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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6809761" data-attributes="member: 42582">Slightly tangential, but not completely so - this reminded me of the following from Ron Edwards, discussing Tweet's Over the Edge:Karaoke. This is a serious problem that arises from the need to sell thick books rather than to teach and develop powerful role-playing. Let's say you have a game that consists of some Premise-heavy characters and a few notes about Situation, and through play, the group generates a hellacious cool Setting as well as theme(s) regarding those characters. Then, publishing your great game, you present that very setting and theme in the text, in detail. From Over the Edge (Atlas Games, 1994; author is Jonathan Tweet): How to Use the Setting When I first played OTE, it was on about ten minutes' notice. I had some notes on major background conspiracies, a few images of various scenes, and a primitive version of the current mechanics. No map, no descriptions of businesses, people, places, or any of the other useful tidbits that are crammed into the previous two chapters. [He ain't kidding, and actually it's the previous four chapters, 152 pages total, in the second edition - RE] Naturally I winged it. That night were born Total Taxi, Giovanni's Cab's [sic], Cesar's Hotel, and Sad Mary's, all now landmarks in the Edge. Things just happened. I faked it. Since there's nothing that couldn't happen, anything I dreamt up was OK. Now, however, you have a background explaining who, what, where, and when. You're in a completely different situation from where I was back on that first manic evening. [The rest of the section concerns converting the reader-GM's in-play mistakes about the canonical setting into opportunities, as well as altering it to taste; the suggestion that he may instead put himself directly into Tweet's improvisational shoes at the outset is, to my eyes, vividly absent - RE] [several pages later] Could vs. Should ... The first time I played OTE, I had a few pages of notes on the background and nothing on the specifics. I made it all up on the spot. Not having anything written as a guide (or crutch), I let my imagination loose. You have the mixed blessing of having many pages of background prepared for you. If you use the information in this book as a springboard for your own wild dreams, then it is a blessing. If you limit yourself to what I've dreamed up, it's a curse. All I see, I'm afraid, is the curse. The isolated phrases "mixed blessing" and "(or crutch)" don't hold a lot of water compared to the preceding 152 extraordinarily detailed pages of canonical setting. I'm not saying that improvisation is better or more Narrativist than non-improvisational play. I am saying, however, that if playing this particular game worked so wonderfully to free the participants into wildly successful brainstorming during play ... and since the players were a core source during this event, as evident in the game's Dedication and in various examples of play ... then why present the results of the play-experience as the material for another person's experience?In my experience, it is possible to build up a pretty rich gameworld on the basis of material lightly prepped in advance (eg a few maps, the names of a few gods, kingdoms, etc) and then seeing what happens to it in play. The demands of play will force authorship: and conversely, if something isn't authored because not needed in play, then what would its existence have added to the game experience?</blockquote>

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