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If you’re interested in the various ways to make story, here’s a very brief overview., maybe so brief it won’t make a lot of sense. Plot centric trad. This is the type of advice you find in Vampire the Masquerade, a lot of adventure supplements, 2nd edition D&D and so on. It’s often conflated...

I agree with you and it’s why I think Daggerheart will end up getting rewritten. I don’t think the approach you describe scales well and the Crit roll cast have eight players. I also think that the meta-currency breaks the Dungeon World initiative style. Either you as GM ignore the...

Even if people don’t get super tactical, I think the system is flawed. They creating a genre based, combat heavy, action adventure game. I doubt most of the combat is going to be filled with highly consequential moral choices that illuminate character and pressure their values. So it’s just...

So I have a particular brand of ‘story now’ play that I approach most of my games with. Assuming the person would actually find that style fun, then I tend to have to teach a few things. What it means to create a story together (in this context) How to view a character in terms of priorities...

I recently made the lightest game I could think of, for my style of play. It ended up being heavier than I thought. There’s no GM. Situation: Create at least 5 characters with tension between them. Probably no more than 7. Scene framing: Take turns framing the scene. No one else has input...

PART TWO So this exact sequence could appear in both modes of play but here are the differences as I experience them. We’ve got all the characters on the board before play begins and are pretty constrained by them. Someone can’t just decide that aunt Daisy turns up (that would be expanding the...

PART ONE Yeah. Note before I begin: I was going to try doing this without theory terms because they can muddy the water, that proved too hard, so if I use a theory term I’ll explain it as it pertains to this specific mode of play. So in collapse play what you as a group (including the GM) are...

For me, that flavor of trad play is Narrativism at it’s best. Although it’s a bit more complex than that because I think there are two fundamentally different modes of play that people call Narrativism. (and for the critics out there, yeah yeah Narrativism really should be applied solely to...

Yeah 100% agree.

@clearstream Oh I think I get your point now. So the way I view it is that the unwanted is always in terms of the audience and you can’t legislate that away. You can advocate for a character as author but you can’t tell people who to root for as audience. I mean that’s obvious really but it’s...

You hit the nail on the head. On the GM thing. It can really be whatever you want no? In gamism you absolutely need an impartial adjudicator for the whole thing to even run. So they can be a player or a means. I strongly prefer for the GM to be just another player in resolving the situation but...

@clearstream Yeah you’re exactly right about my take on the unwanted. Now the GM can unilaterally introduce something that has a similar effect but it tends to be either accidental or from prep (they’re pre committed to it). I think the two things are different enough to occupy their own...

My take on the Vincent thing is, Really he’s talking about conflict resolution. Whenever there is a conflict of interest between two characters, use a randomiser to decide which interest prevails. The unwanted really only consists of the wrong characters interests being triumphant, in fact I...

I think Torchbearer follows different rules (as in a different super structure) but I’ll use Sorcerer, In a Wicked Age and Apocalypse world as examples because in my opinion they’re kind of the same game. Hopefully you’ve read them but I can expand a bit more if you need me to. So in In a...

When you give them motive and backstory you’re completing the dramatic situation. In a way a story is just a clash of world views and so you need binding world views to actually be able to clash. Which is in my opinion the most important part of allowing emergent story to actually happen. It’s...

This is basically what I do to get emergent story through play. Say If I was playing D&D, I might come up with a premise like ‘The king is dead and the succession is uncertain’, so everyone makes characters who are pretty invested in who the next King is going to be. Then pull the first group of...

Ah I was misunderstanding your point, in my crusade against no-myth I can become overly zealous. To answer the broader point of the thread. I do think you can run Apocalypse World in a similar way to how you’d run a fully prepped D&D. By which I mean the motivations and resources of each npc...

This might be the wrong thread for it but I see story now and no myth as pretty much directly opposed. Now I hate no myth personally but if that’s what people enjoy then that’s fine by me. As a lover of Narrativism though it does kind of pain me to see them conflated, especially given that the...