Justin Achilli

Obviously, I come from a storytelling tradition. The mechanics in games that use the Storyteller/ Storytelling system take a back seat to moving the story along. (In fact, I used to kid that the rules were intentionally so bad that they forced you to rely on sensible story outcomes rather than stare into the yawning abyss of the mechanics.)

Story doesn't really matter much to games.

Heresy! Let's put that in context, however.

The experience of what makes games doesn't end with what the players accomplish in the game. What's important is that the players are together, interacting, communicating, and sharing an experience. The fact that they got together to tell a story about vampires in the cutthroat world of modern art or a raid on Orcus' temple is secondary. The important part is that they're doing something together.

That's where I think tabletop RPGs have a distinct edge over their legacy, online MMOs. In an MMO, the player ostensibly has access to thousands more players at any time -- but their interactions are limited by the medium. Most MMOs feature a familiar format of kill-the-monster, gain-the-level. You don't need other people for that, and if you do, the objective is fairly obvious, so the necessity for communication is minimal.

By contrast, around the table, the player isn't forced to communicate, she's already inclined to communicate because being there, with other people, she's just doing what people do when placed together -- she's forming community. She either already knows the people with whom she's gaming, or, if this is a first-time session like a convention game, she's there specifically because meeting people and gaming with them is what people do at a convention.

In this regard, though MMOs overcome the massive barrier of geography, they don't always do a good job of making the players acquaintances before they throw them into the game itself. Other people aren't first and foremost friends or acquaintances in networked games, they're tools to help overcome the environment. They're game pieces, rather than players.

EVE does a good job of putting players in touch with each other socially: It assumes everyone wants to join a corp, and the experience is designed to put players in corps as early as possible. And that's why you see EVE, as a comparatively small game (300K subscribers), with a strong, tight community that has closer interaction than many of the larger titles. The social network starts early. It doesn't always start before the experience of the game, like I did when I was nine and played D&D in my cousin's basement, but it overcomes that limitation as early as it can.

(Tangentially, you also can't kill your communication channel. You can minimize, but you can never actually leave the basic channel. You will communicate in the world of EVE, whether you want to or not.)

Look at a Vampire LARP, as another example. Until you start talking to people, you are almost guaranteed to have nothing to do. Character objectives in Vampire LARPs are rarely mechanical -- you're not likely to be tasked with "kill 50 Brujah." You might want to kill a given Brujah, or maybe even cripple "the Brujah" as an entity, but that all arises from some assumed interaction in the player/ character's past rather than as a solely systemic objective.

Putting people together is something I'm working on every day. Dana Massey's blog also covers this topic (with some editorial bias, as Will points out). Be sure to read the comments when you check out that article.

Consider that the next time you're around the table or logged in. What you're doing isn't important as that you're doing it, specifically with the people who are also there. The experience you can form with those people is greater than the story or world in which you're doing it. Think beyond the experience at the table or outside the monitor. What do you have in common with those people -- outside your characters?