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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Indaarys" data-source="post: 9509517" data-attributes="member: 7040941">I would say the issue is that you're approaching it from perspective of trying to tell a story. You might not believe you are, but thats what's resulting in how you're engaging these systems. You're thinking up a story, breaking off a chunk of it, and throwing it into the system.Which, apropros to the response to to clearstream, is something I'd identify as yet another manifestation of an improv problem.I've related in the past that Ive observed the hobby as being over obsessive with trying to tell stories, and I think there's a case to be made that this isn't fundamentally all that different from how, in improv, players might end up obsessed with trying to deliver a performance.For an improviser, if you want to achieve a real sense of presence, you essentially have to get a point where you've eliminated any notion that you're being observed; not just shake off any self-consciousness you may have, but reach self-forgetfulness. Its a state of flow where evaluation and awareness of self has given way to a vulnerable, open spontaneity.If you approach improv from the perspective of performance, reaching that flow can effectively be impossible, because doing so means you're engaging in that conscious evaluation that stands in its way.And this in turn, relates to what I've spoken to before about how trying too hard to tell stories through certain video games just burns me out. Its the same issue. I've thought up a story, and I'm trying to make a game turn it into something organic through brute force. It doesn't really work, and even if the story I have in mind is something special, the actual experience of it even if I got through it wouldn't be nearly as endearing as something more genuinely organic.But if I step back from storytelling, and just be present in the moment to moment of play, and trust the game, the fun comes back, and the stories that result from play mean so much more.Events as a broad system were designed to emulate "Attractors" in open world design, as a way of enhancing and bringing fun to the procedural process of moving around in the gameworld, and indeed, exploring it deliberately.Opening them up as prompts to kickstart a collaborative, improvised narrative is a natural evolution as, in tabletop, we seldom have the visuals that a video game has to spark curiosity, so we have to seek another avenue to foster that feeling, and reinforce the choices to act on that curiosity when it manifests.Birthsigns, meanwhile, call back to that necessity in Narrative Improv, Identify the Protagonists, establishing not just how players can set motivations and conflicts in motion for themselves and the greater narrative that will emerge, but also how the Game can interface with and interact with these esoteric ideas, and influence them as part of the improvisational process by consistently prompting you to consider who you are, and to question what you value, and what you are becoming.As your Luck waxes and wanes, its not a matter of you trying to hit the plot beats you think you need to hit, but a matter of whether or not you're embodying who your character is, whether the times are good or bad.But it only works if you trust the game, just as you would your fellow Players or your Keeper, and if performance or story take precedence, you've lost any grasp on that trust you might have had. I describe Labyrinthian as a game of "life and legend", and this is true in the broad strokes, but what Labyrinthian is really driven by is choices and interaction, before anything else. What the game is shooting for, even if we must admit it isn't fully there yet, is what I'm talking about when I describe a story like Lord of the Rings, that results not from a story being defined and told, but from emerging from spontaneous, but guided, interaction. Its what I'm saying when I describe a story as something that couldn't have ever been told, because it had to be experienced first.When I describe the beauty in a group coming together, in character, to cook a meal together, its not because these players decided to tell this cutesy story about doing so, improvising the dialogue as they went.Its because it emerged unprompted from interaction between players being present as they interacted with a deep crafting system and each other, with the system reinforcing the scene, tying their choices and actions to something concrete that will stick with them in their adventure, and the players reinforcing the system in turn, using its rules to generate unique, bespoke mechanical boons for themselves that isn't just numbers and dice, but a tangible part of their emerging story.Its a system where cooking with love isn't just an expression, but something you can tangibly see and feel, because the things you seek out the most become your characters favorites, and this becomes something other players can interact with.Its easy to just tell a story of this moment where two characters express how much they care for each other in the exhange of gifts. But it'd pale in comparison to feeling the actual emotions involved with not just this individual moment, but every other moment, and all the choices within, that lead up to this happening, going back to the beginning.We may know the story of Lord of the Rings, and the broad story told of how it comes to that penultimate moment when Sam tells Frodo that he can carry him. But what we don't know, is what its truly like to be Sam, to be someone of such moral and loving fortitude, and in a story we tell, we can only just grasp what it must be like, even with the gorgeous prose of the Professor to guide us there.But if we play as Sam, or whomever we decide to be, and we reach that critical flow as him, then we'll know, and in so doing, as Walt Whitman says, the powerful play goes on, and we may contribute a verse, and that is where the good stuff is, not in the stories we tell, but the ones that are made.I may have gotten a little overly poetic there, but, I think its important to really drive in this nail, because while all I've said serves as a valuable perspective that might help one understand what I'm trying to do, the point of the game is ultimately still to be fun. There's toys in these systems, and we shouldn't take them so seriously we begin to slip into that disruption of our flow. But not should we be afraid to trust, and to surrender control, and just be.</blockquote>

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