I still love role-playing games. I haven’t been able to play in what seems like years. I wish I could, but my crappy schedule keeps me out of it. I still try to keep tabs on the hobby and where it’s going.

Where it’s going or, most likely, the new fad is storytelling games. Games that focus on storytelling and have mechanics to support this.

I’ll have to tell you right now, I don’t get it. But thinking differently and broadening your horizons is always a good thing.

I did download several games, but I really haven’t had much time to read them, let alone play them. I did peruse them a littleand found a few items.

First of, these games seem to be full of themselves. (The word “seem” is important.) Nearly every one of them makes a big deal out of how different they are from more standard games. I suppose if you read one of them after playing nothing but GURPS it would make sense, but after the sixth game described itself in this manner it got annoying fast.

Furthermore, there is more that a little implication that these games are more mature. Namely, most role-players start out playing an RPG as a game, collect points and win. Eventually they start really role-playing using the rules to help simulate the reality of the game. Then they move of to the storytelling games as is likely for mature role-players.

Well, I can buy part of that, I guess, since I’ve been there. I started playing video games. When I was introduced to RPGs, I thought, “what a great thing to do in a video game,” and played as such. I later moved on to GURPS, Mekton, Villains & Vigilantes, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. Now I’m looking at the likes of Sorcerer, Puppetland, Story Engine, Hero Wars, The Window and others. I don’t feel more mature. In fact most people who’s spoken with me privately can attest to the opposite. I am interested in seeing what these games have to offer, though. To think they’re the final tier in role-playing, I’d say guess again.

First of all, to an extent the character identification is diminished. What that means is you are not your character. Oh, sure you may speak in your character’s voice and control his actions, but you are merely using this fictitious person as a means to an end. The end being to tell a good story.

In a chase scene involving flying cars, a traditional role-player may hesitate to leap from car to car out of fear of falling. The story role-player would do so without hesitation since that would be a cool story. However, this sort of thing happens all the time in typical RPGs. Some people are just braver or surer of their dice I guess.

This lack of character identification flies in the face of what I personally believe RPGs to be at a basic level. You’re playing a role, not manipulating a protagonist. The whole idea was to experience places and things you normally couldn’t as well as being someone who is not yourself. Being someone brave enough to do those things you’d probably never do in a million years or just the stuff you wish you could do or even wish you had done.

Maybe that’s just my own personal game philosophy talking, but I hesitate to refer to some of these games as role-playing games in the strictest sense of the word. I’m a little more flexible on this than the average curmudgeon.

Hogshead Press’ The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen is, to my way of thinking, a role-playing game. True, the play is basically one player telling a story of adventure, but it is their own story of adventure they are telling. The players take the role of barons, earls, dukes, or what-have-you sitting around, drinking tea, sipping wine, snacking on morsels and thrilling each other with tales of their exploits. That’s role-playing in my book. It’s weird but still role-playing.

Hogshead’s Pantheon on the other hand, uh…er…um…ah… I have my doubts about its status as a role-playing game. Mostly it’s another storytelling engine but the characters are little more than playing pawns in the game of storytelling, much like the little dog and the race car on the Monopoly board are just pawns. And like Monopoly, I suspect that any real role-playing you experience while playing is purely incidental and largely due to your own design rather than anything that comes from the rules.

What little I’ve seen as far as mechanical differences has not been much. Obviously I’m looking in the wrong place since the rules in these games are supposed to be so different. The reason why the rules are so different is to make it easier for the GM. Before these games came around, a GM would have to “fudge” dice rolls to help the story along. This is supposedly unnecessary in the story games.

Well, the only such mechanic I know of off hand is found in Orkworld. Basically, an Ork has a Trouble score which, among other things, allows the GM to cause any successful die roll the player makes into a failure up to the character’s Trouble times a game. If your character has a 3 Trouble, the GM can make you fail three times a game.

I thought that was a stupid rule when Wick first published it in his column and told him so and still think it’s dumb. It seems a forced way to make fudging the dice rolls part of the rules and, since it has a limit, it may still be necessary to fudge the dice rolls after the character runs out of Trouble.

I hope there is more to the non-fudgibility than stuff like this. I seriously hope this is actually a poor example of such things, an afterthought Wick added to his game at the last minute.

I suppose I’m being a little premature in dismissing these games so soon. I still haven’t played any yet, after all. It is easy to dismiss these sorts of games as pastimes for failed are frustrated writers, people who rather write fiction but can’t for some reason. I think that’s mean-spirited and just wrong. I may not get these games, but people are having fun with them and there’s a certain validity to that.

Besides, I’ve also been quietly working on a storytelling game myself. This is probably why I’ve been trying so hard to understand these games. Nothing bridges the gap between different peoples like an ulterior motive.