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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6104707" data-attributes="member: 4937">Without seeing the context, I can't really answer definitively.  I think it is being implied that since the story is about the player characters, everything about your preparation to play or play should be focused on the player characters.  At one level, I find that a very obvious statement.  At another level, I think that strictly adhering to that would be very difficult in practice especially if you wanted to avoid railroading a player and especially if you want to make the story meaningful.  The word 'involve' here is so vague, that I think in practice it will be defined in a lot of different ways and as a constraint is almost meaningless.  For example, at the start of 'The Lord of the Rings', Sauron's attack on Gondor profoundly involves Sam Gamgee and has huge implications for his future, but neither Sauron nor Sam can possibly know or foresee this.   At some point these events must be assumed to have occured either before or during a particular session, as Sam's story progresses.  This means that 'involve' doesn't mean that the only things that happen in the game world are the things he can immediately percieve.  Rather, I think the meaning is closer to the fact that Tolkien doesn't bother to tell the important stories of Dain's war in the North or Celeborn's cleansing of Mirkwood even though his world is alive enough he can imagine them happening, because they aren't really immediately pertinent to the story being told.  It's not that things don't happen, it's that we don't have to distract the players with them if they aren't part of the core story.Likewise, Harry Potter is profoundly involved in the life of a man named Tom Riddle, but it will be many years before he really understands how much his past which we may think of as being briefly sketched by the player as 'my parents died in a car accident (*wink*) and I'm an orphan' and his future is linked to the offstage actions of Tom Riddle, Sirius Blank, Severus Snape, and others.  Think how much poorer the story would be if none of those connections existed, or how much poorer the experience would be as reader if we knew them all ahead of time.As I see it, BW is about giving the players meaningful choices backed by a dynamic action resolution system that intends at least to create meaningful choices, be cinematic, and pile on the tension to make the moment where the fortune is determined - the roll of the dice - exciting every time.   There are a lot of games you could make out of that system, but it seems like the default game - the one explicitly affirmed and blessed by the text - is about two things - first, exploration of character through a sort of simulation of basic personality including provisions for tracking growth and change (along side more traditional mechanical growth and change) and second, a sort of versimiltude to the source material of fantasy fiction (the "accuracy" spoken of in the introduction).  Of course, even that is a really broad pallette for creating games.  What fantasy fiction are you inspired by?  Tolkien?  Leiber?  Moorcock?  Brother's Grimm? GRR Martin?  Kirosawa?  D&D?  What sort of assumptions do you have about the role of character in such fiction?  Are your characters mythic and archetypal?  Are they assumed to be on a hero's journey?  Is Bilungsroman consciously or unconsciously your default model for fantasy fiction?Oddly enough, the character burner - with its elves and dwarfs and other stock fantasy elements - seems to assume that the primary purpose of the game is to better emulate D&D than D&D does.The character burning system is designed to create mechanical linkage between the character and a backstory, strongly encouraging the player to engage in backstory authority.  As the game has evolved, it seems to have moved from 'beliefs as ethos' to beliefs as 'forestory authority' where the player not only includes a stake in the belief, but a future course of action and as a way of cueing the GM in on the sort of direction he wants to take the character in.But its not at all clear to me that the best way to achieve these goals is 'No Myth' or 'No prep' or any thing else of the sort.  Nor is it really clear to me that something as vague as that advice would really change how I approach the game.  For one thing, I never assume - even with a player cue - that the player will bite on any particular hook or choose to follow up on it.  All I can do is dangle stories and hope to get players running to engage them rather than running out of them.  Once you get engagement, then you try to provide some more of the same and follow on player direction.  But I think that it is a bit ridiculous to imagine the world as empty or static save in the exact spot a PC stands, and won't make much of a story.</blockquote>

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