I appreciate the lowdown, but it matches pretty much how I thought it works.
"There is no plot. Setting and situation will orbit around the premise of play + the dramatic needs of the characters."
Yeah, so this is actually a big part of what I'm reacting to and discussing, because setting and situation orbit around the players and are defined by their dramatic needs, it renders the material that I would typically enjoy exploring subordinate to those dramatic needs. Because the world is defined around the dramatic needs of the characters, the character's stories can't be defined in the same way by their emergent interactions with the world. This is where all that text I wrote about simulation comes into play, I want the world to be an object exterior to the players, and for it to define their situation and dramatic needs as they explore it-- this allows them to be inter-textual with that world, but not to define it. It actually acts on them as 'other.'
(digression)
I sort of see this as comparable to artistic movements in writing, contemporary writing advice suggests that the setting ought to be defined by the plot, Chekhov's gun-- if an element is there, it better be somehow important to the plot. Lord of the Rings doesn't do this, so someone like Matt Collville a professional, trained writer, suggests Lord of the Rings is 'Badly Written' for that reason. But I prefer for elements outside the story to add definition and depth to the world, to speak to a larger world outside the story, Tolkien's writing is GOOD because it does this, its just something contemporary thinking on writing doesn't value-- its worthy of being its own movement in that space.
"Premise will absolutely be online (because its baked into the game) but Theme is only very roughly sketched at the beginning and it/they will change as the story emerges and characters erode/change/rebuild (or not) through the collisions mentioned above."
Similarly, I like to be able to discover themes baked into the text of the game world, and then have the emergent choices of the characters in the actual narrative of the game sessions, be inter-textual with those themes, with the world itself defining the dramatic needs of the characters by confronting them with those themes, allowing them to explore, react, reject, and comment on them.
"There is no Cosplay element. There is no Power Fantasy element."
I'd like you to expand on the Cosplay element so I can understand what that means. But as for the Power Fantasy element.... In a traditional role playing game, values are absolute, so they simulate absolute power differences, difficulty, and increases in skill. When I discuss the 'Story Now' being more narrative in this context, I'm probably discussing what you think of as Power Fantasy. I'm thinking of how Traditional Roleplaying Games measure the power of different game elements in concrete terms, which makes them simulations-- if the Dragon is too powerful to defeat, numerical power increases from levels, treasure can adjust your odds of victory in a granular way. In PBTA, again technically referencing Masks, the numbers simplify into whether I am allowed to roll and are abstracted from the thing I'm rolling against. 1-6, 6-9, 10+, it doesn't vary by threat, just my own bonus, so there's no protocol for measuring my power against the dragon's power and having that relationship define my odds of success, only the material outcomes of the scene I'm allowed to roll in, and emulation of those elements through the fiction of what the fight between me and the dragon looks like.
I either have the potential to succeed or I don't, and if I have the potential to succeed, we move to the singular action resolution with the predefined ranges for story outcomes based only on my skill and not by my power relationship to the Dragon in world. This is what I mean by it being 'narrative' rather than 'simulative' the action resolution only governs uncertainty, it does not simulate in the way that another RPG might, which means that the network of power relationships is not demonstrated by math, only uncertainty of outcome-- which in turn damages the 'simulative' dimension of play. But I find that simulative dimension, and having the story outgrow as an emergent aspect from the complex relationships of numbers that express the game elements players and monsters use is fun.
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If you combine my responses, you can see the outline of how I'm understanding narrative play and simulative play, and how they intersect with exploration. When I discuss simulative play, I want a pre-existing world that exists as a text that I can explore, react to, and defines my dramatic needs through introducing new elements to me, and allowing me to ascertain the pattern and design of those elements in a way that informs my roleplaying. I like information to be hidden so that I can use investigative play procedures to uncover it for personal gratification, and to leverage it within the world in various ways.
I want that world to be defined by a network of (relatively) absolute numerical values so that my odds of success emerge organically from faux-empirical comparisons between those elements, that can be planned around, and finessed. PBTA (as an example of story now play) doesn't really do that in the same way, because the values are concerned with narrative outcomes of my actions as a scene in a story, rather than quantifying the relationship between in world game elements. This intersects back to exploration somewhat (though not exclusively), because it gives everything in the world 'objective' (in this case, reflective) values for me to understand, plan around, and interact with.
I'd especially like my relationship to that game world to be granular so that I get to navigate that network of power relationships through those same simulative elements, a +2 sword isn't just cool because its a magic sword, its cool because it makes me better (by +2) at hitting dragons, which changes my power relationship with that dragon.