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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Manbearcat" data-source="post: 9051130" data-attributes="member: 6696971">If you mean Threats (capital T as in Apocalypse World) like Treacherous Badlands or Burn Pit or Psychic Maelstrom or Pestilential Junkyard, then setting definitely gets used as a source of opposition in these games.  Its just that preauthored setting that is detached from PC goals and needs doesn't exist.  Preauthored setting that informs PC goals/needs and therefore directs play is anathema to Story Now play. More on that below.Preauthored setting that informs PC goals/needs and therefore directs play would be an example of "generic" rather than "specific."  Remember the above.  Setting and situation that sees play should be authored such that it indexes system directives/premise and PC goals/needs.  Continual fidelity to those constraints and processes should direct play.  Not the other way around.The game's premise, the system's content generation process, and the players will give you the boundaries on "specific."  Go outside of those boundaries and you're now in the "general" rather than "specific."EDIT:  Quick example would be in a Stonetop game you've got a Judge (Paladin of knowledge and order) and a Lightbearer (priest of light, radiance, hope, purity, etc).  Setting Threats better (a) attack Stonetop or (b) subvert knowledge and/or be sow chaos or (c) be an avatar of darkness and/or spoilation of spirit while indexing the rough maps of Stonetop and surrounds.  So a dark spirit that corrupts a Stonetop denizen to tear down an important custom or union or disrupts/defiles the imparting of knowledge (most everyone is illiterate and one of the few literate people start a "reading circle" that turns out to be a liturgical seance to The Darkness Below, inviting the malevolent spirit into the home and hearth of those there)?  Good.Trying to turn the game into courtly intrigue in Marshedge (a faraway settlement) with no Opportunity for or Threat to Stonetop?  Bad.Protagonisation in these games means players + system direct play via their nonvetoable input which dictate what this game is about whether that is "on-premise" content generation by system or "on-premise" flagging of dramatic needs/goals for a PC by a player.  These things generate situation-framing constraints (and therefore both consequence-framing constraints and follow-on conflict constraints) upon the GM.An example of a deprotagonizing rug-pull would be a GM subverting that stuff in the paragraph above.  While its possible in some games to do that by any of (a) up front ("I, the GM, say the game is about this!") or (b) covertly (covert GM Force, Illusionism, being deployed to subvert system/player input and steer the game toward GM desired outcomes/content) or (c) unilaterally ("oh, the game was about this...but now I, the GM, want the game to be about this!  We're in another dimension and ZOMBIES!"), those means of deprotagonizing rug-pulls aren't really on the table for GMs in Story Now games.  So typically, deprotagonizing rug-pulls in Story Now games are downstream of plain old GM mistake.  They screw up and its obvious to the table (and it better be to the GM themselves if they're going to improve their craft) that they screwed up.  It happens sometimes.  Fix it and update the fiction : gamestate and play on![HR][/HR]Hopefully that helps!</blockquote>

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