NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 9245015" data-attributes="member: 82106">My test is where does the direction come from? In trad the direction comes from the GM, and maybe secondarily through some negotiated grant of permission, traditionally with very strict bounds, for the players. Players MAY get to pick some of the attributes of their characters, maybe some of their backstory, but generally gated by GM permission (witness the recent long thread about GMs insisting that they get to decide which classes and races players can use). That's trad. Once these things are decided, then fiction is presented by the GM, and player input is strictly limited to in-character descriptions, usually without any mechanical support for, say, testing their willingness to break their own code of conduct or something like that (IE D&D places the definition of alignment on the GM, the player simply plays to what they have declared and gets punished if they deviate in the GM's sole judgment).Neo-trad moves the authority for WHO YOU ARE and possibly also other parts of the character's definition strictly to the player, and the primary orientation of play is towards the players enacting their conception. The GM provides fiction and other elements in such a way as to complement and support this effort. There are usually at least informal, possibly formal, means for the players to signal their requirements. Trad can certainly 'bleed into' this simply by dint of players getting their way, though there are some fairly well-known failure modes here where play becomes fairly degenerate. So, signaling and constraining elements usually exist in the structure of the game if it envisages this sort of play as its norm. As several people have mentioned, this is a type of play that isn't aiming at challenging the CONCEPTIONS of play, but of affirming them and enacting them. Which leads to the final form on this continuum, Story Now/Narrativist play in which the premise(s) of play are supposed to be challenged. The GM's job generally becomes to frame these challenges, which players usually signal via various mechanisms. Here we find conflict resolved in terms of achievement of intention, the definition of consequences and rules for their imposition on PCs as part of the resolution of these challenges, etc. While any one of these features MIGHT be employed in Neo-trad play, it will be in service of whatever the player is doing, whereas in Narrativist play it will be true fallout, and often impacts the core perception of the character in uncontrolled ways. This gets me to why we have held that PtFO is particularly an expression of Narrativist play, because it is ALL OF this kind of play. Neo-trad players are not playing to figure out what their characters and their relation to the world ARE, they KNOW THIS ALREADY. They play to find out what it feels like to make that story, and if there are things in doubt it is either A) doubts within themselves about their dedication to the concept, or B) small side issues, like maybe "which of the superheroines do I fall in love with?" or something like that. In Trad play the questions will be more like "did the party survive the encounter with the Red Dragon?" Sure, you can 'play to find out' these things, but ALL OF Narrativist play is fundamentally almost nothing else.And honestly, I don't care about any one 'model', GNS is often used, its easy to understand and IT DOES REFLECT THINGS. I mean, if Vince Baker wants to come and have a discussion with us about it that's great, but there are fundamentally different games where people spend their time and energy on different things. All these games have a lot in common, nobody has ever disputed that, least of all myself. They still have some differences. I'm one thousand percent certain that my Dungeon World game is going to be substantially different from someone else's 1e AD&D game, and the difference is not just some minor variation of resolution mechanics. There are many narratives which WILL NOT ARISE in one which can in the other! (and here I will have to disagree with RE or VB or whichever of these guys said differently, they can sue me if they want).</blockquote>

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