Why collaborative storytelling is a meaningless phrase

[Lacuna Caster]

Third, there's the baggage -- and it goes back to before The Forge, even. Way way back, it starts with someone asserting that the only good way to game is to focus on "the needs of the story"...

...But The Forge cranked it up to 11, and tried to snap off the dial.

https://refereeingandreflection.word...ing-the-forge/

It's certainly true to say, as the article mentions, that the bulk of, ah, research and development at the Forge was concerned with Narrativist play and techniques, since RE and others considered this a rather neglected style of play as far as the major publishers were concerned. But I have never seen Ron write or say anything to the effect that 'Gamism and Simulationism are bad and inferior styles of play', and I don't know where you got that impression.

(He had plenty to say about the technical and social breaking-points of some popular G/S systems, particularly when they pretended to be Nar-focused and weren't, but that's another discussion.)

It is basically nonsense to describe a group of people producing a sequence of fictional events as "not collaborative storytelling". You are collaborating on a story. The assertions to the contrary are word salad. Also reflective of a deeply warped understanding of reality where it is impossible to do something that has significance you don't appreciate, or for the same thing to mean different things to different people.

The broad definition is "tell a story". Nothing more, nothing less. This is what you do when interacting with your fellow players (and gm) and add something to the ongoing narrative by declaring what your character does and describing it to them - you tell a story about fictional events and your fellow players act upon that.

Going back a bit, I would say that if you're defining 'story' as 'a sequence of fictional events', then yes, it is trivially true to say that role-playing produces a story. Though, given there are such things as 'true stories', I don't know why such events would even need to be fictional, and at that point anything that ever happens is 'a story'.

The question is whether the intentions of the people playing, and/or anything about the game mechanics, encourages stories that are about something interesting. And what qualifies as 'interesting'.

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