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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9243117" data-attributes="member: 42582">There must be some misunderstanding, as I don't think it is "high time" to repudiate pre-planned storylines. My post was not about what should be done in RPGing - there are many things that can be done in RPGing, and clearly pre-planned storylines remain very popular (eg Wotc APs). I was pointing out that a particular game text (Apocalypse World) repudiates them; and that the phrase "play to find out" is part of the language in which that repudiation is expressed.As I posted, by ignoring what Baker meant by the phrase - that is, he was using to signal a contrast with pre-planned storylines - and by using it to describe all RPGing (including DL? Dead Gods?) - all that is achieved is obfuscation. To what end? Why is Baker not allowed to use clear, plain English words to describe what distinguishes his RPG from many others?I mean, I can also describe tying up my shoelace as a narrative - the untied laces are the antagonist, I as protagonist confront them, the story climaxes with my fingers knotting them, and then there is either a twist (the laces, being old and frayed, or even more unexpectedly, and hence dramatically, being poorly manufactured, snap!) or else a resolution and denouement (the laces are now tied, and my shoe snug around my foot, and I walk out of my house into the street).Perhaps thinking of video game design through this lens is helpful for designers of those games - I don't know. But using this sort of language to obscure the difference between (on the one hand, say) the role played by Keraptis or the Ogre Mage (whose name I forget - does it start with Q?) in White Plume Mountain; or the role played by the GM's keeping track of the Ogre Mage's hp tally in a combat; and (on the other hand, say) the role played by Megloss or Lareth the Beautiful in my Torchbearer campaign, is utterly unhelpful. It does not help design of RPGs, it does not help GMs with their prep, and it does not help me describe or characterise my play to other RPGers.Here is another illustration of unhelpfulness: central to narrativist, or "story now", RPGing is that the players choose the antagonists. Vincent Baker emphasises this in DitV: although the GM presents the situation, including the cast of NPCs, it is the players who choose how to respond and hence who choose, inter alia, who it is who is cast in the antagonist role. This sort of player choice is crucial, likewise, to Burning Wheel, to the extent that a good chunk of the PC build rules and the consequence rules (Beliefs, Relationships, Reputations, Affiliations, the Circles mechanic) are dedicated to addressing it. Torchbearer 2e is more equivocal on this than is BW, but I hope my actual play reports of my Torchbearer play illustrate how - as my group plays that game - it resembles Burning Wheel in this respect.But of course no one, in saying that (say) Burning Wheel has, as a fundamental feature, the players choosing the antagonists, means that the players get to choose the mechanical game system or its dynamics. The proposition about BW is about how certain core elements of the fiction is established structured, not about how the resolution rules operate. Obscuring this fundamental contrast between BW and (say) a CoC module or a DL-ish adventure module, by saying that all RPGs are narratives and by co-opting the label of "antagonism" to describe the relationship of players to mechanics, rather than of players-via-their-PCs to certain other characters in the fiction, seems to me to achieve nothing and to obscure some of the most interesting differences in approaches to RPGing.I didn't assert or imply an contrast between narrativism/"story now" and neotrad in the post to which you replied. To repost what I said, "The fact that the focus is on the characters, and on things that the participants care about, marks the difference from gamist play." Neotrad play is not gamist. As I already posted, it is high concept sim.And gamist play is not focused on the characters or things the participants care about in the relevant sense. No one, playing White Plume Mountain, cares about Keraptis or about the giant crayfish in the inverted ziggurat, in the way that Vincent Baker aspires to have players of Apocalypse World care about their PCs, and the NPCs, and the relationships between them all. The crayfish is a means, not an end; Keraptis even more obviously so.I mean, perhaps there is one person somewhere in the world who read Warlock of Firetop Mountain not with the goal of playing and winning, but simply for the literary pleasure of it, but I'm yet to meet that person. Trying to argue that caring about whether you win or lose the fight with the Orcs is the same as caring about the fates of certain characters; or the same as having a view about the demands of loyalty, which then determines how you declare actions for your character, is in my view ridiculous. It simultaneously purports to elevate that which no one wants to (WoFTM as a work of literature!) and to deny or devalue things that are of great importance (the "problematic features of human existence" that - <a href="http://www.indie-rpgs.com/_articles/narr_essay.html" target="_blank">as Edwards puts it</a> - are at the core of narrativist play).CODA:It seems like it might be useful to requote some Edwards, from the above-linked essay and also <a href="http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/15/" target="_blank">here</a>:There cannot be any "the story" during Narrativist play, because to have such a thing (fixed plot or pre-agreed theme) is to remove the whole point: the creative moments of addressing the issue(s). . . . The key to Narrativist Premises is that they are moral or ethical questions that engage the players' interest. The "answer" to this Premise (Theme) is produced via play and the decisions of the participants, not by pre-planning. . . . Depth and profundity of the Premise and/or theme are false variables. The key issue is whether participants care enough to produce a point, not whether the point is deep. . . . In Simulationist play, morality cannot be imposed by the player or, except as the representative of the imagined world, by the GM. Theme is already part of the cosmos; it's not produced by metagame decisions. Morality, when it's involved, is "how it is" in the game-world, and even its shifts occur along defined, engine-driven parameters. The GM and players buy into this framework in order to play at all. The point is that one can care about and enjoy complex issues, changing protagonists, and themes in both sorts of play, Narrativism and Simulationism. The difference lies in the point and contributions of literal instances of play . . .The discussion of religion and morality, and their role in play, found in the DitV rulebook, is practically a hymn to that final paragraph: Baker stresses again and again that the game - neither in its mechanics, nor in the GM's prep - provides no answer to the moral questions that are raised by the framing of the game, and by the GM's operationalisation of that framing in their prep of a town. This is what makes it narrativist. Contrast, say, The Green Knight, in which players have to identify honourable and dishonourable actions in order to preserve or even buff their PCs for the final confrontation. That is what makes The Green Knight simulationist.What about Agon 2e? Players succeed or fail, in part, on how they please the gods. But this is determined not by reference to GM pre-planning, but by reference to the players' own reading of the GM's "signs of the gods" at the start of each island. This is an "indie" technique. By default - and as I have experienced the play of Agon 2e - it supports narrativist lay. [USER=6696971]@Manbearcat[/USER] has recently argued that Agon 2e can support neotrad play, though, because the players - having interpreted the signs of the god - can then make it all come true, due to insufficiently robust mechanical opposition on the Strife (=GM side).If I was interested in design that tried to incorporate "indie" techniques in the service of "trad" (ie fundamentally simulationist) rather than narrativist RPGing experiences, I would be looking closely at The Green Knight, at a togglable game like Agon 2e, as well as at GUMSHOE, Fate and some of the other more usual suspects. I don't see how it at all advances this inquiry to try and coopt all terminology so as to make it impossible to draw contrasts between different sorts of RPG experiences.</blockquote>

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