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Message: <blockquote data-quote="clearstream" data-source="post: 9462345" data-attributes="member: 71699">These (which I do not have any strong disagreement with) would fit with the ludologist's dislike of presupposing critical methods for traditional forms of narrative will say anything useful about games. However, there have been arguments put about narrative structure (development of themes, rising tension, etc.) that do seem to express or rely on a familial relationship between RPG and other kinds of performed fiction.Cues and other signifiers (rules, descriptions, perhaps parameterizations) are expected to lead to performances that are recognizably of a kind. There's that superficial likeness to a script, which is also expected to lead to performances that are recognizably of a kind. The difference seems to be spontaneity as you said, including freedom of interpretation and arrangement.As a minor aside, RPG testing and iteration isn't solely about how well its mechanisms function, it's also how well those mechanisms give rise to fiction of the desired kind. The experience of choosing which mechanisms to include, which to retune, and which to cut feels authorial when instigating the design, and editorial when finalizing it. That's if editing includes preparing a text (in the broad sense) for consumption or performance. An example could be if an early version of an Oracle contained a prompt to "Writhe" and it was felt that writhing would be jarring to the intended conversation. I suspect that the Stonetop discord channel is replete with further examples, as Strandberg proposes, playtests, accepts feedback upon, and revises the rules etc.In that light, I'm not sure I entirely agree with the point about "not the subject of extensive rehearsal". It is only that they're not rehearsed by the group at the table. They are rehearsed by groups from whom conclusions are drawn about how they will most likely play out at the table. Blades in the Dark works as well as it does because Harper was able to extensively playtest it (a sort of rehearsing on behalf of). It wouldn't be surprising if there were lessons to draw from theory around editing for other media, just as there have been lessons to draw from theory around narratives presented via those other media.</blockquote>

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