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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8150723" data-attributes="member: 42582">I'm sorry to rain a little bit on your thread, but that blog really didn't impress me. There is not the least engagement with "story now" play which has been a thing in practice since some time in the 1990s (Over the Edge and Maelstrom Storytelling are two early entrants in the field) and has been a theorised thing since some time in the early 2000s.Consider the following from the blog:The second meaning of “story” covers the things happening during the session. This meaning is the one that properly doesn’t exist: In real time, the story can hardly be identified. Looking at the events as they unfold, we find an endless amount of detail that we wouldn’t consider a “story” – think of a shopping session lasting two hours of play time, or an argument about how the characters actually move from point A to point B. Both are examples of events we will probably not include in the post-hoc narrative of events; In the post-hoc process we extract the interesting bits, to wind up with what we tell after the session. . . . Justin Alexander suggests we “<a href="https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/4147/roleplaying-games/dont-prep-plots" target="_blank">prep situations, not plots</a>”. In a nutshell, it means we’re not planning a sequence of events, but rather a rich and interesting situation we can put our PCs in. Another famous approach is the one preached in Apocalypse World: “play to find out what happens” – being aimed primarily at GMs. Combining the Alexandrian and Apocalypse World, we’d say that the right way to do it is to prepare situations that make you want to find out what happens. . . . We suggest a shift from the object, “the story”, to the practice: the players form expectations regarding the narrative; the GM plans situations that interact with the players’ expectations; the result is a story, but only a post-hoc one. The end. Personally I think that The Alexandrian and Apocalypse World combine about as well as oil and water. The Alexandrian's "three clue" rule and "node-based design" are both techniques that only make sense in GM-driven play and are intended to make GM pre-authored plot more feasible while maintaining an illusion of player authority over the content of the fiction.More broadly, the assumption seems to be that we are playing a game essentially like traditional D&D - with equipment lists, map-and-key resolution for travel-oriented action declarations (at least - maybe other stuff to), etc - and now we are going to try and find a way that will avoid overly evident railroading but won't involve changing any of those other conceits about how play works, how declared actions are resolved, etc.It is possible to have RPGing not just with post-hoc story but with story now. The techniques are well-known. The systems are well-known: PbtA and FitD are probably the best known at present; I really like scene-based ones like Burning Wheel and Prince Valiant; and there are others which can be used this way like Cortex+ Heroic/MHRP and (I believe but have never tried) Fate.A blog that doesn't even engage with those systems, or the thinking that inspired them, isn't shedding very much light.</blockquote>

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