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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6527995" data-attributes="member: 4937">I guess it depends on the player.   The above situation doesn't sound particularly fun to me.   I hate that fourth wall breaking sort of thing.When I was in high school, some of us nerds would spend a class period adding to a story in a notebook (multi-tasking, the trick to getting away with this was to pay enough attention that it just looked like we were taking copious notes), which would then get passed to the next nerd in the chain and round and round.I don't think that there would have been much point in having a GM or making a game out of that.  What's the use of having a secret keeper if you can tell the secret keeper what the secrets are?   What's the use of having a simulation if it is tractable to the desires of the beings in the simulation through methods that exist outside of the simulation?  Ultimately there seems to be a big disconnect here.  Are we simulating being characters collaborating in a story, or are we simulating the process of authors collaborating to create a story?  The former is tense and exciting.  The latter sounds like something you'd do as an exercise at work to learn about collaborative effort.  You might naively think it would a useful technique for simulating being a team of Hollywood script writers trying to turn around a movie in the middle of a production crisis, but in fact it wouldn't even be that story, but simply a process for turning out such a script.For a more detailed discussion of why this sort of design is actually incoherent (and I use that word in its traditional meaning, rather than in its Forge specific meaning), see for example <a href="https://isabout.wordpress.com/2010/02/16/the-pitfalls-of-narrative-technique-in-rpg-play/" target="_blank">here.</a>   IMO, the vast majority of games we would want to play are harmed tremendously by that sort of naïve backstory authority - including most narrativist ones.</blockquote>

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