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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Malmuria" data-source="post: 8440066" data-attributes="member: 7030755">Sometime ago, I ran a one shot of an OSR supplement called <a href="https://www.exaltedfuneral.com/products/stygian-library-pdf" target="_blank">The Stygian Library</a>.  It's a really interesting book! Though I'm not sure the remastered version is worth it.  Anyway, it's basically a procedurally generated dungeon in the form of an extradimensional library.  The locations are very OSR: lots of things to interact with, random tables for searching rooms or hearing rumors and what not.  The overall structure, however, is very interesting, and makes it play in a particular way.  The players enter a randomly generated room and can choose to go deeper, in which case a different room is generated (along with randomly generated room "details," NPCs/monsters, and items).  The list of possible randomly generated things changes based on their "depth" in the library and how they interact with npcs.  The locations are not literally connected to each other, so traveling between them could mean traveling down hallways, up or down stairs, etc.  This means that the players can go deeper, but they can also choose to go back, and then go deeper again, meaning another set of randomly generated rooms/details/npcs/items/etc (you can see why a book is not the most user-friendly presentation of this kind of thing...).  They could keep going back and going deeper until they found a situation that they liked, though I guess eventually you would run out of possible combinations.  The reason for being there was a fairly conventional one for a library: they were trying to find a book!  As my players are Cthulhu-obsessed, they chose the Necronomicon.  So their <s>objective</s> win condition was to find the book, and the likelihood of that happening was based on a combination of their depth and their progress, which is affected by how they interact with each location and with the npcs (not angering the librarians, randomly finding a related book, some other things).  The play experience was made further interesting in that we were playing <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/197158/Maze-Rats#:~:text=Maze%20Rats%20is%20an%20RPG,with%20two%20six%2Dsided%20dice." target="_blank">maze rats</a>.  One aspect of maze rats is that you get spell slots, but you roll on random tables to "generate" the spells, which are really just a combination of words.  Then the player and GM hashes out what the spell effect is.Overall it was a really great experience, especially as a GM, as my role ended up being taking a number of elements and interrelating them on the fly in addition to narrating/adjudicating player actions.  Because so much is randomly generated, and the interactions among those things are unpredictable, there was no way for me to really force a "story."  Plus the players knew I was generating everything randomly.Is that backstory first?  Probably, as it's basically a module filled with backstory, even if randomly generated.  On the other hand situations take a certain priority into what going deeper and making "progress" in the library looks like, and the free-form magic system was very player-driven and conversational.  I'd guess it was story after.  I don't know.But the bigger point is that...I don't care!  I think some of you look at play reports and toss them in basket A or basket B or basket C.  For those of us not invested in those categories, it makes providing play reports something of an exercise in futility, because no matter if I say that the above experience felt like there was a lot of player agency and authorship over "situation," it's possible that you all will come in and say, "nope, basket A."  Meanwhile, if both The Stygian Library and Waterdeep: Dragonheist are basket A, then that categorization doesn't have much meaning for me, because it doesn't describe what are vastly different play experiences.The deployment of theoretical language or jargon has a time and place, and one could argue that an internet forum dedicated to a niche hobby is exactly that time and place.  But employing it will make the conversation less accessible and more insider-y.  Particularly, when words with conventional meanings and connotations--backstory, situation, character, genre, force--are being used in ways that are technical and specific.  So speaking using theoretical terms is not some act of generosity; it situates the speaker in a position of authority and minimizes and devalues the experiences and ideas of those who don't have access to that terminology.  Or, as the OP phrased it at the beginning of their post:[As another aside, I'll say that one reason I like the <a href="https://retiredadventurer.blogspot.com/2021/04/six-cultures-of-play.html" target="_blank">Six Cultures of Play</a> post was that, while it provides a sort of categorization, the categories are historically situated, have admitted overlap, and are explicitly non-comprehensive.  They are an attempt to account for the things that people actually do with games, not what they should be doing with them in some platonic form.  The author identifies six cultures, but says that there could be more (with particular acknowledgment of the non-English world!), and it is implied that more could and in fact will develop, unlike GNS, which speaks as if the model is already complete and future games just need to fall into basket A, B, or C.  A flaw of this post might be that the author quite obviously prefers OSR games, but I think that's better that articulating a "universal" model whose real purpose is to design hyper-focused basket B-type games (you know, the ones for the "most functional" non-brain damaged among us)]</blockquote>

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