Storygaming has become a dirty word

Reclaiming the Storygame through simplicity and passion

Mythic Mountains, Samuel James, and Crescendo Games

Nov 08, 2025

“That’s just storygaming!”

Nowadays it’s common to hear this slur in some classic gaming places. What they mean is that someone isn’t being honest about playing a roleplaying game anymore.

Storygaming was exemplified by games like “Dungeon World”, “Blades in the Dark” and “The Burning Wheel.” Like everything about roleplaying games, no one can agree on definitions.

Here is a fascinating article from 2017 by Axthetable going over the history of the term “Story Game.”

https://axthetable.wordpress.com/2017/10/23/the-origin-of-the-term-story-games/

Mike Mearls, one of the creators of D&D 5e, outright stating that RPGs are something specific and Storygames are not RPGS

Also check out Samuel James “brief history of Storygaming”

Story Games Sojourn

Bonus Ep1 - An Oral History of Story Games

In which Sam draws a through-line from Free Kriegsspiel to Braunstein to Matrix Games to Indie Narrative Games to the Old School (R) to the Free Kriegsspiel (R) to Modern Story Games…

Listen now

9 months ago · 5 likes · 2 comments · Samuel James

For our purposes here I’ll define it as:

STORY GAME - A game where you tell a story.

That sounds pretty simple right? Then D&D is a storygame? Already we are steering into conflict (and quickly discovering again the #3 Folk RPG principle link).

Adventure gamers do not set out to tell a “story” any more than hikers go hiking to make a story. “The story emerges.” For many who play D&D, it’s probably a mixture of things, but it couldn’t be reduced to mere story and you can’t ultimately place the story outcome as the first principle (as Mike Mearls said mentioned earlier). Classic gamers might have no story in their game at all!

The three forms of Old Storygaming

Storygaming as a pejorative – Storygaming began as the Indies, wild experimenters who made fascinating games like “My Life with Master” or “Dogs in the Vineyard.” They were soon faced with skepticism by their friends that just loved that Good ol’ 1970’s Fantasy Wargame.

From here an odd choice was made. Rather than embrace this new form that emerged from the “Fourth Category” of gaming, or perhaps rather than seeing it as the emergence of older things from the new, these experimenters came into conflict with people in D&D, and they decided they wanted their place in that world also. They wanted to be called RPG gamers gosh darnit!

This is the source of “Storygaming as a pejorative” for indeed, D&D is a specific thing. There are things which make D&D work well and things which do not.

Those passionate about D&D will in short order express their distaste at a Gamemaster who has a “plot” and who “railroads” players, and who can blame them? The promise of the open adventure, of making meaningful and consequential choices is the Great Promise of D&D. Storygamers seemed set on doing exactly the things people had worked hard to learn not to do in D&D, and they seemed set on doing a whole lot of arguing about those desires.

They also seemed to like the idea of usurping the role of the Dungeon Master. Lo! Across D&D’s history this has been a battle has it not? And anyone serious about D&D long ago learned that you don’t tolerate “rules lawyering” and disruptions that can kill this blessed communion with Cheetos(TM).

So really, in an effort to forcibly integrate themselves into something, they became the misattributed slur for those people who clung to bad behaviors like railroading and rules lawyering.

Thus, in the Classic RPG community when you see someone being overly performative, self-centered, demanding of pre-supposed outcomes and other bad behaviors you say “ew, Storygamer!”

Storygaming as product – Storygames were products. I have many fond memories of these. We played a 6 month long campaign of “Monster of the Week” in 2020 that remains one of my fondest RPG memories.

Storygamers also wanted a slice of that brand pie. And companies eventually moved from the more Avant Garde like Dogs in the Vineyard and “My Life with Master” to things which, while sometimes risqué (ahem - “Thirsty Sword Lesbians”) were often far more familiar such as “Monster Hearts”, “Dungeon World” and “Blades in the Dark”. Storygaming was no longer just “the Indies” experimenting, it had carved itself a place on common bookshelves right next to the giants. You could sometimes find copies of “Mouse Guard” and “Blades in the Dark” in normal book and gamestores. I once got “Kids on Bikes” at my LFGS but couldn’t get “Traveller.”

If you’ve read my article here you know I’m all about what I call “Folk Gaming.” That might sometimes get confused with something like anti-capitalism. I love when someone has an idea and makes bushels of money on it (see my article on the rise of Shadowdark here and my celebration of their success). However, the way money is made has an impact on a game. This is the tragic fact of the history of D&D. The Brand quality of the game is a cancer on the game, and well, that cancer infected Storygaming too.

Don’t get me wrong, I really have a fond place in my heart for these games. PBTA (Powered by the Apocalypse) or FITD (Forged in the Dark) games were the “threshold crossing moment” for many to come into classical gaming. I share this when asked about my RPG history. My third RPG I ever played was FATE, well before I had ever tried D&D.

These games lost the creative wildness of some of the Indies. They were often very, very complex, full of intricate systems (like Blades in the Dark), or often expressions of familiar games trying to include new ideas (Dungeon World.)

The consequences of this branding of Storygaming was that many people really just used these as alternatives to D&D. People just used Dungeon World as D&D.

This is part of a beloved folk phenomenon where people buy something and completely don’t use it the way it’s intended at all, and while I like that in this case, I can’t say it succeeded at being a “Story game.”

I see this sometimes when I watch people play something like “Blades in the Dark” online, and ignore most of it’s byzantine conventions and arrangements which defy the conventional table. They are just playing a roleplaying game, with flashbacks and stuff.

This old form of storygaming was just an interesting form of that Good Old 1970’s Wargame.

Storygaming as designers see it

The last form of old story gaming is story gaming as designers see it, what was written by the very RPG online on RPG.net, the Forge, and by the famous Ron Edwards.

The purpose of Storygaming for these people was to reduce “ludo-narrative dissonance” those elements which come between the creative agenda of the participants and the game, for example the need to stop and look up rules. This resulted in trying to front load design to keep things moving quickly, and it reduced the authority of the game-master.

Check out their model of design here

I think Storygaming in this way failed. It did not do that. Storygames are often dense and complicated, or in other ways insufficient at equipping a narrativist creative agenda. Furthermore, they feel as though they create the opposite of their intended goal. For example in “Monster of the Week” or “Dungeon World” with it’s “playbooks” and selecting a “move” for a character rather than just naturally acting in an imagined world, gives the sense of the entire game being a layer of buttons to press and activate between the participant and the fictional result.

This is one reason that people keep coming back to D&D. It just works for them feeling like stepping into the Otherworld. It works because of simulation. Torches weigh something, they have a quantity, they exist at shops to buy them. They are not merely quantum. This aspect of D&D, applied at many levels, keeps people coming back to the dungeon and stories result.

But D&D doesn’t accomplish the dream of a seamless story either, is it possible to Storygame? Is the chance of doing something D&D cannot do lost?

Two new forms of Storygaming

The Story Games Sojourn

Like most RPG things, the seeking after commercial product success altered the course of it’s design. Brands enshitify. And to that end, I’m always a proponent of “Make D&D like hopscotch” or “Make D&D like something you can do in a 15 minute drive with your son to school” (See my interview with Jim Parkin regarding the Free Kriegspeil Renaissance on that here)

To that end, Samuel James at Dreaming Dragonslayer has created a blog called “Storygamers Sojourn” and arrived at the desire for stories and the freedom from the strictures of traditional RPG design by another route.

You can see my interview with him and the overview of his ideas here.

Storygaming according to the Samuel James method is D&D as “eye-spy” or “hopscotch.” It is campfire storytelling. When asked if Storygaming is an RPG, he makes the decisive choice that was not made years ago.

“No. It is not.”

What if you owned everything the classic gamers accused storygamers of? The result is you no longer seek a place on the product shelf (though he has made lots of cool stuff and you should check that out here, as well as this starter pack of things to help), and you make a game that really has existed as long as humanity has been around.

In other words, Samuel James has taken Storygames away from the 1970’s tunnel simulator we all love, and made it about what is done around a campfire. This incredibly simple process can be done by anyone, anywhere at anytime.

It has a seven part process:

First start with a scenario.
Then say what happens next.
There is no turn order.
Build on each other’s ideas!
If there’s uncertainty, roll dice.
The host may veto anytime.
End when the scenario resolves.

To put it even simpler you just define a scenario and then say what happens next

That’s it. And yeah, you’re right, that isn’t D&D. But it’s something that anyone, anywhere, anytime can do. You can still achieve the goals of what most want with D&D, even campaigns of grand scope and continuity, but it’s key that participants not see themselves as piloting avatars (characters) within the world. They might champion concepts, aspects, groups or characters, but everyone must be able to say what happens next for the Story Gamer’s Sojourn process to work.

Divorcing any brand goals from the method, making it simple and human and embracing story rather than insisting on the 1970’s wargame overlapping, liberates the Story Games Sojourn from the weights which held back it’s forebears.

The Subcreation Renaissance

The second form of new storygaming is the Subcreation renaissance led by Crescendo games. These games can still fundamentally be roleplaying games.

Crescendo shares a lot in common with “The Burning Wheel”, but it is much simpler. You create characters with beliefs and the game interacts with the beliefs creating unexpected results. It shares the simulation quality of D&D though. That is, the world is a real place. The goal is the same as that of Tolkien’s Subcreation.

The world is real
Character beliefs are real
When those collide, unexpected things happen

The narrative outcome is achieved without any knowledge of what it will be by the participants, through a process which mimics a “crescendo” beginning with playing out beliefs of characters in various circumstances as the setting constantly confronts and challenges their beliefs, until it spirals into something loud and transformative.

Crescendo inverts the accusation of storygaming where Story Gamers Sojourn embraces it and says “no, we will not come to the table with any expectation of outcome, and we will take this world seriously and honestly.” It refuses any imposition, a “purposed domination by the author.”

(That’s of course not different than the stated goals of some storygames, as Sage LaTorra of Dungeonworld famously said “Play to find out.” But in all of those games the key difference from roleplaying games was the presumption of a narrative outcome.)

Tolkien famously began with a language, then a map, then all of the real elements of his Legendarium, all as he wove fables for his kids, and then the epic that is Lord of the Rings emerged from that.

“This tale grew in the telling, until it became a history of the Great War of the Ring and included many glimpses of the yet more ancient history that preceded it.”

―J.R.R. Tolkien,The Lord of the Rings

Famously, there were aspects of the Lord of the Rings which Tolkien did not know until he arrived at points in the story. Even long after it was written he had the quality of not knowing some things when people asked.

Tolkien believed that humans had a divine faculty which he called “Fantasy.” This unique quality of fantasy was derived from us being in the likeness of God. Since God creates the world we too are “little world creators” all of us, every single human. When we access this faculty, we “sub-create” along with God, making things unique and beautiful, just as each human is unique as he says:

“Man, Sub-creator, the refracted light
through whom is splintered from a single White
to many hues, and endlessly combined
in living shapes that move from mind to mind.
Though all the crannies of the world we filled
with Elves and Goblins, though we dared to build
Gods and their houses out of dark and light,
and sowed the seed of dragons, ‘twas our right
(used or misused). The right has not decayed.
We make still by the law in which we’re made.”

― J.R.R. Tolkien

Crescendo is a roleplaying game because participants still roleplay a character while the Weaver (aka the Gamemaster) roleplays the setting. It still has those trappings of D&D, and likewise it carries the simulation of D&D with an equipment list included in the game. That’s because of the seriousness with which it treats the world. The Weaver must make a real world through this subcreative process. Furthermore, for this to work, the Weaver must employ genuine myth in the world’s creation, seeking the enduring and sacred patterns of durable stories. The setting must be a secondary world in order for it to respond honestly to the Character’s beliefs, and for a mythopoeic outcome to result.

Where a storygame presupposes a narrative and D&D promises that a narrative might result, Crescendo creates a process which ensures an unexpected narrative outcome, since heroes acting on their beliefs must create a narrative when the setting responds to them.

Crescendo and the Subcreationist then solve the problem of Storygaming by shattering the accusation of being contrived.

This spring I’m eager to show a Crescendo Actual play series on our Youtube channel, where you’ll see me attempt to put this into practice!

The promise of Story

I’ve discovered on my journey through classical gaming that while the hobby developed through a primordial soup of what I called “theatre kids ruining the Army Officer’s wargame” that this conflict never truly resolved.

It never resolved on the D&D side of design which I discussed in my article “A Tale of Two Sandboxes”, and I found that creating honest, hands off conflict simulations, by the rules, produces a realistic fantasy world and infinite gameplay.

It also didn’t resolve to the satisfaction of the “Theatre Kids” side of the dichotomy, who have inadvertently attained stories through emergent qualities and shenanigans, but when setting out to achieve a story as it’s primary aim, often find D&D unfulfilling.

The willingness to risk, to dream, to experiment that the Forge and other Designers of 20 years ago attempted is an admirable quality that we ought to not give up on. To say “maybe I’m not playing D&D, yes I am telling stories” or “I will make a world and it’s people so real in quality that a story is inevitable” are two ways we can hope to achieve this goal.