When I was first getting into game design, it was peak Forge era and Ron Edwards' GNS theory was king. Most folks I knew used it as a triple-axis map of a ruleset or player's priorities rather than a fixed set of three possible game types.
Obviously that schema fell out of favour, but the recent return to challenge game/story game categorisation makes me wonder why a binary slider is a more useful tool of analysis than a trinary spectrum like RBG/HSL for colors.
Since you're the closest thing to my dash's resident RPG philosopher, would you mind weighing in? I'd be interested to hear your thoughts.
Please & thank you :)
I don't think challenge/story game is necessarily a useful binary either because even most "story" games will end up engaging primarily with the language of challenge (due to the outsized influence of D&D, a game primarily concerned with challenge) even though they don't realize it. This is something I have touched upon multiple times in the past: most PbtA games tend to cast the player characters as a Group of Heroes whose aim is to Overcome Adversity even though that type of framing is nowhere in the text of Apocalypse World and in fact Apocalypse World is not a good game at all for adventure gaming. A lot of people who think they are making "story-focused" games, whatever that means, still end up making various iterations of D&D.
Like, I don't think we should think about games through a binary slider of story vs. challenge and if that's the impression you've gotten then that might be due to lack of clarity on my part. When I speak of challenge games I primarily speak of a mode of play that largely concerns itself with players putting their characters in adversity and seeking to overcome that adversity, often via knowing how to manipulate the rules and developing system mastery. It's not necessarily indicative of design philosophy.
Like, for example: Daggerheart is, at the end of the day, a challenge game. It might also be a "story" game. Whatever, but it's undoubtedly still very much a challenge or adventure game. The point isn't to create a false binary of story vs. challenge, but to illustrate a blind spot most TTRPG designers have: that TTRPGs tend to be largely about overcoming challenge even when designers think they are bucking the trend.
And there's nothing wrong with games about challenge and I am their fiercest defender! But the reason I draw attention to this is that a different way is possible and many people often end up just making D&Ds (which isn't bad: but the issue is that they end up making D&Ds when they think they're making an anti-D&D).
ohhh that's a really cool point about primordial mechanical assumptions. Without wanting to sound like an MFA, how do you produce story without external challenges for characters to overcome? Or would you define a more story-focussed game as being one where the players get in their own way on purpose?
So, I would class Apocalypse World and Monsterhearts as games that very much work, as written, without external challenges, because these games don't assume cooperation on the player characters' part and in fact do heavily incentivize characters acting at cross purposes to each other. Something like Fiasco is an even more pronounced example because the game doesn't use traditional fortune mechanics to determine success and failure and is, in fact, very much about "playing to lose."
A challenge game is basically a structure built around one player presenting the rest of the group a situation or obstacle course that their characters need to overcome and often relies on an implicit or explicit agreement that the player characters form a coherent unit. Once you remove the idea of a coherent player character unit gameplay often becomes less of an obstacle course and more like a free-for-all.
imma push back on this reading of aw. it is very explicitly written as being about challenges to the pc as a group. the game assumes they are allies at the start and that they face some range of threats that are gonna fuck with them all regardless of their individual goals. it also assumes they share resources and like, a home base, usually. the inter-PC conflict is, of course, encouraged, but it's situated inside that general shared situation threatened by external forces. the way it differs from the "challenge" games is that it doesn't care to make players work for their success, and in fact makes it about interesting choices of "what will you do for success". e.g., all the characters are generally good at violence, and the violence related moves are always degrees of success, unlike some others; social influence always stems from lies, manipulation, seduction, bribery or threats of violence -- there's no way to get somebody to work with you by being nice; etc. the players are then choosing not the most strategically salient thing to do, which always means just doing all the fucked up things you are the best at, but whether you leverage the resources you have to do what your character wants to be done, and how it goes from there. that's the difference
