Story Now is murdered in cold blood by metaplot and it’s imposition.
Edwards talks about that too; he begins with a quote from his own RPG book
Sorcerer and Sword:
The solution most offered by role-playing games is a supplement-driven metaplot: a sequence of events in the game-world which are published chronologically, revealing "the story" to all GMs and expecting everyone to apply these events in their individual sessions. These published events include the outcomes of world-shaking conflicts as well as individual relationships among the company-provided NPCs involved in these conflicts.
Metaplot of this sort, whether generated by a GM or a game publisher, is antithetical to the entire purpose of Sorcerer & Sword. Almost inevitably, it creates a series of game products that pretend to be supplements for play but are really a series of short stories and novels starring the authors' beloved and central NPCs. The role of the individual play group in those stories is much like that of karaoke singers, rather than creative musicians.
Metaplot is central to the design of several White Wolf games, especially
Mage; all AEG games; post-first-edition
Traveller;
AD&D'2, beginning with the Forgotten Realms series; as well as others. Nearly all of them are perceived as setting-focused games, and to many role-players, they 'define role-playing with strong Setting.
However, neither Setting-based Premise nor a complex Setting history necessarily entails metaplot, as I'm using the term anyway. The best example is afforded by Glorantha: an extremely rich setting with history in place not only for the past, but for the future of play. The magical world of Glorantha will be destroyed and reborn into a relatively mundane new existence, because of the Hero Wars. Many key events during the process are fixed, such as the Dragonrise of 1625. Why isn't this metaplot?
Because none of the above represent decisions made by player-characters; they only provide context for them. The players know all about the upcoming events prior to play. The key issue is this: in playing in (say) a Werewolf game following the published metaplot, the players are intended to be ignorant of the changes in the setting, and to encounter them only through play. The more they participate in these changes (e.g. ferrying a crucial message from one NPC to another), the
less they provide theme-based resolution to Premise, not more. Whereas in playing
HeroQuest, there's no secret: the Hero Wars are here, and the more everyone enjoys and knows the canonical future events, the
more they can provide theme through their characters' decisions during those events.
In designing a Setting-heavy Narrativist rules-set, I strongly suggest following the full-disclosure lead of
HeroQuest and abandoning the metaplot "revelation" approach immediately.
So to summarise: the problem with metaplot is that (i) it is sole-authored (ie by the GM, or a publisher whose work the GM uses), (ii) it is secret from the players until they encounter it in play, and (iii) it is used to resolve, or generate consequences of, actions that players declare for their PCs. Because of (iii), it is further the case (iv) that those resolution and consequences, being independent of the players, cannot express players' responses to and judgements on whatever thematic questions play might be generating. Any answers to those questions follow from the unilateral pre-authorship.
There are multiple ways metaplot can be avoided.
One is to avoid pre-authorship. This is the "no myth" approach. It's fairly popular for "story now" play.
The other is to avoid secrecy from the players. This can be done by sharing authorship, but needn't be eg Glorantha, which Edwards discusses. An alternative is simply for the author to share their work. This happens in DitV, although the "setting" in DitV is really more like conflict-charged situation. Edwards discusses richer session-focused "story now" play in his "setting dissection" essay that I wayback-linked upthread. He emphasises sharing, and the fact that the participants all have to buy into the setting.
Elaborating a bit on that last point: once, in responding to a Forge poster who was having trouble with their scene-framing, Edwards gave
this advice:
It's not the distributed or not-distributed aspect of situational authority you're concerned with, it's your trust at the table, as a group, that your situations in the SIS are worth anyone's time. Bluntly, you guys ought to work on that.
In other words, the real problem confronting that poster wasn't
who had authority over scene-framing, nor
what principles governed its exercise (such as taking suggestions), but rather
that their scenes weren't any good. Edwards's advice: work on framing interesting scenes! (Of course a game can help with this: see my post upthread about using my powers, as a player, to steer BW play towards more interesting scenes than what the GM seemed to have in mind.)
The same thing applies to setting-based "story now" play: it won't work if the setting isn't engaging for everyone who is expected to be using it as the material for their play.
I think we also need to be clear about what it means to
use a setting when RPGing. As some participants in this thread know, I use the GM maps and basic backstory (the Suel empire, Suel nomads in the Bright Desert, knights in Furyondy, etc) in my Burning Wheel and Torchbearer play. This doesn't push towards high concept simulationism. The goal of play isn't to explore the setting - it is a backdrop, to which we add as needed, and whose main function is to provide some organising coherence for things like
Where do Elves come from? and
Where do we wash up when our boat sinks? When I played a session of Wuthering Heights, my knowledge of London (plus a Google map) performed the same function. I've used Washington DC, and the US east coast more generally, in exactly the same fashion playing MHRP. And I've used Europe, North Africa and West Asia in the same way for Prince Valiant. In all these cases the setting is basically just colour and a bit of geographic and historical coherence.
This contrasts markedly with the role of the pre-authored setting in my 4e D&D play. This basically resembled what Edwards suggests for Glorantha: the setting information (the cosmological conflicts, the history of the Dawn War and the pending possibility of the Dusk War) was shared. It provided context - informed, meaningful context - for the players' decisions. Eg because they
know who Kas is, and who Vecna is, they
know what they are doing when they return Kas's sword to him, or when they implant the Eye of Vecna in an imp familiar.
And of course for
this sort of play to work, it needed the players to buy into the setting, and the themes/conflicts it presents, so that they can use those as fodder for their decision-making during play. Which they did.
Story Now is imperiled by high resolution, pre-authored setting material that is PC dramatic need disconnected
Hence the need for player buy-in to a setting that has been shared and is not secret. The connection to dramatic needs is established by the players picking up what they like in the setting (the Raven Queen, the good Primordials, the fall of Nerath, the sundering of the Elves, or whatever else it might be) and running with it.
I don't know if Stonetop is more like "setting as colour", or more like "setting as material" that the players need to buy into, or even if it has some of the problems Edwards sees in Over the Edge, of being "setting as karaoke" (in which case one can disregard it and thereby avoid the "curse)". But I assume it doesn't rely on metaplot, and that it works in play by being shared rather than secret.