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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9051534" data-attributes="member: 42582">What prabe says here pretty much sums it up. If the setting is supposed to be a source of opposition, as opposed to mere backdrop - or to use Edwards's terminology as per my post just upthread, if the game is to involve setting-based premise as opposed to character or situation-based premise - then as I wrote in the post you quoted, the players have to have a handle on the setting. Helping to create it is one obvious way to achieve that. The GM sharing with the players is another.Here is some of <a href="http://www.indie-rpgs.com/_articles/narr_essay.html" target="_blank">what Edwards has to say</a> about setting and "story now" (= narrativist, as he uses that term) RPGing:First, quoting from, and agreeing with, an email he received:themes in Nar play are created by the participants and that's the point; themes in Sim play are already present in the Dream, reinforced by the playThen quoting his own earlier writing:Premises focus on producing Theme via events during play. Theme is defined as a value-judgment or point that may be inferred from the in-game events. . . . Premises vary regarding their origins: character-driven Premise vs. setting-driven Premise, for instance. . . . The key to Narrativist Premises is that they are moral or ethical questions that engage the players' interest. The "answer" to this Premise (Theme) is produced via play and the decisions of the participants, not by pre-planning. *A possible Narrativist development of the "vampire" initial Premise, with a strong character emphasis, might be,Is it right to sustain one's immortality by killing others? When might the justification break down? *Another, with a strong setting emphasis, might be, Vampires are divided between ruthlessly exploiting and lovingly nurturing living people, and which side are you on? He adds this explanatory gloss:That bit about moral and ethical content is merely one of those personalized clincher-phrasings that some people find helpful. It helps to distinguish a Premise from "my guy fought a dragon, so that's a conflict, so that's a Premise" thinking. However, if these terms bug you, then say, "problematic human issue" instead.In my OP in this thread, I've talked about player-authored concerns for their PCs, with the understanding that the GM will both engage and oppose these.And here's a bit more from Edwards, elaborating further on how setting can figure in "story now" RPGing:*Character-based Premise: Characters begin play with at least one significant Premise-based decision in their backgrounds. *Setting-based Premise: External adversity swarms upon the characters based on unavoidable, often large-scale elements of the overall setting. I suggest that it's useful to reduce the pre-play effort on the other elements involved. Loading too many of them with Premise prior to play yields a messy and unworkable play-situation in Narrativist terms, in which characters' drives and external adversity are too full to develop off of or to reinforce one another. . . . 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 [a subsequent edition of HeroWars, the Glorantha RPG I mentioned upthread], 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. In designing a Setting-heavy Narrativist rules-set, I strongly suggest following the full-disclosure lead of *HeroQues*t and abandoning the metaplot "revelation" approach immediately.These remarks from Edwards also provide the answer to this question:Not remotely. This would be a non-supernatural variant of the Hero Wars that are coming in Glorantha. [USER=82106]@AbdulAlhazred[/USER] has from time to time posted about a sci-fi scenario that he ran in which the characters are trapped in a doomed space station.But this needs to be shared with the players. Otherwise, as Edwards says, they are not establishing the meaning of the actions they declare for their PCs, and hence are de-protagonised rather than bringing the protagonism.An alternative approach, which I've used in Rolemaster, 4e D&D and Cortex+ Heroic Fantasy (a FRPG hack of MHRP), is to put a possible end of the world on the table (the return of an ancient cosmological evil in RM; the Dusk War in 4e; the Ragnarok in Cortex+ Heroic), but to make the question of whether or not it comes to pass something that is up for grabs in play. The players then orient their PCs towards it, and based on the actions they declare and whether or not those action succeed, the event may occur or it may be staved off, or it may even turn out that the portents of it were (in the fiction) being misinterpreted.To be clear: the idea of setting revelations that come unilaterally from the GM more or less independently of what the players take to be at stake in their action declarations is not compatible with "story now" play. And at this point the reason should be obvious: because it de-protagonises the players.</blockquote>

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