Quote Originally Posted by Max_Killjoy View Post
Plus, you might mean the first definition, but the hobby has more than a few people who mean the second definition or something far closer to it, and will actively use agreement that the first definition is a reasonable universal to push their agenda of asserting that the second definition is universal.
Frankly, from my perspective you are disproportionately concerned about slippery slopes. In particular:

  1. You are worried that if you don't fight the assertion that TTRPGs are, broadly speaking, an act of storytelling that is collaborative, then people will be emboldened to claim that all TTRPGs must be played with the intention of crafting a very specific sort of novel-like story—instead of "playing the character" and letting events unfold as they may.
  2. You also seem very worried that if we allow a definition of "story" that is broad enough to encompass all TTRPGs—games that near-universally describe themselves as storytelling games—we are capitulating to the toxic influence of a philosophical movement that threatens western society.


For issue (1), there is simply nobody in this thread doing that, or even gesturing toward it. Some people have proposed broader definitions of "story" that drop the "account" or "description" clause, but nobody here has said that you personally are, or should be, playing the game specifically to create a structured 3-act story with character arcs and narrative causality, etc. In fact, I'd say everybody in this thread almost certainly agrees that no player should be compelled to play that way.

I see no reason to engage with a bad-faith argument being put forth by people who are not present in this discussion.

For issue (2), seriously? This discussion isn't a Trojan horse for, nor a consequence of, postmodernism.

You don't need to subscribe to a specific ideology or use a postmodernist lens to look at a group of people sitting at a table, opening a book that starts with "this is a storytelling game", describing a bunch of imaginary characters' actions and consequences to each other, and then conclude that they're pretty clearly creating a story together.