Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8133389" data-attributes="member: 42582">Ron Edwards discussed this sort of thing <a href="http://www.indie-rpgs.com/_articles/narr_essay.html" target="_blank">nearly 20 years ago</a>:neither Setting-based Premise nor a complex Setting history necessarily entails metaplot, as I'm using the term anyway. The best example is afforded by Glorantha: an extremely rich setting with history in place not only for the past, but for the future of play. The magical world of Glorantha will be destroyed and reborn into a relatively mundane new existence, because of the Hero Wars. Many key events during the process are fixed, such as the Dragonrise of 1625. Why isn't this metaplot? Because none of the above represent decisions made by player-characters; they only provide context for them. The players know all about the upcoming events prior to play. The key issue is this: in playing in (say) a Werewolf game following the published metaplot, the players are intended to be ignorant of the changes in the setting, and to encounter them only through play. The more they participate in these changes (e.g. ferrying a crucial message from one NPC to another), the less they provide theme-based resolution to Premise, not more. Whereas in playing HeroQuest, there's no secret: the Hero Wars are here, and the more everyone enjoys and knows the canonical future events, the more they can provide theme through their characters' decisions during those events.From the point of view of authorship - which is what we're talking about when we talk about player agency over the shared fiction of a RPG - there is no fundamental difference between past and future in the fiction. A player's goal can be to establish that his/her PC really is the child of the duke (ie a past-oriented goal), just as much as to overthrow the duke (ie a future-oriented goal). And you don't need particularly fancy mechanical systems to support this: my current Classic Traveller game has action declarations that aim at establishing truths about the past as well as truths about the future.So playing in a context where we know the setting is a doomed space station can be just as meaningful as playing in a setting where we know the revolution has just happened.What is anathema to player agency - as Edwards points out - is the GM using secret backstory and covert manipulation of unilaterally-imagined fiction to shape and thwart action resolution outcomes.</blockquote>

Verification