The reason I referreed to Eero Tuovinen's essay, a long way upthread, is because it gives a very clear statement of the "standard narrativistic model", which is one method of "story now" RPGing. PbtA is another way, which emphasises scene-framing less and extrapolation from the fiction more. (PbtA is, in that way at least, closer to OSR.)
In my experience there are some posters on ENworld who think the question "If there's no worldbuilding, how would the game even be set in motion?" is a purely rhetorical quetion, and a sufficient explanation of what worldbuilding is for. Hence the utility of a succinct description of an approach to play - the standard narrativistic model - which uses other methods to set the game in motion.
Examples of searching for a map, or a secret door, were introduced into the discussion by me - not Eero Tuovinen - to illustrate the contrast between resolution with or without GM secet backstory. The only connection they have to Eero's essay is indirect, in the following way: (i) the absence of secret-backtory is more typical in standard narrativistic RPGing, because (ii) the use of secret backstory makes it harder to "go where the action is" if the action involves discovery (as opposed to, say, killing) and makes it more likely that the game will involve a significant degree of the players declaring actions that trigger the GM to reveal hitherto-unrevealed backstory so that the players then know what the necessary fictional positioning is for their PCs to make the desired discoveries.
I guess a third connection between the topic of the previous paragraph, and Eero's essay, is that his essay is moslty a criticism of conch-passing (or, as he calls it, narration sharing), and resolving an action declaration in a RPG is obviously not conch-passing.
Subsequently, [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION], [MENTION=6778044]Ilbranteloth[/MENTION] and [MENTION=23751]Maxperson[/MENTION] asserted that resolving action declaration is, in fact, a form of conch-passing, and hence is the sort of thing that Eero is cautioning against. I think this is obviously not what Eero had in mind, for the reasons that both [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION] and I have given: whatever we think about action resolution, it is clearly not preparing something in advance of playing the game, nor a proxy for it.
I think that the only thing that is clear is that Eero's post isn't as clear as you think it is.
We all seem to be pretty sure that what he writes in that post is directly relevant to our perspective.
The very problem he points out as the basis of his post is:
"The problem When we bring the above terminology together, I can finally express my issue: I think that mixing narration sharing uncritically with backstory-heavy games and advocacy-model narrativistic games sucks ass. Examples:
My brother Markku likes narration-sharing a lot, narrating stuff is one of his big loves in roleplaying. Now and then he gets proactive about introducing various methodologies into his gaming, which often ends up with him asking his D&D players what sort of monsters they would like to meet in the next encounter. Of course it’s fine if he likes this (no intent to call Markku out here specifically), but to me it seems completely awry and awkward to break the GM backstory authority and allow the players to narrate whatever they want. There’s no excitement and discovery in finding orcs in the next room if I decided myself that there would be orcs there. This fundamentally changes my relationship to my character.
Somebody at Story Games suggested in relation to 3:16 (don’t remember who, it’s not really important) that a great GM technique would be to leave the greater purpose and nature of the high command of the space army undefined so the players could make this decision when and if their characters find it out. So maybe they find out that the great space war is a hoax or whatever. I find that this is completely ass-backwards for this sort of game: the players cannot be put into a position of advocacy for their characters if those same players are required to make the crucial backstory choices: am I supposed to myself decide that the space war is a cruel lie, and then in the next moment determine how my character is going to react to this knowledge? Doesn’t that look at all artificial?
In another thread a similar claim was made about Trail of Cthulhu – that is, somebody described how he’d played the game with the players having the right to invent backstory by paying points for it. I’m not that vehemently against this in this case, as I don’t know ToC that well. Still, I’m almost certain that this is not the intended reading of the game text, and it definitely deviates quite a bit from how the game works if you assume an objective, GM-controlled backstory. My first instinct would be that I wouldn’t be that interested in playing the game if there weren’t a carefully considered, atmospheric backstory to uncover; it’s an investigation game after all."
And it's clear (to me anyway), that in the rest of the post he's not arguing about secret backstory. He is arguing against sharing the narrative in a way that allows the players to add to the backstory during the course of play. That you can't have an "I am your father" moment if the players themselves are contributing to the backstory. The parts I bolded only speak to the GM having the authority to write the backstory. It says absolutely
nothing about when that backstory is written.
His conclusion also speaks specifically to this:
"
Conclusion
I hope I’ve outlined my argument in sufficient detail. What I’m getting to here is that I don’t find it convincing how lightly many GMs seem to give away their backstory authority even when playing games that absolutely rely on the GM’s ability to drive home hard choices by using these same powers. There are other types of game that have similar problems (D&D for instance has nothing to do with the standard narrativist model, but it still sucks for slightly different reasons if you make playing the setting a matter of group consensus), but that issue with narrativist games seems exceptionally clear to me on account of how very clearly these games are written and how well-known the theory of their function is – the only reason to introduce extra dashes of shared narration in these games is well-intentioned foolishness, it seems to me."
There is absolutely nothing about the "Pitfalls of secret backstory" or "pitfalls of worldbuilding" or "pitfalls of pre-authoring materials."
I'm not sure how you'd come to the conclusion that I think action resolution is conch-passing, because that's definitely not what I think at all. It is a form of contribution to the story, yes, but very, very different from conch-passing. To me, conch-passing is what I see in the YouTube demo of Dungeon World. "OK, Bob, you're playing the dwarven cleric, tell us about the dwarves of this world. And tell us about the gods and religion in this world." That is, essentially handing over full control of the setting, backstory, and the fiction as a whole in a round-robin sort of way. I see most RPG's action resolution as a structured process, where the GM and players have more defined roles in the context of how they contribute to the fiction, but it's not a fixed process. That is, at times the players have more control, and other times the GM has more control. However, this control is centered around the roles they agree each of them will have, and it's a mutual decision during the course of play that allows this to be flexible. Can the GM in such a game ask a player to define the way religion works in the world? Of course, if that's how they'd like to play the game, that's fine.
Going back to Eero's post, the only thing he's advising against is to allow the players to have full control over the backstory. That is, there will be secret backstory (whether written or otherwise) that they players are not empowered to write. That portions of the backstory are reserved for the GM to write. If the GM decided at the beginning of the entire campaign that one PCs father is, in fact, the leader of the empire they fight, then he can choose when that is best revealed in the course of the game. It could be years later that it comes to light. On the other hand, if in the course of play, the PC and the evil leader of the empire are locked in a fight to the death, and it suddenly occurs to him that this evil man is the PCs father, and declares it to be, the result remains the same. The player now has to determine how his character will react. The fact that the backstory was secret is part of what gives it impact. Whether it's pre-written or not is immaterial.
I get that to you, it's not immaterial. That it makes a difference somehow. I don't doubt that it makes a difference to you. But I also don't doubt that it doesn't to me.
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The other thing that recently occurred to me is that we have a fundamentally different belief/feeling about pre-authored material/worldbuilding. You see such activities as limiting your options or agency. I see that very same activity as enabling them, as making it easier to participate in a meaningful way.
I see it as a framework, where the limitations it imposes provides the opportunity for a different type of creativity. If you want to call it agency, whatever. When you sit down at a gaming table and are told that the game is taking place in Europe, 1943, and you can be a French, UK, or US soldier, it doesn't inhibit your agency. It shapes it. It provides context. Such context is helpful in determining what might matter to the character. For example, if the setting indicates you are Roman slaves in 500 BC, your goals and motivations will be different than a setting that pits you in a race against your rival to be the first to climb the world's tallest mountain.
Likewise, a GM determining ahead of time that a secret door does or does not exist has no bearing on your agency. You are still free to search for a secret door. It does have a bearing on the potential success of that action. To try to narrow agency down to one aspect of RPGs, that it is relevant only to "the narrative" or "the fiction" is not considering the game as a whole. In addition, it's making a lot of assumptions about what constitutes a narrative.
You also seem to consistently insist that pre-authoring means that the GM cannot bring that material to bear in a way that speaks to the "needs of the fiction." While I'm sure that there are GMs that author material and believe it to be immutable, I've made it clear that I don't consider that the case at all. That whatever might have been "pre-authored" is in fact not actually authored until it comes into play, and can be changed at any point before that. Does that mean I never use what I (or somebody else) might have written as is? Of course not. A lot of times I do, because there's no compelling reason for it not to be that way. If I have a map of a keep, and there's no secret door in the wall, and I can't see any compelling reason for one to be there. Then it isn't there. My approach is more about whether it makes sense for it to exist, rather than whether it's compelling for the PCs at that point in time, but that's also because I don't consider any single event or series of events to be that important in the big picture. The PCs are compelled to enter the keep and kidnap the king. The fact that there is or isn't a secret door doesn't change that, nor does it matter when that decision is made. They will succeed at some things, and fail at others. If the failure to find a secret door here is enough to stop the quest, then it wasn't very important to begin with.
Part of what a lot of people seem to enjoy in RPGs is overcoming obstacles, and succeeding in the adventure, not a single use of a skill. This time it's the wizard that figures out how to get them in, next time it's the rogue. Not everybody wants every moment to be connected directly to one's motivations. Sometimes it's just part of getting there. To me, eliminating those parts (the parts between the action) are more about what makes the story interesting. They can have a material impact on what happens when you get to the action. But more importantly, it helps shape the narrative. The action is somehow more exciting when there are periods of non-action. Although more decisions, character development, and narrative somehow seems to occur in the in-between scenes in our campaigns.
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As I've been running the last few sessions, I've been considering the different approaches to play. I don't think the way I run my game is really that different than a lot of games. It's the same basic approach as I learned from Holmes Basic, B2, and the AD&D PHB and DMG. Certainly more refined, and my skills have improved (I hope), but the process is how I think the game is generally designed. And I find that there are times that I exert more control than I might think I do, and other times where the players have a greater control and contribution to the setting, backstory, and other elements outside of their character's actions. I think this is really a natural thing in RPGs, although some games are designed in an effort to steer more towards one sort of playstyle or another.
As I've considered the many other RPGs I've tried, and really even other games, like the more complex board games, video games, whatever, I think the main reason I keep coming back to D&D is because it doesn't favor one specific style to an extreme amount. That the game flows (at least for us) naturally to whatever playstyle is appropriate. Over the years, different editions drifted to favor one playstyle over another. And we'd ignore those parts that seemed to drift too far in one direction or the other.
Perhaps I'm not that objective. Maybe my style or D&D favors a particular playstyle more than I think. I definitely think individual games can heavily favor one style over another. So maybe we do favor a particular style. The thing is, when I read or play other games, or essays about how D&D or another RPG works, I find that a lot of what is said applies directly to our game. I guess I've had very few power gamers, min/maxers, etc., although on the other hand, most of the ones that I have had seem to blend in fine with our campaign, while still being able to enjoy their "game within a game" of mechanical optimization.