Editing One Simple Thing (section)

=== The Story ===

Original posts, and 10 pages of discussion, [http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?t=238027 here].

:The Story: When people play an RPG they tell a story. Everyone who plays adds something to the story. Unless you have a tape recorder running, that story, as it is told right that second, can only ever be heard if you are there right that second. 

:When a player talks about the game later she is not doing the same thing she did to tell the story the first time. She is retelling the story. The story she tells is a second story inspired by the first. In retelling the story, she will reveal what she thought was important about the first story. If she thinks that the fights were the important thing then she will tell a second story with all the action and none of the in-between. If she thinks that the way the characters related to each other between the fights was the important thing then she will tell a second story with a lot of talking, and very little fighting. Those are both true retellings of the first story, but neither of them is the first story. 

:When someone, before the session is played, says that he knows what story the group is going to tell, he is not talking about the first story. He is saying that he could already tell you the second story that he will tell after the session. He is saying that he has control over all the things that he will later find important enough to retell. Or, put another way, he is saying that the things he doesn't have control over will not be important enough to make it into a retelling. 

:This is not the same as knowing that some elements will appear in the first story. Say I prepare a plot with a dark evil that must be destroyed (or the world ends) buried behind seven doors, and each door can only be opened by passing a certain test in a certain way. Do I know, before playing that game, what the story will be? Only if I would choose, in retelling the story, to talk about that evil, those doors and their tests. If I would choose to talk about the things that the other players had their characters do in response to those tests, and how it brought them together (or drove them apart) as a group, then I don't know anything about the story, going in. The only way I can find out what that story will be is for the other players to tell me.

I honestly don't think '''anyone''' disagreed with the spirit of what I was saying here.  A whole bunch of people very strongly wanted to talk about what the word "story" meant in this context, and whether I was talking about a literary story, or a journalistic story, or just the sort of story even atoms make when they mate and cling.  I didn't want to get into that, said I didn't want to get into that, and then we had a great big furball about whether I was allowed to not want to get into that.  Some people argue that the point doesn't hold water apart from the semantics.  My position is that it does.