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Message: <blockquote data-quote="John Morrow" data-source="post: 2070055" data-attributes="member: 27012">FYI, I'm purposely trying to avoid "Narrativist" and the GNS model here because it contains a lot of other baggage that goes far beyond the issue of story and setting.I think "Cinematic" games that give the player some control over their character are an attempt at achieving Dramatist ends using Gamist means.  Similarly, settings like Torg that have setting-based justifications for treating the PCs as story protagonists or letting them bend the rules for story-based reasons are an attempt to achieve Dramatist ends using Simulationist means.  What both Simulationist and Gamist games have in common is that both tend to thrive on unpredictable and random outcomes and dice are often (though not always) a big part of that.  Dramatist games tend to frown upon random outcomes because some outcomes often produce bad stories (e.g., Luke Skywalker fails his Dex check to catch the antenna and falls to his death from Bespin). "Cinematic" rules and settings are an attempt to skew the odds of unpredictable or random outcomes to make them more controllable by the players and GM.  But as a result, they are often forced to treat PCs and NPCs or monsters differently (e.g., the Feng Shui mook rules, D&D rating monsters by "Hit Dice", etc) as part of the rules or setting because protagonists and plot device opponents are treated differently in stories.But I agree that without a GM or players to guide the process as a story, the result is more often than not a pastiche of a story than a story (that's a great way of putting it, by the way).  But I'm not entirely sure that distributing the authority to guide the story across multiple people (as Narrativism seems to do) doesn't have a tendency to do the same thing in a different way.  As Larry Niven points out in one of his story collections, "collaborations are unnatural," and expecting a half-dozen people to produce a coherent story in a single pass without revision or planning is a task that most professional authors are not even up to.</blockquote>

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