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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8082158" data-attributes="member: 42582">I don't agree with this. I'm not sure what systems and experience you're drawing on, so I don't know the basis of our disagreement.To explain for my part: there are a number of RPGs, some dating back to the late 90s and many more over the past 10 years (especially those that are PbtA or otherwise Apocalpyse World-influenced), which do not require or rely upon a pre-authored plotline but which do, reliably, in play, produce story. By story here I mean some sort of up and down of thematically-relevant tension that rises and is then released, with the release of the tension telling us something about the characters and their situation.This post of yours suggests that maybe you're not familiar with these games:If you are familiar with them then it would help for you to clarify what you mean by tell as story and how you see that relating to pre-authorship, which is of the essence of an Adventure Path but is precisely what these systems repudiate.The Wuthering Heights session I linked to upthread produced a story: a conservative but republican clergyman clashed with a group of socialists, and was inadvertently killed by them. They threw his body in the Thames, but his ghost came back to haunt them. As a result the socialists fell out, and one of them (Hamish) ended up in prison. He escaped after starting a riot, but the resulting brief friendship with a sympathetic police officer turned sour, and - urged on by the haunting ghost - he burned himself alive in the socialist bookshop. So the ghost got its way, at least i part - the socialist tracts were all destroyed.That's not a great work of literature by any stretch of the imagination, but I think it's clearly a story. There were protagonists (Neville the clergyman/ghost and Hamish) and antagonists (Barry, most prominently). There was conflict (between the protagonists and Barry; between the protagonists themselves, although in the end they were in a sense reconciled in death). There was rising action, climax (disposing of the body; the arrest of Hamish; the riot, the burning down of the shop) and resolution.But that session did not rely on anyone having any sense of a plotline. The point of the system mechanics, informed by appropriate GM techniques, is to generate the story without the need for curation of the plotline.Not far upthread [USER=16814]@Ovinomancer[/USER] mentioned Burning Wheel. Here's a <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/burning-wheel-actual-play.673872/" target="_blank">play report</a>. It's not as overwrought as Wuthering Heights, but again there was rising action, climax and resolution.  Thurgon's attempt to care for Aramina resulted in a fire in Evard's tower, which exposed the basement; the protagonists' action in the basement resulted in the tower collapsing completely, with Thurgon and Aramina escaping only in virtue of her sorcerous control of the Orcish scrap metal; the protagonists met first Thurgon's brother, which foreshadowed the despair he would find when he returned to Auxol and his mother; but in that final moment of climax Thurgon's prayer resulted in his mother being lifted out of her despair, setting the scene for an attempt by the protagonists to liberate Thurgon's ancestral estate.Again, that is a story. And it did not depend on any prior sense of plotline. The system mechanics plus the GM techiques it advocates (which it is much clearer about than is the case for Wuthering Heights) make this happen.</blockquote>

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