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Advice for new "story now" GMs
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<blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 9058555" data-attributes="member: 82106"><p>OK, but I want to know what those moves were in response to and who really supplied the various pieces of fiction, and in response to what. So, a more detailed analysis of [USER=7020832]@FrozenNorth[/USER]'s post:</p><p></p><p>Player established family structure and wedding as an event. (This is 5e, we don't know what that looked like procedurally, but it is player directed/authored situation).</p><p></p><p>GM 'sets his adventure at the wedding', so there's SOME kind of GM story line that is established as part of the situation/framing. It sounds like the upshot of that is that an assassination attempt is established as a threat, and the PC is charged with acting, and this plot is the GM's.</p><p></p><p>After some extensive action which appears to have resulted in the capture of the assassin it is revealed that there's still danger. The PC's fail to thwart the danger, a cake explodes and lots of people are killed. </p><p></p><p>Now, we can see that the plot itself is GM formulated, though on the basis of a setting devised by one of the players. It seems like the stakes are apparent, but the outcome, the player is upset at the death of many of the PC's family, indicates that there's a mismatch of agendas. Clearly in Story Now/Narrativist sense there is probably less plot, BUT actually I don't think the GM introducing a plot which addresses PCs backstory and issues is necessarily out of line with narrativist play. Clearly the stakes were not adequately resolved before the cake blew up, which is something of an issue, but probably stems more from a lack of clear agreement when the game was started, or lack of existence within the process of play, of stakes setting processes.</p><p></p><p>You've talked about soft and hard moves above, but I don't think we can really discern specifically from the narrative presented here a sequence of moves that could be posited. I think a similar narrative could arise in a PbtA like DW or AW. There would be more definite constraints on the GM in terms of how they would frame things, but none of the framing seems to obviously violate, say, DW's principles. I think what is problematic is the degree of transparency and stakes negotiation present. That can be done in very explicit or more subtle ways, but I would think there would be opportunities, for example, to use Discern Realities in order to make choices. Those might involve things like whom to save, whether to disperse the targets and insure small losses vs crowd them all together and have a lower risk of a catastrophic outcome, etc. etc. etc. Certainly I think there aught to be that moment when one or more of the PCs sees the cake coming, literally, and those final split-second choices happen. </p><p></p><p>Maybe the stance of the GM running the game, not being really narrativist, is a bit too literal and some possible dramatic and thematic opportunities were maybe lost? This is one of the ways where simulationist/trad can diverge strongly from narrativist/SN. I don't want to rehash all the contrasts made in other places on that score though. I would just say that in the final 'cakesplosion' a narrativist approach would probably allow for some more dramatic 'moves'; ones that might be rejected as unrealistic or contrived in many sim/trad commentator's opinions (if I can venture to voice them here).</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="AbdulAlhazred, post: 9058555, member: 82106"] OK, but I want to know what those moves were in response to and who really supplied the various pieces of fiction, and in response to what. So, a more detailed analysis of [USER=7020832]@FrozenNorth[/USER]'s post: Player established family structure and wedding as an event. (This is 5e, we don't know what that looked like procedurally, but it is player directed/authored situation). GM 'sets his adventure at the wedding', so there's SOME kind of GM story line that is established as part of the situation/framing. It sounds like the upshot of that is that an assassination attempt is established as a threat, and the PC is charged with acting, and this plot is the GM's. After some extensive action which appears to have resulted in the capture of the assassin it is revealed that there's still danger. The PC's fail to thwart the danger, a cake explodes and lots of people are killed. Now, we can see that the plot itself is GM formulated, though on the basis of a setting devised by one of the players. It seems like the stakes are apparent, but the outcome, the player is upset at the death of many of the PC's family, indicates that there's a mismatch of agendas. Clearly in Story Now/Narrativist sense there is probably less plot, BUT actually I don't think the GM introducing a plot which addresses PCs backstory and issues is necessarily out of line with narrativist play. Clearly the stakes were not adequately resolved before the cake blew up, which is something of an issue, but probably stems more from a lack of clear agreement when the game was started, or lack of existence within the process of play, of stakes setting processes. You've talked about soft and hard moves above, but I don't think we can really discern specifically from the narrative presented here a sequence of moves that could be posited. I think a similar narrative could arise in a PbtA like DW or AW. There would be more definite constraints on the GM in terms of how they would frame things, but none of the framing seems to obviously violate, say, DW's principles. I think what is problematic is the degree of transparency and stakes negotiation present. That can be done in very explicit or more subtle ways, but I would think there would be opportunities, for example, to use Discern Realities in order to make choices. Those might involve things like whom to save, whether to disperse the targets and insure small losses vs crowd them all together and have a lower risk of a catastrophic outcome, etc. etc. etc. Certainly I think there aught to be that moment when one or more of the PCs sees the cake coming, literally, and those final split-second choices happen. Maybe the stance of the GM running the game, not being really narrativist, is a bit too literal and some possible dramatic and thematic opportunities were maybe lost? This is one of the ways where simulationist/trad can diverge strongly from narrativist/SN. I don't want to rehash all the contrasts made in other places on that score though. I would just say that in the final 'cakesplosion' a narrativist approach would probably allow for some more dramatic 'moves'; ones that might be rejected as unrealistic or contrived in many sim/trad commentator's opinions (if I can venture to voice them here). [/QUOTE]
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