Among all the replies, I found two people who gave diametrically opposed definitions, and it was a real eye-opener. I took screenshots of those two answers of course. Here they are.
One says that in a storygame, the players have narrative control — they create the world during play. The other says that in a storygame, the players can make minor changes to the plot, but what happens, happens.
That’s when it hit me like a ton of bricks: we invent so many new names and tags and genres and categories in this hobby that we no longer know which is which. Nobody knows what a storygame really is, and perhaps nobody knows what the other categories really are, either.
Someone talks about a sandbox game as being an “open world” kind of setting, but then somebody else says, “You are using the wrong terms, and don’t understand what a sandbox is. By definition, if you are making the world up in relation to player decisions it is NOT a sandbox. A sandbox is a pre-built, walled location to play in. Hence it’s called a sandbox.”
This person focuses on the word “box” when they really should focus on the word “sand.” The sandbox in their definition is not an open world but rather a demiplane or a Flat Earth: one cannot venture past the edge.
Sooner or later you’re gonna have to face Strahd. It’s the only way out.
There is no consensus on what a sandbox is, and there is no consensus on what a storygame is. Semantics reign supreme.
If you are making the world up in relation to player decisions, like the guy said, what is it called? Not a storygame? Not a sandbox?
Do we need to make up yet another confusing name here?
On the back cover of Blades in the Dark it says “all the maps, factions, NPCs, and opportunities you need to run an exciting sandbox game.” But then on page 6 the book clearly states: “No one is in charge of the story. The story is what happens as a result of the situation presented by the GM, the actions the characters take, the outcomes of the mechanics, and the consequences that result. […] You play to find out what the story will be.” (The parts in boldface are in the book as-is.)
So Blades in the Dark is a storygame and a sandbox? Isn’t that like, heresy?
Plus, the city of Doskvol and all the other cities in the game are linked together by mighty armored trains — a literal railroad. So it’s a storygame and a series of sandboxes on a massive railroad? What the hell?
I’m trying to make it sound very confusing. As a joke.
When role-playing games first started in 1971 the folks playing those games didn’t know what to call them. Fantasy wargaming? Medieval fantasy?
The answer is that you don’t need to label it — just play whatever you want, and shift from one thing to the other whenever you feel the need to. It can be theater of the mind until the bandits attack the village, and then you bust out the miniatures. You can interrupt the session and play a real, live game of poker or chess, because one of the player characters is being challenged to a game of chess or a hand of poker by an important NPC that they absolutely need to impress.
Hell, you can even incorporate a game of friggin’ Monopoly if you want. Clan Ventrue has moved into your city and start buying real estate en masse, so the other clans have no choice but to start buying property as well. Lucy shall play her clan Toreador, James plays clan Tremere, and Billy plays clan Malkavian. Just replace the names of the streets on the board with the names of important avenues in your campaign city, and go!
Speaking of vampires…
“Bleed” is another term that we can add to the already tall pile. As I understand it, bleed is the flip side of cozy: it’s when you feel something. But if I asked that question on Xwitter, of course someone would say the exact opposite.
Bleed is cozy.
Bleed is when you feel nothing.
Bleed is railroady.
Bleed ain’t at all railroady.
Storygames don’t have bleed.
Storygames are bleed.
Wait — what is bleed?
And the Great TTRPG Word Salad continues.
This level of unfair scrutiny borders on hypocrisy. I sincerely don’t think anyone can watch Mike Krahulik, Jerry Holkins, Jasmine Bhullar and Luis Carazo play Vampire: The Masquerade and think that the game is about slavery and sexual assault.
Vampirism has been a standing metaphor for sex literally since Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. What was dubbed “Now YOU Are The Monster” is a craze that began in ’91 with tens of millions of aficionados, a very, very low percentage of whom were pro-slavery and / or sexual predators. Don’t be absurd.
You want to play as a monster, but you don’t want them to be a monster?
Have you read the definition of the word?
You want cozy monsters, right.
Are we going to see people play Call of Cthulhu and be a party of friendly Shoggoths and smooth-talking Moon-Beasts and funky Fungi from Yuggoth?
Bending over backwards to play “cozy Ghibli D&D” seems almost ludicrous. At this point, why not just play TOON? I mean, that awesome game is sitting right there, super easy to learn.
This is like insisting on playing high-speed roaming hide-and-seek instead of plain old tag. Again, semantics, pure and simple.
High-Fantasy vs Low-Fantasy is another worthless debate. Someone says that High-Fantasy means wizards and magic items everywhere, and someone else comes to the contrary conclusion.
What’s the use of having this branding debate? If every character owns two longswords +3, that’s a game, and if there are only two magic swords in the entire world, that’s another game. Choose your table. Some play poker with thousand-dollar chips and some play poker with Monopoly money or Lego bricks.
Take a pill.
It’s a hobby, not a religion.
Modern tabletop role-playing games are too preachy and try too hard to explain themselves. MCDM’s intro reads like an essay. What does Tactical even mean? What does Cinematic even mean? Tactical is just another word for crunch — and Cinematic is just another word for fluff. Get over yourself; you’re crafting a toybox, not establishing a sacrosanct doctrine.
“Tactical Heroic Cinematic Fantasy RPG” reeks of desperation. There is such a thing as too many adjectives. It’s like Chartered Professional Accountants: these people need two adjectives in order to feel secure and recognized. Master electricians only need one. Lawyers are so cocky that they don’t need any.
You are selling a game, not a table culture. Some folks play Call of Cthulhu like it is a first-person shooter game, rolling dice and dropping monsters non-stop. Some folks only play Cthulhu for the stories; their investigators run like hell when the Shoggoths appear. Sell your game, and people will play it in many different ways — tactical or foolish, heroic or murder hobo, cinematic or just old-fashioned verbose. Whatever. It ain’t your call.
Don’t pontificate.
Yes, Gygax did pontificate a little. But don’t do it.
Spenser Starkes, the creator of Candela Obscura, also fell headfirst into the preachy trap. He said, “We wanted to ensure that we’ve made a place that, although it was scary, although it had many elements of horror, had powers that were scary… we also never wanted to create a space where people felt unwelcome for who they were in playing the game and the GM never had to make that decision either to whitewash the world or to play the world as it was and put themselves in a place that would make them and the table not feel welcome and happy.”
Why not produce a game and leave the social engineering and exegesis to sociologists and historians? The designers of Settlers of Catan and Mortal Kombat and Yu-Gi-Oh! didn’t write complete doctoral theses to frame their work.
Here’s an idea. Since nobody really knows what those labels mean, why not just stop using storygame, sandbox, railroad, point-crawl, bleed, low-fantasy, sweetweird, nobledark, grimbright, narrative and other such terms? You might as well run a grungeblend proseflux halflegacy — it’s gibberish.
You and your group play a game.
My group and I play a game.
Joe Manganiello and his group play a game.
Those games are all different.
No need for seventy-eight meaningless name tags.
Byzantium a.k.a. Constantinople argued for over a hundred years about whether the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost were one and the same, or three separate beings linked together.
Don’t be like that.