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: 8138221" data-attributes="member: 42582">Some posters are talking about "actor stance players" and "author stance players". To the best of my knowledge the terms actor stance and author stance have no well-established meanings outside of their use at The Forge. And <a href="http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/4/" target="_blank">as used there</a>, they are not properties or tendencies of players:Stance is very labile during play, with people shifting among the stances frequently and even without deliberation or reflection. Stances do not correspond in any 1:1 way to the GNS modes. Stance is much more ephemeral, for one thing, such that a person enjoying the Gamist elements and decisions of a role-playing experience might shift all about the stances during a session of play. He or she might be Authoring most of the time and Directing occasionally, and then at a key moment slam into Actor stance for a scene. The goal hasn't changed; stance has. However, I think it's very reasonable to say that specific stances are more common in some modes/goals of play. Historically, Author stance seems the most common or at least decidedly present at certain points for Gamist and Narrativist play, and Director stance seems to be a rarer add-on in those modes. Actor stance seems the most common for Simulationist play, although a case could be made for Author and Director stance being present during character creation in this mode. These relative proportions of Stance positions during play do apparently correspond well with issues of Premise and GNS. I suggest, however, that it is a given subset of a mode that Stance is facilitating, rather than the whole mode itself. Some forms of Simulationism, for instance, may be best served by Director Stance, as opposed to other forms which are best served by Actor Stance. Similarly, some forms of Narrativism rely on Actor Stance at key moments. Rather than a whole lot of "downloading" from the GM in "session zero", [USER=82106]@AbdulAlhazred[/USER] has suggested cutting straight to session one, and using the more immersive technique of having the player of the ranger tell us what s/he knows!The same outcome: the ranger knows that there are hills, and where they are. More immersion: the player of the ranger doesn't have his/her access to his/her character's knowledge mediated via second-person exposition. More play: instead of wasting time with "session zero" we just start playing the game! [USER=6785785]@hawkeyefan[/USER] and [USER=82106]@AbdulAlhazred[/USER]'s approach seems like wins all round to me.The advantages only get magnified as we get to stuff that isn't introduced in "session zero" (eg is their a hunting lodge in the hills where we can take shelter?) - because obviously such stuff is going to come up in any halfway decent RPG in pretty short order - and the immersive-disrupting amount of second-person exposition increases.</blockquote>

Verification