Story vs. Experience

In a post which is mostly about podcasts and gaming conventions, Carl Cravens says:

I'd talk about indie/"story" games tangentially, but I'm not heavily into them... I steal bits and pieces that are helpful to me, but I'm not looking for a "narrative" experience... I don't want to tell a story, I want to experience a story. Most story-games don't work for me because the mechanics are about who has narrative rights... who gets to tell the story, and the mechanics may not even be tied to what's going on in the story at all.

This reminds me of the post by Joshua BishopRoby that I bookmarked ages ago but never got round to blogging about. It looks at the more extreme narrativist approach to gaming, where little or nothing is defined at the start, and just about everything, including fundamental elements of the setting itself, is made up on the fly during play.

Characters are incorporated in the setting and situation quickly, powerfully, and often inextricably. Actions and stunts become grand to the point of excessive. Stunning reversals and byzantine plots are commonplace. Which isn't better, I want to state very emphatically and very up front. It's very, very easy for this kind of set up to create a torrent of too much, too fast that tears through stuff that may be better approached with a more measured, sedate, and nuanced approach. To dodge away from LotR for a moment, this approach does not create Star Trek and Stargate; it makes Battlestar Galactica and Dr. Who.

In extreme circumstances, it makes me wonder if you really are creating a story, or just the outline of one, as emphasised by Joshua's later anecdote.

Recently, Merten at story-games started a thread asking for clarification because he simply didn't understand why Tony Lower-Basch wants to distill a complete storyline down to one hour of high-impact play. "What's your hurry?" he asked, "Why can't you savor the experience?" In responding to him, I realized that, to a large extent, I didn't understand why he didn't want these powerful tools to rock the story over the cliff screaming the whole way down. In the course of discussion, I think I understood a little better that he wanted to be there and experience events directly, and I hope he came to the point where he could see how some people weren't so interested in being there as implying things about being there.

I've played and enjoyed Primetime Adventures a couple of times, which I think is a good example of the sort of game Carl is talking about. But I consider that sort of game is so far removed from a traditional style of RPG that it falls into a quite different genre of game entirely. They give such a different play experience that I don't believe either can be seen as a substitute for the other.

So where does this leave the games I'm running? Interestingly I'm using two different approaches on my online games with a lot of the same players Kalyr has a richly detailed setting, with a lot of fundamental elements nailed down. I've defined the political and social structures, what technology is available, what psionic powers can and can't do, etc. I've also got a whole load of NPCs with pre-defined agendas. The other game, Arrhan Empire Frontiers is much more freewheeling. This is partly because I've taken over the game from another GM, and don't have the same feel of ownership over the setting. So I'll quite happily make up major plot elements on the fly, or let the players introduce significant bits of setting.