It's not a general part of the goals of BW - or of narrativist play in general - for the resulting output of play to have a 'novelistic' quality to it.
While I'm not an expert on BW, I have read Luke's introduction to the system and he is very clear that he created BW to be a better Dungeons and Dragons, and in particular as he was working on the system he realized that his goal was to produce better stories than D&D produced and specifically that the system would let you live out stories like the great epic fantasies. I invite anyone with the text to quote it. So, I think that while it may be your opinion that this isn't the goal of BW or narrativist systems in general, that isn't the author’s opinion (at least, from a few years ago, he may have mellowed since then).
As I mentioned upthread, the key word in the phrase "story now" is not story, it's now.
And again, I feel that this is just your interpretation. I think it would have surprised the designers and fans of narrative play 10 years ago that the whole purpose of their games was to improve pacing, and not improve the story of the game. I was rather unaware that the central idea of 'narrativist' was 'faster pacing'. If a narrativist game is delivering pacing first and story second, then some might see that as a misplaced priority. And in any event, that isn't how the products were originally 'sold'.
I don't know if you read [MENTION=99817]chaochou[/MENTION]'s posts a page or three upthread. But they showed an approach to GMing which involves a quite different extent and deployment of authorial power.
I have no problem conceding that there are different ways to organize authorial power. Not only am I aware of that, but it doesn't really harm my points.
The authoring in this paticular scene is shared between player and GM.
The player contributes the element that his PC is capering along the rail of the bridge. The GM contributes "and does so without falling".
This is only true in the sense that authoring of story is shared in any RPG. The player proposed something. The GM proposed the outcome. The same basic event could have happened in 3e D&D with a PC with 5 ranks in balance, a rail with a balance DC of 15, and a DM that decided that because nothing was at stake, the PC could 'take 10'. But note that in neither case are we delivering 'story now', much less 'quality story now'. And note that in either case, we don't really have a table conflict as long as everyone understands the stakes. So as far as I'm concerned, the bridge doesn't really offer us a good model for understanding what is at stake when you are 'surprising the DM' nor does it really address the issues of the thread. I guess to get to what is really at stake, we'd have to up the ante. Suppose the player in BW offers - purely for color - not to balance on the rail, but to balance on the mists rising out of the chasm, and caper across them. Is that 'pure color' by the same standard you are applying to balancing on the rail, and do you rule on it in the same way?
So in the scene described, another relevant consideration would be that, in crossing the bridge, nothing is at stake and hence tests (and advancement) aren't available. It is mere colour.
This is true only because the GM has decided nothing is at stake. It's quite easy to imagine that important beliefs are at stake if the player character topples into the chasm!
And that is not remotely contentious. As I've already mentioned upthread and reiterated in this post, there is no particular connection between narrativist play and "movie-style story as product". (And the comparison that Luke Crane makes to a movie is in terms of emotional response - "it would be like a false note in a bad action movie" - and not in terms of structural composition.)
I'm not sure that I agree in this based on the claims Luke makes about his system. However, it isn’t critical to the main thrust of the thread.
Perhaps the bits of the picture that you're missing aren't in what I quoted, but were in the OP of the BW play advice thread in which you participated - that the players author Beliefs and Instincts, in consultation with one another and with the GM, as part of setting up the overall themes and focus of the campaign.
I'm not missing that at all. What I'm seeing is that this is so broadly and loosely defined, and the GM so powerful and essential, that it isn't the system that causes this to happen, but the GM. And as with so many things in the 'system matters' model, the same GM can leverage almost any system to produce the same results simply by thinking about the system in the same way, and having players with the same agenda of play. So it's not clear to me that it is really the 'beliefs' that are achieving this in any functional sense. And what is really achieving what you claim is achieved is much less well described and nebulous and seems to come down to 'they talk about it'.
A BW GM who uses "say yes" to free narrate through scenes that enliven Beliefs, Traits and Instincts while calling for tests when none of those things enlivened is, by the express word of the rulebooks, doing it wrong.
And in the same way, a GM that regularly uses handwave technique to skip over things that matter, significant player choices, and conflicts is doing it wrong. Thus, in the same sense there can be disagreement over what matters and when "Say yes" is warranted. And also note, that there can be player motive to skip over things that enliven traits, beliefs, and instincts in order to obtain metagoals like security, empowerment, and 'victory'. How should a GM handle a player who says a scene that clearly relates to his beliefs, doesn't relate to his beliefs and thus should be said yes to it. I'd also like to point out that there is a potential player complaint that I'm quite sympathetic to that if the game is to be about my beliefs, it's counterintuitive that you 'say yes' to thinks unrelated to them but make it harder to succeed where it really matters to me. Many players are going to think it more intuitive that the system privileges what the player wants to obtain over things that aren't important to him. I understand why BW doesn't work that way, but I also can see why at first blush this is backwards (And notably, it
is backwards from how most other Narrativist games approach the problem, though that may be because in my opinion BW seems much much more sim than nar.)
Your first sentence is a non-sequitur. The player has said what the game is about, namely, it's about that player's peasant PC finding out whether or not he is to be king of the land.
But note that that is very unlikely to be a player position. Hussar doesn't want to play a game where he finds out if he gets to 'the city'. He wants to get to the city. The game where the player's peasant PC finds out whether or not he is to be king of the land isn't want the player wants. He wants to be the rightful king of the land and play out the story of the conflict inherent in that.
If the GM decides, at the start, that "that's ridiculous" then the whole game is a waste of everyone's time. Which is to say, that would be bad GMing, at least as far as BW is concerned. The Character Burner actually has a discussion of a related GMing mistake (the Belief pertained to the resurrection of the PC's dead wife, and the GM let it happen carelessly in the game, almost as mere colour, which completely pulled the rug out from under that player's participation in the game), and cautions new BW GMs against it.
That isn't a 'related mistake'. That's almost the opposite mistake, but not even opposite enough to say it is related by being an antonym. The problem in your example is the GM carelessly and easy grants the goal. The problem I see with beliefs is that they don't actually inherently address player goals. Indeed, the most straight forward approach to a belief is to pile on reasons to question or challenge the belief, which suggests that even a GM who doesn't see the belief as ridiculous might deliberately or inadvertently create Don Quixote when the player wants Morte D'Arthur.
This has no bearing that I can see on how Beliefs work in BW play.
That's pretty much exactly my point. This whole 'Belief' system is extremely weak in addressing player narrative empowerment. In fact, I'd go so far as to suggest it does nothing to address that, and what really addresses that isn't the system but the OOC talk about the system that consitutes prep. Which means that talking about the Beliefs really tells us nothing, and what we should be talking about in depth is the tenuously related to system process of preparing to play.
