It has no name

So I got to hang out with some kick-ass "story game" designers a couple days ago and, to my shame, have discovered that they don't like the term "story game":

* It's divisive. Players of traditional role-playing-games are probably saying, "What do you mean my game doesn't do story?" Any rpg can do story.

* It's vague. What about games like exquisite corpse, Once Upon a Time, Dixit - aren't those story games? But those are different from what I've been talking about lately.

Which leaves me in the lurch. "So what am I supposed to call these things?"

"Role-playing games," they say. 

"But ... I have a totally different experience playing Lady Blackbird, Geiger Counter, or Fiasco than I have playing D&D. How do I tell people about that?"

And they shrug.

So I'm thinking about this, and I can't point my finger at any specific thing about one role-playing game that makes it a "story game" in my mind that doesn't rule out some other game that I also think of as a "story game."

GM-less? But Apocalypse World and In a Wicked Age aren't GM-less.

No prep? But Dogs in the Vineyard requires prep. And Paranoia and Toon, a couple games from my youth, didn't require prep. (Paranoia did have modules but my experience was they were irrelevant to the fun, as my friends would start shooting each other in the first room. Kind of an ancestor to In a Wicked Age in that way.) Maybe "story games" have been around forever.

Rules-light? Annalise and Burning Wheel and Universalis are actually pretty complex. And there are a lot of rules-light RPGs out there that don't scratch the itch for me.

So, okay guys, I give up. I will stop using a blanket term for a bunch of these games, and in the future talk about them one at a time on their own merits.

Comments

[Dark Acre Jack]

That's the first time I've heard of the term 'story game'. At first I thought you meant 'interactive fiction' but then I checked some of the titles you cited and yeah, my circle's always referred to those as RPGs or TRPGs (tabletop).

[Justin Alexander]

I'd go with storytelling games and they can suck it. The mechanics of their games are about narrative control, which is aptly summarized by the term "storytelling game".

Once Upon a Time is also a storytelling games. (Its mechanics are about narrative control.)

Dixit is not, even if its rules do include a "storyteller". (There is no narrative and none of the mechanics are focused on controlling the telling of a story.)

Similarly, Vampire: The Masquerade isn't a storytelling game either -- even if it also features a storyteller.

Yes, the nomenclature is somewhat confused. But that's no reason to confuse it further by insisting that their apples be called oranges because they're both round.

[Jamie]

I don't think your apples/oranges metaphor quite hits it - really I'm saying "Hey, I dig fuji apples, strawberries, blueberries and tangerines, and it would be nice if there was a name for whatever that je ne sais quois was that these fruit share, and I thought maybe it was 'sweet fruit' but then I remembered, hey, watermelon is sweet and I'm not crazy about it...and blueberries aren't that sweet. So maybe I should just talk about the individual fruit instead of trying to define and categorize."

Also, D&D and Vampire have narrative rules too: the player's always allowed to narrate what their character is thinking and what they try to do, for example. And in 3e & 4e the DM is limited in what they can narrate about your character without jumping through various mechanical hoops first.

[Tyler]

I just had this problem when trying to write about the styles, my solution was to put a * next to the words story game and rpg and then explained what I meant with specific games in the foot notes.

Also, I want to play Toon. I felt bad I could not talk about it with warren.