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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Manbearcat" data-source="post: 7109991" data-attributes="member: 6696971">Just to be clear, Story Now games don't see the GM's role to direct players toward <stuff/thing>.  "Drive play toward conflict" and "go/cut to the action" aren't about seizing the initiative of the trajectory of play/the fiction away from the players.  Its about ensuring that table time isn't spent on premise/theme-neutral material and that momentum isn't lost due obsessive waffling/detail-haggling.  Here is a relevant passage in John Harper's Blades in the Dark that  [MENTION=16586]Campbell[/MENTION] may have relayed earlier:Notice his caveat "this may seem way too fast and breezy if you're used to other roleplaying games."  He's talking to several of the players in this thread (and on ENWorld generally).  He's talking to players that got angry at 4e's version of "drive play toward conflict/go to the action" which was "skip the gate guards and get to the fun."  They should have said "action" instead of "fun."  That is what they meant (obviously, given the context), but they didn't say it that way and a firestorm ensued.If you're in a downtime moment and the players are transitioning from action to action, (1) player(s) make their move, (2) resolve things mechanically (and/or spend currency and/or prepare loadout) as the system infrastructure demands...BOOM, (3) GM follows the players lead and cuts right to the action requested in 1, describes the situation and telepgraphs any consequential trouble/danger/conflict that the PC would be aware of, and we're back to (1). We don't have to serially play out things moment to moment, range increment to range increment, detail to detail (as JH talks about at the end of the second paragraph above).  I mean it depends on what you mean by "plots."  If "plots" mean premise/theme-neutral stuff in order to "create a living, breathing world" which puts on full exhibition "lack of PC-centrism in order to convey realism", then no...I don't think that Story Now games support that.  Now you can still have a sandbox where all the moving parts are premise/theme-relevant (Blades in the Dark connotes such play as does Dungeon World, Apocalypse World, and Torchbearer).  But its a different sandbox then most AD&D players (and now 5e players) would consider as orthodox; everything is premise/theme-relevant and the "off-screen" isn't hidden to the players.On that note, I don't fully agree with Ron Edward's ideas about the inability of multiple agendas to exist concurrently in a coherent fashion.  However, when you break it down to micro-components, sometimes it becomes inescapably true.  Such is the case here.  The premise-neutral components that are part and parcel of "the right to dream" Simulationism (a lot of orthodox AD&D sandbox play) fundamentally do not (and cannot) cohere with the premise-relevant requirements of "story now" Narrativism.In the same way, the technique of fudging (one technique of Illusionism) is completely anathema to "step on up" Gamism where the entire point of GMing is to referee with absolute objectivity and integrity (after you've skillfully rendered an exciting dungeon with interesting decision-points) so the players can test their skill against the collection of obstacles before them.</blockquote>

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