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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9051281" data-attributes="member: 42582">From the post you quoted:As you can see, the post contrasts two possibilities - setting as backdrop/context vs setting as a source of opposition. The first possibility is "no myth" or at least very low myth. The second is not. I mention 4e D&D, but probably the most paradigmatic (if less widely known) example of the second is HeroWars (the setting, in this case, is Glorantha).From the post you quoted:In the post I also pointed to the post upthread about Burning Wheel, which illustrated specific concerns:I also gave some examples in the post you quoted:As a GM, facilitation of the generic concern to do knightly things, or superheroic things, puts fewer constraints on the sort of fiction you introduce than facilitating those more specific concerns. This is why the Prince Valiant RPG has terrific little scenarios (or "episodes", as it calls them) in the rulebook and the supplementary episode book; whereas BW doesn't (there are example scenarios for BW, but they come with pregens already authored with the appropriate specific concerns).Part of the point of the post you quoted was to say a bit more about prep, and no/low myth, as flagged in the OP. It's not true that "story now" = "no myth", nor that "story now" = no prep. Some "story now" tends towards both - eg BW. Some is no/low myth but can use prepped situations/scenarios/episodes - eg Prince Valiant. Some starts from shared myth - eg 4e D&D, HeroWars.I think it's fair to say that none uses secret, GM-controlled backstory/setting in the manner of (say) the DL modules, or a typical WotC module.Ron Edwards <a href="http://www.indie-rpgs.com/_articles/narr_essay.html" target="_blank">makes the following observation</a> about "story now" RPGing that uses what I am calling "generic" PC concerns:Situation-based Premise is perhaps the easiest to manage as GM, as player-characters are well-defined and shallow, and the setting is vague although potentially quite colorful. The Premise has little to do with either in the long-term; it's localized to a given moment of conflict. Play often proceeds from one small-scale conflict to another, episodically. Good examples of games based on this idea include Prince Valiant, The Dying Earth, and InSpectres. . . . The point is that the Situation doesn't have any particular role or importance to the Setting, either in terms of where it comes from or what happens later. The setting can be quite vague and might even just be a gray haze that characters are presumed to have travelled through in order to have encountered this new Situation. This type of Premise does carry some risks: (1) the possibility of a certain repetition from event to event, but probably nothing that you wouldn't find in other situation-first narrative media, which is to say serial fiction of any kind; (2) the heightened possibility of producing pastiche; and (3) the heightened possibility of shifting to Gamist play. I haven't found (3) or even really (2) to be a problem in Prince Valiant play. (I can easily imagine both being a big problem for a certain sort of superhero RPGing - the risks are obvious even just in reading the modest number of MHRP books that got published while MWP still enjoyed the licence.)The way we have dealt with (1) is (i) to change the backdrop of play over time, and (ii) to shift, over the course of play, towards some more specific PC concerns, for two PCs mostly focused around the building up of their warband and using it to wage a crusade, and for the third PC mostly focused around his relationship with his wife. In Edwards's terminology, this is moving away from purely situation-based premise (=, or ~=, theme) towards character-based premise. In the post you quoted, in my example of Classic Traveller play, I gave an example of moving away from reasonably generic PC concerns to setting-inspired ones, which in Edwards's terminology means moving from situation-based premise to setting-based premise.As per the OP,De-protagonisation occurs when the GM makes decisions - in responding, or otherwise in presenting the fiction - which undercut or contradict or override the players' endeavours to bring the protagonism by deciding what it is their PCs care about, what their motivations are, what their projects will be.In the post you quoted, I gave this example of de-protagonisation:As another example, consider my BW actual play from upthread and quoted just above: suppose the GM just declares that the balrog has stopped possessing the PC's brother; or suppose the GM just declares a magical effect occurs which teleports the PC to another plane, where he can no longer interact with his sorcerous cabal, no longer trade on his reputation as a minor illusionist, and no longer meaningfully pursue the project of redeeming his brother: those would all be de-protagonising decisions.Here is a quote from Ron Edwards (same source as above) that sets out the issue in more abstract terms:the other issue regarding protagonism is the problem of de-protagonizing, a term coined by Paul Czege. . . . Nearly all of the dysfunctional issues described later in the essay concern deprotagonizing in the context of Narrativist [= “story now”] play, which is best defined as Force: the final authority that any person who is not playing a particular player-character has over decisions and actions made by that player-character. This is distinct from information that the GM imparts or chooses not to impart to play; I'm talking about the protagonists' decisions and actions. In Narrativist play, using Force by definition disruptsThe key thing to recognise, in my view, is that there are many ways to exercise authority over a characters decisions and actions besides declaring them (which is what players typically do) or vetoing them (which is a standard image of a "viking hat" GM). In the examples I've given just above, the GM exercises authority over a character's decisions and actions by completely changing or removing the fictional context in which the player's decisions about those things - that is to say, the player's decision about their PC's concerns - made sense. In my imagined BW case, of the PC being teleported elsewhere, nothing stops the player imagining that their PC still cares about his brother and remembers his time with the cabal, but the player is precluded from declaring actions that engage those things, because the GM has established a framing (ie the PC is trapped on some other plane) in which such action declarations aren't feasible. That's an exercise of what Edwards calls "Force", it is de-protagonising and hence, as Edwards says, it disrupts "story now" RPGing.I'm not 100% sure what you've got in mind, but in writing the OP and in my thinking more generally I'm heavily influenced not only by Edwards but also by Vincent Baker, who <a href="http://lumpley.com/hardcore.html" target="_blank">said this</a> about the GM (around 20 years ago, the same time Edwards was writing what I've quoted):Doing Away with the GM You need to have a system by which scenes start and stop. The rawest solution is to do it by group consensus: anybody moved to can suggest a scene or suggest that a scene be over, and it's up to the group to act on the suggestion or not. You don't need a final authority beyond the players' collective will. You need to have a system whereby narration becomes in-game truth. That is, when somebody suggests something to happen or something to be so, does it or doesn't it? Is it or isn't it? Again the rawest solution is group consensus, with suggestions made by whoever's moved and then taken up or let fall according to the group's interest. You need to have orchestrated conflict, and there's the tricky bit. GMs are very good at orchestrating conflict, and it's hard to see a rawer solution. My game Before the Flood handles the first two needs ably but makes no provision at all for this third. What you get is listless, aimless, dull play with no sustained conflict and no meaning. In our co-GMed Ars Magica game, each of us is responsible for orchestrating conflict for the others, which works but isn't radical wrt GM doage-away-with. It amounts to when Emily's character's conflicts climax explosively and set off Meg's character's conflicts, which also climax explosively, in a great kickin' season finale last autumn, I'm the GM. GM-swapping, in other words, isn't the same as GM-sharing.I hope the influence of these thoughts on my OP is obvious.I have a currently active BW game in which there are two of us playing, each with a player character, and we use the sort of approach that Baker describes to handle GM duties - I frame the adversity for my friend's PC, and narrate the consequences of his failed action declarations, and he does the same for me. (You can see actual play posts <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/burning-wheel-actual-play.680804/" target="_blank">here</a> and <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/burning-wheel-actual-play.696702/" target="_blank">here</a>.) It produces very "local", "intimate" situations and stakes, because there is no "external" GM who is drawing on a bigger picture to bring in grander or more sweeping backstory.  I think this works in Burning Wheel because the game's action resolution system easily handles those sorts of stakes (contrast, say, 4e D&D which probably doesn't) and the system more generally copes with very low myth and has robust mechanisms for players to send signals about what scenes they want framed (or even to trigger the framing of scenes - eg via Circles checks). As far as "the campaign" is concerned, I don't think that's a terribly useful notion once it's taken outside the Gygaxian framework, except in the most basic sense of "a series of sessions broadly concerned with the same characters". My two-person BW game is set in Hardby, and notionally takes place at the same time as the BW game involving the sorcerer with the demon-possessed brother - the reference in my actual play report of the two-person game to "the bottom has fallen out of the market in soft cheese" was a joke between us, based on the fact that in the other game the wedding of the Gynarch of Hardby had been called off (and hence there would be no need for soft cheese as part of the wedding celebration). But I don't think it helps us make sense of the play of either game, or the techniques being used by the participants, to posit that they are both elements of a common "campaign" or "campaign world". Each game is its own thing, with its distinct protagonists and its distinct established fiction and its distinct trajectory.The idea of "canon", as something distinct from what we've all agreed on as participants in this game, being a constraint on play, is antithetical to "story now" play. (That's why, for setting-based "story now" play, the players need to have a handle on the setting from the outset - the deployment of "external" canon by the GM will be as de-protagonising in that context of any other instance of GM Force.)</blockquote>

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