The goals thus cannot be further apart. Why should there be any expectation that they wouldn't be? > The problem is that I very rarely see Lex's point actually work. Most of the stuff I've read on the web that's convinced me to change my mind *are conversations between individuals.* There's unspoken history I don't know, context I don't have, rough edges that never get hashed out, *the gaps are the things that somehow pulled me in.* I'm attempting to provide the thing that got me in the first place. > > So, I *did* think about tomorrow, it's that what I think may be valuable for someone is just hearing the name "Tony Bath" and not getting much more context on what that means unless they go hunting. If they don't want to hunt? Fine. No skin off my nose. I'm going to be very blunt here because firstly it's my nature and secondly because I think it's worthwhile: When you see it not work, it largely comes from people who are unable to think about the fact that their audience is more than just a single person they're talking to when they're talking in public. It would be like going up on a stage in front of thousands of people to do an interview with someone else and then proceeding as though you were sitting in a living room in complete privacy talking to them. Firstly, it's just not true, but secondly, everyone involved knows that it's not the case. In order to have that experience, to actually communicate something intentional, you have to be *intentional* about *communicating* that experience. If you want to have a private talk with someone that convinces or persuades someone, then have a private talk with them. If you want to have a public talk with someone that might be persuasive *in general*, then you have to speak as though you understand that you are speaking to not just the person across from you, but the entirety of the audience, and not just the entirety of the audience sitting there in front of you at the moment, but all of the people that *can* come to the recording in twenty minutes, a day, a hundred years, whatever. More importantly even than that, though, is that if you want to have a conversation that educates, which is far more important than changing someone's mind, because that's impossible, then you need to remember that the audience is out there and you have to phrase things in a way that you know will be seen, consumed, digested, and finally excreted as thought by those people. Do you know what I took away from the repeated invocation of Tony Bath? That I didn't care. It was just a name. I wasn't motivated to look it up because it wasn't really attached to anything other than "an important guy in wargaming." Okay, context provided. You have to move on and make a point. You can't continue hammering on the invocation of what you think is an important name just because you hope it'll make someone look it up. You have to provide the motivation to look it up, and that doesn't come from just invocation. It comes from actual connection to an important idea, but that's a nitpicky criticism on public presentation and debate.[^3] > Here's the error, which compounded in the 3.5 days. System matters because philosophy and mechanics must be aligned, with mechanics flowing from philosophy. Men of great ego and capacity, driven by widsespread ludonarrative dissonance, created the Forge. I was certainly *not* trying to jab at anyone, and I wish you'd just asked for clarification instead of assuming I meant an under-handed jab. Again, I want to be very clear here. I'm not assuming that it was an underhanded jab. I'm pointing out, I'm actually telling you that it was an underhanded jab, whether you think it was or not. It was entirely dismissive and frankly, annoyingly disconnected. You had every opportunity to explain what you meant right there, and you didn't. Also, you're just wrong. System matters because process of play matters for experience. It's not that philosophy and mechanics *must* be aligned. Philosophy leads to mechanics. They are inevitably aligned. The question is always: are they aligned *in ways that the author intended?* Do they result in the experience that the author wanted them to? If not, then they are aligned with the philosophy, but the author doesn't understand their own philosophy, or they don't understand the methods by which it can be made manifest[^4] — or they don't *have* a philosophy. (More on that later.) The one thing I can tell you that occupied the majority of the minds at the Forge was not that there was widespread ludonarrative dissonance. There are many criticisms that I could make of the community of the time and that which has descended from them, but ludonarrative dissonance is the farthest from the truth. It is, however, an easy bit of shit to sling, so there's that in its favor, I suppose. For those in the audience who are not fans of the language of academics, ludonarrative dissonance refers to a difference in what the mechanics describe and what the fiction represents. Now, it could be here that what you mean is that the widespread ludonarrative dissonance in traditionally architected tabletop role-playing games motivated part of the creation of the Forge, and that I would actually agree with. But your problem here is you coupled ludonarrative dissonance with *"the mistake."* You have failed to attribute whose mistake that you believe it was, and I have been too long in the trenches to assume goodwill or good faith with someone as critical of the Forge, even those who are in general aligned with descendant philosophies. *Mea culpa* if that was not the intent, and instead you *mean* to say that it was the response to widespread ludonarrative dissonance that led to the Forge and not the mistake *of those inhabiting it*. I'll own my mistake, but you need to understand why it might happen. In part because I've heard the same thing coming from critics for nearly 30 years now. You have no idea how much it pains me to actually say that number. > And yet, here you are, writing to *me.* Calling me by my username: Spyder Openly. Hell, if you wanted to you could just call me Nathan. I wouldn't care. I'm going to be honest, brother, *I don't know what your actual name is*. I'm truly network old school. I have never paid attention to who's got a real name or what it was. Once a reference is stuck in my head, it stays. That's it. 80% of the people who know me in convention space call me Squid. I wouldn't think to call you Nathan, and probably will never think to call you Nathan at any point in our continued existence. That still doesn't make this a personal message. It puts us on a stage in front of an audience talking. The ostensible framework is that it's a conversation of a semi-personal nature, but the reality is that it is a series of exchanges occurring in a public space, much like the exchanges of flyers published by the Founding Fathers, though perhaps on slightly less heady subjects. I'm sure they would have discussed the ludonarrative dissonance of the ruling aristocracy of Europe as regards the mechanisms of law and the actual execution of it.[^5] > Except that there's one problem, which I feel like isn't being addressed. If you do exactly what you said, you *will* hit so many branches on the way down that you'll practically look like a candy cane. Communication *sometimes* has to be succint, but I don't believe it to be one of those times. Could I have been more concrete in drawing forward from the wargaming experience to the storygaming one? > > Absolutely. I'll cop to that. Sure. I'm not talking about being succinct. Hades knows that I have no interest in being succinct. I will throw words at the wall until the stains themselves can be read by someone who has only learned Braille this week. The problem is not one of succinctness. The problem is that you didn't just hit all the branches on the way down, you clung on to them and didn't let yourself move to the root of the tree. You got caught up on the way and spiraled around and around something that didn't move you toward where you really wanted to be. I love talking off the cuff. 98% of what you're reading from me right now, I'm just reciting into the system. I'm writing it on the fly as I read. I've done enough podcasts and recorded enough stuff to just do it. That's no actual credit to me. That's just a lot of long, bitter slogging, having to edit my own voice for hours at a time.[^6] It teaches you not to like the sound of your own voice, but to love the sound of good ideas. You got hung up on repeatedly trying to demonstrate that you knew their processes without actually just trusting them to understand what you're saying because you know their processes. You created a disjunction in what you were saying and what you were doing, ironically not unlike ludonarrative dissonance. The idea that you wanted to create was not the one you seemed to communicate. Imagine that instead of getting caught up on trying to repeatedly assert your bona fides and refer to Tony Bath, you had done it once, internalized the *"he already knows this"* bits, and then used the time that you saved of that 24 minutes to concretize and ground your explanations, outside of trying to talk about the **[Count of Monte Cristo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Count_of_Monte_Cristo)**. No, I'm not going to let that go. It's too funny to. As another sidebar, for those who haven't spent their life reading Alexandre Dumas, **The Count of Monte Cristo** is about a man who is wronged by his employer and the justice system and is consumed with revenge up until the point he lets it go, seeks redemption, and skates with his former lover and slave, leaving everyone else to confront the consequences of his actions. This is funny because trying to dip out on one of the failures of the initial discussion is very Count of Monte Cristo. I'm not saying that purely negatively aspected. I literally do get a giggle out of it. It's an unconscious parallel that just keeps getting better.[^7][^8][^9] > "Those methods that you've learned: systemic generation, carrot and stick rewards, and committing to the overarching narrative as it proceeds, can be applied in ways you wouldn't expect. You can take all of these methods and apply them to a deeply psychological game." Two out of three ain't bad, but that third one is a problem. By that third one, what I really mean is carrot-and-stick rewards, because I don't think those are legitimately part of storygaming, either as a philosophy or as a mechanical hook that you can hang a similarity between wargames and story game RPGs on. That would be a bit of an anti-hook. Most of the mechanical manifestation of the storygaming philosophy is purely[^10] carrot, not stick. When there are visible and deterministic negatives, they are generally carried in the form of resource management (a real element of both historical and modern wargaming), and not carrot-and-stick operations. Storygaming philosophy leads to branching choices, both of which are desirable for certain purposes and undesirable for others. Then the game asks the player, *"Which way do you want to go? What things are important to you? What things are less important to you?"* This is oppositional to carrot-and-stick operations, which provide two choices and hang a carrot in the direction of one and hold a stick up high over another. There is only one right choice with a carrot and stick. That's anathema to story games in general. > I didn't say mechanics are always a successful implementation of your philosophy, but mechanics *always* express a philosophy. But, given how you were just busting my balls about not providing concrete examples of the storygaming philosophy… well the chuckle you got out of me was at least somewhat warranted. Concreteness for me, but not for thee? This final bit would land better if the next 600 words or so of my response weren't literally talking about the implementation of philosophy and expressing what the philosophy of storygaming is. There's that element at play. I'm also not sure that I want to state that elementally, mechanics always express a philosophy, because there are a lot of game designers out there, for good or ill, mostly ill, who don't bring a philosophy of design to the table when they're putting together their mechanics. Sometimes they're just a grab bag of things that the creator thought sounded good together and that kind of worked when they wrote them down, and guided their friends through using them in order to decide the results of an action. They can't communicate a philosophy because they never had one. People just did a thing. They didn't think about the thing necessarily from the level of meta-analysis necessary to have a philosophy. Some of the things that they do work damn well, either by accident or intention. Like most tools, a philosophy is useful for coherence and for eliminating a certain amount of wasted energy, treading the same ground as others have before you, but it's not necessary. It's just probably desirable. Which brings us back to the philosophy of storygaming. If, as I have maintained, stories happen anyway, as long as there's a series of events, which can be recounted later, then why do you need a philosophy at all? The story will just happen, right? The answer is you don't. If your only interest is to play a game in which a story occurs, any game will do, with any methods and any tools. But that's not necessarily the desired outcome of storygaming. The philosophy of storygaming, as I understand it anyway, is that by applying certain methods and approaches to the process of play, you can refine the experience to make the eventual story clearer in the minds of the players at any given point. Some interpret that to be a greater sensation of taking the authorial rather than the immersed perspective in the formation of the game. Some interpret that, wrongly in my opinion, to be mechanisms to direct the story in the way that someone who is not at the table would prefer (this is the province of those who treat table play as more of a scenario-driven experience than character-centric). Some interpret this to be a literal translation of story mechanics as understood by authors into a mechanical form (see **[[Theatrix - The Core Rules|Theatrix]]** for what I think may be the pinnacle of that particular approach[^11]). Which brings us around to perhaps the most useful question that I'm going to posit here in this little treatise. In what way do you want to see storygaming philosophy concretized? No, you don't get to turn this into an opportunity to talk about promoting your own work, because goddammit, every third post that people make in the TRPG hobby these days seems like it's about self-promotion and pushing their own work. It feels like an advertising seminar rather than a high-minded discussion of philosophies, opportunities, and methodologies. I feel like I really shouldn't have to say this, but inevitably that's where things go. I want to nip that in the bud. [^1]: Just imagine a mash-up of these two songs.   Try not to imagine the kind of life experience that leads to mashing these two things up. It's interesting, I promise. [^2]: As a side note, I hope that you're using some form of visual reformatter like Obsidian Reader or Readly or something like that, because the way the background renders under the text is kind of painful without it. I could just be getting old. These things happen. [^3]: Yes, writing online in almost every context, aside from hot sexting with your girlfriend or boyfriend, is best seen through the lens of public speaking and debate, which casts in stark relief how many people never attended any debate team meetings in high school. I mean, sure, they were out having real lives doing cool things and eventually going into selling insurance, but they're *terrible* in the online space. [^4]: See, I avoided using the word "reify" again here, even though it was what I really wanted to use. I'm kind of proud of myself. [^5]: Okay, now I think I have the basis of a really good PhD thesis, if I actually cared to pursue one. Political science through the lens of recreational, recreative gaming and the language of story and screen. This probably isn't a Cornell degree, but I could probably get something from Harvard. [^6]: And in the case of this particular bit, getting the basic writing in and then doing an editing pass — which I don't enjoy doing very much — is part of knowing that I'm going to have to slog here. In part, I'm literally thinking about the audience in 20 minutes, a day, a hundred years, etc. I can't be the only one that *hates* the copy editing process, right? I'm glad to have mechanical adjuncts for it. It makes it slightly less painful, but not entirely painless. [^7]: *"This one's mine. Get your own tree!"* Real geeks of film will get this in seconds or less. Both references. [^8]: In fairness to the count, he does only skate after leaving a massive amount of emotional and psychological wreckage, not to mention a pile of bodies in his wake. It's interesting that the traditional response to the **Count of Monte Cristo** is to suggest that Dantes gives up on revenge, considering that the entire book is about him getting his revenge, how he gets his revenge, and largely how people die and are destroyed by him getting his revenge. When he leaves, it's not because he has given up on revenge. It's merely that he just doesn't absolutely murder the last guy left in the pursuit of that revenge. So really, it maybe isn't as funny in reality as it just strikes me as, but that's beside the point. This has been your literary education for the evening. [^9]: I seem to have gotten lost in the footnoting. What is this, **[House of Leaves](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Leaves)**? [^10]: ... Mostly. Usually. Almost always ... [^11]: One day I'll write an entire series of posts on all the ways that **Theatrix** is a terrible game design, and yet how it really put its finger on a whole fistful of good ideas that it resolutely failed to actually make use of. Perhaps one of the best examples of a game with an explicit philosophy that failed to get well translated into the actual game mechanics because it didn't *trust its philosophy enough*.