I draw maps and leave blanks. I have an agenda. I name the folk of the realm and guide players to a world that contains elves and bards, and word demons. I sketch out fronts, dangers, enemies and dooms.
That seems like building a story to me.
As you describe it, it seems closer to an imaginary catalogue or bestiary or atlas.
Obviously there's little profit in quibbling over word-meanings - but Vincent Baker clearly says in the rules for DitV that the GM should prepare towns (which resemble your fronts etc) and shouldn't prepare stories; and says something very similar in the rules for Apocalypse World. So on the reasonable assumption that he's not confused or self-contradictory, there is a received usage of
story in RPG design and RPGing practice that distinguishes prep of the sort you describe, and prep of a story that
@Ovinomancer said oughtn't to be done when playing DW.
When I read a book, if I reread it I know what is going to happen. The dramatic-narrative is the same because books are linear and non-dynamic. Chess is non-dramatic, but it implies all its narratives.
game as game may imply all its possible narratives (it doesn't matter if this set is bounded or well-defined, to get the notion). If it makes more sense, a game implies the contents of the set (plays). That's the job of the system.
A book implies one narrative. That's currently a great advantage: it can be dramatically richer.
For the reasons I posted upthread, I don't think a RPG implies all its possible narratives, unless that is meant in what seems to me the completely trivial sense of
whatever the gameplay, it will be possible to describe it in retrospect.
Consider even a rather "simple" RPG, like T&T. There are relatively few constraints on how a GM might draw up a dungeon level for a delve; and not that many more constraints on the actions that the players might declare for their PC delvers once play starts.
So T&T doesn't imply all the possible narratives that will arise from playing T&T. And even a particular dungeon map and key drawn up for use with T&T doesn't imply them. Even if we add the PC sheets to the "game as game" we still don't get any such implication.
If we make the constraints on what counts as a
narrative stricter - eg it must have the conventional form of a story -
then T&T ceases to be a useful example because it doesn't necessarily imply any narratives in that sense. But the same points made in relation to it can be reiterated in relation to, say, Prince Valiant: a Prince Valiant episode and a set of Prince Valiant characters don't imply all possible narratives in any interesting sense that I can see.
To me, this open-endedness that results from the fact that the only constraint on action declaration is fictional position seems fairly fundamental to RPGing.
When we look at dramatic-story-focused games, are we trying to force something that is great in another medium, into a medium that has different strengths?
Is the question meant to be rhetorical?
The reason for playing a game like Burning Wheel isn't to produce a story that is, qua story, on a par with (say) LotR. At least for my part, it's to participate in the experience of a dramatic story. There are features of RPGing that are pretty crucial to this - the "avatar inhabitation" of the player participant, for instance; and for the GM participant, the lack of control over what the protagonist will choose to do in response to tension or crisis.
The Lumpley Principle defines system as "the means by which the group agrees to imagined events during play." And this is not wrong: it leads to useful outcomes and can be taken to match the cloud-players-cues diagram.
As a designer, I see it as giving system too passive a voice. We might rank systems for degree of success in leading to agreement, but we can't tell why [how successfully] BB is murder mavens versus Lovecraft or Dogs were Mormon gunslingers. We can't judge systems using it for success in their creative purpose
<snip>
My desired complementary principle would say something about that. Perhaps defining system as - "the means by which the group is driven to choose and go on choosing acts that match the distinctive and worthwhile themes of this game, over all other games."
Yet something has changed. There have been consequences. It's going to take one more hit to down the orc. The DM is intended in the basic pattern to narrate results.
If they are not doing that then they should be subject to accusations of doing it wrong that parallel those levelled at some play styles of story-now games. Or at least, they have brought the lack of fictional consequence on themselves by ignoring guidelines as to how to play.
Perhaps I've misunderstood, but what you're talking about here - your complementary principle, and your comment about what the DM is supposed to do - seem to me to be extensively discussed by (among others) Vincent Baker and Ron Edwards.
For instance, the clouds-and-cubes blog I linked to just upthread is Baker's use of the model to critique his own game - In A Wicked Age - for having insufficient rightward facing arrows. That is to say, the rules/procedures do not reference the fiction in generating changes to the "gamestate". One thing he is proud of in DitV is that its rules require having reference to the fiction in order to be applied (see steps 3, 4 and 6 in Resolution System #2) - and this is also what makes the themes of the game become salient in play, because those, or things that directly implicate them, are the bits of fiction that must be referenced.
The D&D DM adjudicating the D&D combat can, if they choose, add leftward-pointing arrows about what happens in the fiction with each change to the hit point tallies. But this will be purely epiphenomenal and optional - the rules of the game don't state that it should be done, and even if they did participants would get slack about it because that changed fiction would never give rise to rightward arrows.
A similar thing can happen in Burning Wheel in a Duel of Wits - this is one reason why years ago I posted that D&D 4e skill challenges actually have a strength in this respect, because you can't avoid rightward pointing arrows in the latter process. (There are approaches to BW that can maintain the rightward arrows in the DoW: the GM can follow the rule
declare actions for NPCs based on the intersection of their Beliefs and Instincts with the current state of the fiction; an optional rule can be adopted which gives a player an advantage die if declaring an action that conforms to or expresses a Belief, Instinct or trait.)
When considering the implications of Baker's ideas for design, I think Apocalypse World is the best case study. So when we look at AW we can see
which sorts of fiction demands
what sorts of moves. Mostly if a player says that their PC does something-or-other than the GM makes a soft move, or a hard move if handed a golden opportunity. This is the back-and-forth conversation of RPGing, but with the pressure/tension generally rising (because of the soft moves) and with a certain sort of colour/flavour to those moves (because of GM-side principles such as Barf forth apocalyptica and Put your bloody fingerprints on everything). But certain sorts of action declarations trigger player-side moves - Acting Under Fire, trying to Seize Something by Force, etc - and then cues are consulted (ie dice are thrown) and the results set constraints on who is allowed to say what. The choice of
what fiction triggers those player side moves helps determine the success of the game in making the intended thematic content central. (It doesn't solely determine it. The constraints that result from various dice throws also matter to this. The fact that we
throw dice is also significant, because it introduces tension in a manner that doesn't depend on consensus/conversation, and so is more vicseral, and that allows for climax one way or the other rather than just rising action.)
It's a sign of weak RPG design that, for instance, it follows tradition in making the tension and play of the game reach a crescendo when engaging in fighting, or worrying about architecture and inventory - these are the things classic D&D focused on - even though fighting and architecture and inventory are of little or no thematic significance. 2nd ed AD&D is a poster child for this design problem.
But I don't see anything in Baker's or Edwards' frameworks that makes it hard to talk about these aspects of RPG design. By getting us to think about how fiction, cues, and rules interrelate I think they give us the vital tools to do so.
