First of all thanks for the good faith response.
The thing is you’re pretty much right, but I think it would be more accurate to say all of those things are collaborative, and they produce stories, which I’ll explain in a minute. This is a case of the two of us agreeing about 90% but defining terms differently and in different context. What you’re saying is true, but isn’t what most people mean when they say “TTRPGs are collaborative storytelling.”
The issue is that when people begin to define all TTRPGs as the buzzword “collaborate storytelling,” particularly coming into the hobby from watching big budget “actual play” podcasts that are more invested in producing an entertaining story for an audience than playing the game by its rules, they begin to consider the purpose of TTRPGs to be the telling of a conventionally satisfying narrative story by the standards of a book or movie, rather than the playing of a game which produces (as a byproduct) a series of actions and events which can be strung together and told as a story ad-hoc. Such a story may or may not fit marks of “good storytelling” by the standards of other mediums such as books or movies by having things like “a good plot” or “character arcs.”
By only valuing the stories produced, and by grading those stories by the storytelling standards of a different medium, you get to a mindset where a dungeon crawl is not “a good story,” nor is playing out a fight tactically, because those things, by the rules of most TTRPGs that involve them, do not produce conventionally satisfying narratives and character arcs, and often actively resist them. If you think that the only point of a TTRPG is to “collaboratively tell a good story,” then TTRPGs where characters can just make a mistake and die randomly and unceremoniously to a trap or goblin before they finish the plot or their character arc are therefore fundamentally broken and bad TTRPGs. This leads to the player base writing off like 80% of TTRPGs as complete failures, and either never touching them, or trying to “fix” them by making the GM responsible for overriding the rules every time something is about to happen that wouldn’t fit the mold of a good story by the standard of a novel or movie. I won’t get too into it here because I’ve made a million posts about it but putting this responsibility on a GM burns them out. At best, assuming the GM doesn’t burn out from this misplaced responsibility, it results in a group completely missing out on the kind of fun experiences they could be having by going with the game instead of against it. They never experience a TTRPG, they experience an improv storytelling session while the TTRPG itself constantly gets in the way like a housecat trying to climb on the table at supper time. They experience “the rules getting in the way of the story,” because the story they came for is not one the rules were ever meant to produce.
The kind of events/situations-that-become-stories produced by TTRPGs that have any D&D DNA in them(which is the majority of TTRPGs, even if the designers don’t realize it) is kinda similar to the kind of events/situations-that-become-stories in a match of Team Fortress 2, even if they do not necessarily involve violence (though of course most D&D DNA games do involve violence).
Here’s a short TF2 clip where I sneak behind a Sniper as Spy and kill him, then get scared by a ghost which renders me helpless to another Sniper who comes around the corner to kill me, but he also gets scared by the same ghost just in time for me to come out of the scared stun and kill him.
Here’s a TF2 clip where I’m playing Medic and me and a bunch of other Medics are healing one Heavy, but then he and one of the Medics get killed by a Spy right when we run into the enemy. Through a little luck and seizing the initiative in the fight though, I, as Medic with only a crappy melee weapon, overcome the odds to kill all three enemies.
Here’s a short TF2 clip why I’m playing as Spy and sneak behind a Sniper to backstab him, but he keeps moving even though he doesn’t know I’m there so I keep comedicly missing.
Here’s a short TF2 clip where I join a match to play Spy and turn invisible to sneak behind the enemy team only to get immediately killed in one hit by an enemy rocket that hit me completely by accident.
All of these are fun little stories, but they don’t have a plot or character arcs or anything like that, and all the other events of the matches they took place in, while very fun in the moment, aren’t really anything worth telling a story about after the fact, so I didn’t save the footage.
This is the kind of story that most TTRPGs produce. Here’s a similar one that’s actually from a TTRPG, where the party had to somehow get a dog down a sheer cliff at the top of a mountain.
(And TF2 players are collaborating, even if they’re on different teams. Cooperating or competing, they’ve all agreed to participate in a game where the rules of TF2 apply.)
This kind of TTRPG also can natively produce plots and character arcs and stuff that are very satisfying in the same way a well-written book or movie would be, I can think of several that happened over the course of AD&D and Eureka adventures, but this isn’t the norm nor the point. It’s a rare occurrence and not something they should be expected to do because it isn’t what they’re built for. If I logged on to TF2 with the expectation that I would experience the plot and character arcs of an action war movie on Upward, or even for the sole purpose of getting those clips to show my friends, I would come away very disappointed from most matches and probably tell you that TF2 is a bad game. This is the situation with TTRPGs and the phrase “collaborative storytelling.”
