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There's a really good thread about OC play (Vincent calls it sim) on Anyway. http://lumpley.com/index.php/anyway/thread/444 It's worth reading in its entirety but you only really have to read up to post 20 maybe to get the gist. The social reward/cohesion in OC play is about affirming the...

That makes sense. So I've only ever done neo-trad until I shifted to Narrativist play. That's what I figured but it's easy to become myopic about styles you haven't really experienced or don't understand.

I think I'd kind of agree. I used to do OC (or something similar) before I went Narrativist. The GM style I was closest to was Brennan (maybe why he annoys me now hah). At the time I saw OC play as just good trad play and it's still hard for me to parse the difference. I currently lump PbtA...

Do you consider there to be a difference between OC play and what Matt Mercer, Brennan Lee Mulligan do? I don't think there is one but I basically grew up with that style (before I moved to Narrativism) so it's always seemed the predominant mode of rpg play.

Just to clear. If the players fail to solve the mystery then that it's, game over, they've lost. They need to get good? Or do you nudge them, change things a bit, prompt them?

The way I see it is that there's the fiction and the system is how the fiction moves forward. So it precisely isn't that cues replicate play but they are the process of play. Instructions are really just conveying what the cues are. I think I'm just echoing @pemerton here. Where I think I may...

Maybe I still get befuddled by mechanics rather easily but when I'm mocking up play it's first to see if I can actually use the mechanics in any sensible way. Then it's to see what they bring to play. Part of my ambivalence toward Apocalypse World's mechanics is that they do lots of cool stuff...

It absolutely is. The first reason is just that it's fun to do. I don't agree that they matter only in so far as the pc's react to them. They're my artistic creations, a load of little imaginary people who are expressing my various points of view as expressed through character. Then the next...

I think me and you have discussed this before. It's game dependant but yeah you can just go with what's compelling in the moment. Although what that means depends on other procedures and aesthetic criteria. I think the aesthetic process of Sorcerer is in the fixed backstory, what does this NPC...

@niklinna The advantage of being able to go away and think up characters is really that you have the time and space to think and make decisions about them. So I can decide I want a crimelord and I can think about his backstory and who he is and what he values. Then in play I'm thinking about...

To go a bit deeper into how I do it, I'll flesh out the bandit situation. THE BANDIT SITUATION There's the Dukedom of Ald and the Dukedom of Creep and they're on the verge of what may be a devastating war. The rules of the land means the first born son gets the right to succession and the...

Ah that's a really excellent example of what you mean and it is really different to how I do it. I'd have established in prep how far the bandits have gone and fixed that. So in this bit... when they finally meet the bandit leader the players see all the violence the bandits commit, and the...

I think instead you get the pleasure of mashing toys together. We see how priorities and relative positions change through conflict and for that we need fairly strongly established priorities and relative positions. It's kind of a hard thing to talk about without talking about specific...

Well I just want to play my npc's like I would play my PC's. Which means giving them a fixed backstory and priorities. Then I get to find out how they interact. It's like filling out the world and then seeing how the world changes. Of course it can be hard to talk about without talking about...

Also I don't mean, are you following the rules, I don't really believe in following rules that way. There's always lots of stuff you have to invent or interpret or some stuff you just don't like and so you change it or some stuff you don't know how to use well so you change it.

Well let's say during the first session there was a gang of raiders established called 'The maximums.' There was nothing about the leader established so as prep you create him and give him a backstory. Something like, Maximum was part of the Slavers gang but was constantly getting into...

If you're playing Apocalypse World say, do you stick to the clocks and backstory prep for the threats or do you not use them? or do you follow the text on a case by case basis? or is it, if you have the option to use floating prep (I think Blades in the Dark might be in this category?), then you...

Well when I GM I mostly want to think about what my primary cast of characters are doing. Which means them taking action based on the priorities I've established for them. If I have to make stuff up, usually it's in reference to one those characters. The players go to a record executives house...

Yes. I'd say aware of prep being used rather than the specifics of the prep. Yes That's exactly right. I'd consider Earthsea a setting. A situation must have a cast of NPC's. So you could have a situation with the setting being Earthsea. Prep you must use has a different decision criteria...

I don't really like the word prep and I'll explain why: Say we're starting a Sorcerer game and the kicker I'm given is something like 'I'm an art dealer and a weird piece of art was recently stolen in transit to me.'. Then I go away and create non player characters and back story based on...