Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 9419532" data-attributes="member: 82106">I think there are three different things that are being discussed here, one is 'action description' in which players, and possibly in some games the GM, describe what the PCs do, as well as possibly their plans and goals and such as depicted strictly within the shared imagined space. This would include things like describing casting a spell and its effects (subject potentially to some resolution mechanics) or simply things like which direction a character takes, or what they say. I do not think this is what the OP was generally describing. ALL games have this, and while some details might differ, it is fundamentally similar in all types of play. Then we have fiction that is less directly engaged with the character and her actions. This would include things like backstory, which is ABOUT a character, but not necessarily representing things the character did. This might also be held to include 'meta fiction' like describing the character's goals and such, stuff that is about things in the shared imagined space, but which is not action oriented or necessarily governed by imagined causality.Finally we have things that are entirely independent of the character, or largely so. Backstory might fall into this category as well, but any sort of general setting lore or fiction would be things that primarily fall into this category. I think the OP is most focused on this third category, though I think it bears on the second category as well. These are the independent fictional contributions of the players. Contributions which simply depict character actions are fundamentally much more constrained and dependent, they're really secondary in some sense because they can only happen and be relevant in the context of other preexisting fiction. Regardless of who authored that context, actions depicted within it are not really independent, while something like imagining the history of your clan is much more so, and inventing a new location is primary fiction.</blockquote>

Verification