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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6529544" data-attributes="member: 4937">I'm not saying they are doing it wrong.  Quite obviously some people like it.  I'm saying I don't see the attraction, and that it can be wrong for a game depending on what the goals of the game are.  I'm saying that naively assuming that shared setting backstory creation creates either a more enjoyable game or a more literary game is likely to lead to disappointment.I think surreal is one portion of the problem.It's incoherent in the sense that I don't think most players actually play to produce a theoretically more literary transcription of play (even if you accept that collaborating on setting backstory in the middle of play is likely to do that), but rather they play to experience the tension of dramatic play from moment to moment.  When you can introduce elements to the setting than help resolve those challenges, you're often working against the experience you are trying to achieve.The difference is that in the 'give me a FATE point' case, they know that the chandelier wasn't there until they asked about it, and they know they had input in creating it.  There is also a big difference in the experience of play something out, and then referring to the rules to find out what happens and in referring to the rules to find out what happens and then playing to justify it.   You look at the FATE rule book, and there is example after example of the later, and - not surprisingly - more than a few examples of where the rules decide what happens and they don't bother to play it out (because really, what is the point?).   It would be like watching a baseball game when you already know the final score.  There's a reason sports reruns aren't tremendously popular.Honestly, the single strongest reason for something like 'give me a FATE point, and I'll give you a chandelier' is probably to avoid table arguments over whether or not some feature of the setting is reasonable.  If you look at the examples in the FATE rules, they aren't really about establishing setting, so much as avoiding an argument over how to adjudicate something questionable - whether or not you can speak an obscure language just because your character is a scholar, for example.  Making it about a question of spending a player resource takes the potential confrontation out of the adjudication, because it no longer relies on any one player's opinion.   Of course, for me the crazy thing about that is that a typical 'indy' style RPG probably relies more heavily on the skill of the GM than even a traditional RPG does.  If you can't trust the GM to entertain the players in a dungeon crawl sort of game, you sure as heck can't trust the GM to entertain in a game that by and large depends entirely on the GM's skill as an oral story teller and improvisational actor.</blockquote>

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