For me as a GM, this is a resource to draw on. If the game will be more interesting, a situatin more challenging, by changing what I had planned here, then I'll change it.
I think I quoted Paul Czege upthread on the idea of keeping NPC personalities/backstory flexible, to put them to maximum use during play. I share that approach, and generalise it the gameworld as a whole. I'm reading the Burning Wheel Adventuer Burner at the moment - a good resource for non-BW GMs, in my view! - and it also talks about keeping backstory loose and sparse to start with (no worldbuilding!), tightening it up and bringing it into play in the most interesting/provocative/challenging ways. The Adventure Burner also makes (what I regard as) an obvious point that
once backstory has been revealed in play, then it is locked in. Thus, over the course of the campaign the gameworld becomes more and more richly defined - but because this has emerged from play, the ever-more-defined gameworld is an ever-more-detailed record of the PCs' struggles and victories, and of the game participants' joint endeavour.
Meta-narrative is solely the domain of the GM.
I don't play this way. Players create backstory as part of building their PCs. (In my current campaign, they have created cultural details, political details, geographical details like towns and villages, historical details, secret societies, etc as part of their PC building.)
Players can also create backstory in the course of play. I don't have as formalised approach to this as BW does with its "Wises", but just following some of the tips in the DMG and DMG2 is enough. A simple example - one PC is talking to an NPC merchant and asks, "Do you know my uncle so-and-so." Until that point in time the existence of this uncle wasn't known to anyone at the table - the player just made it up. But it fit with the PC's backstory (a refugee from a fallen mercantile city) that he should have an uncle whom another merchant might no. On the "say yes" principle - there was nothing at stake here that suggested a roll was needed, or that I should just give a "no" answer - I had the NPC reply "Yes, and have you heard about . . .".
Meta-narrative is the least-engaged narrative element for players
I've tried to explain how, in my approach to play, this is not really so.
Indirect Character Narrative is negotiated between the player and the GM. It's the bridge between direct narrative and meta-narrative, typically related to individual player/character's decisions about who their character is. This includes negotiating race, class, powers/feats/magical abilities, skills, where the character is from, hobbies/professions, and so on.
I don't see any clear distinction here from what you are calling the meta-narrative and what I tend to think of as the backstory.
I tend to see things in terms of the distribution of backstory authority - which in D&D, at least asI play it, tends to be informally distributed among the players and the GM, although it is generally understood that the more remote some fictional fact is from a given PC, the more likely it is that the GM will assert authority over that particular element of backstory.
Indirect character narrative can be engaged somewhat by players, especially when questions of "How would my character react to this?" come up.
I see it as much more than that. The PCs' histories, affiliations, hopes, aspirations etc very much shape the game, in my experience. I frame situations to try and engage them. The players bring them into play - eg asking merchant NPCs about friendships with family members, or taunting cultists that their magic failed due to divine intervention.
Direct Character Narrative—This is where most RPG sessions operate in a moment-to-moment basis; it's anything the character does while participating in an actual session.
Because it is the
players, and not the PCs, who participate in a session, I think that this can sometimes be less clear than you suggest. Eg if a player says that, during some downtime, his PC goes and visits his mother, and then drops off some eggs for the local priest, is that direct narrative or backstory? Without knowing more about what is happening at the table, it is a bit hard to tell in my view. If the GM goes on to tell a story about the priest being robbed of his eggs by a kobold, is it getting closer to direct narrative? Or is it backstory motivating an adventure hook? If, several sessions later, the player has his PC try to get an advantage in a negotiation with the priest, by saying "Remember when I gave you all those eggs?", is that drawing on past direct narrative, or on backstory?
Meta-narrative, indirect narrative, and mechanics all influence how the player approaches direct character actions--"My paladin character would feel the need to help that ragged orphan on the street" (indirect); "My sorcerer wants to find out the history of the Chancellor's magic ring" (meta-narrative)"; "My fighter wants to climb that wall. Tell me if I succeed" (mechanics).
Your division here appears already to rule out a host of possible (and actual!) RPG mechanics. In Pendragon, for example, the paladin's attitude towards the orphan might be dictated by the game's personality trait mechanics. Arguably, in classic D&d, the alignment mechanic might play a similar role. In many games (eg Burning Wheel), learning the history of the ring might be no different, mechanically, from climbing the wall. And it may not be the GM who has sole authority over the history of the ring, or over whatever it is that is to be discovered behind the wall.
There are numerous games out there where the "backstory" of the world is partially the domain of the DM.
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But, I agree, in D&D, typically this is entirely the realm of the DM.
The 4e DMG and DMG2 are pretty clear that this is something that can, and perhaps should, be shared with the players. So in part it turns on "which D&D"?
To me, having the mechanics define things like this has advantages that I can see, but the disadvantage of pre-defining a lot of gameplay.
That bit about "pre-defining a lot of gameplay" -
that's Vincent Baker's point, and Ron Edward's point.
That's what non-simulationist play (and perhaps narrativist play moreso than gamist play) is trying to avoid.
