Need a hand moving those goal posts?
Just clarification, please. A preset ending to a scene is a logical jump to a preset ending to a game. If you didn't mean the former, I owe you a particularly heartfelt apology.
Let's double check, here: Are there games that people speak of as involving "narrative control" or "authorial power" or something like that? And what does it entail?
Seems to me there are, and it entails someone getting to say, "This is what happens". Sure, that someone could just roll a die to determine which outcome to apply -- but then why not just do that in the first place? Why lay on all the chrome that determines who gets to do the job? A simple, sensible answer is that the person in question is expected to choose what happens based on some preference.
That would make sense. I think most games aren't quite that simple, though; at least those with rulesets. There is usually some sort of resolution mechanic in play. A good example would be some sort of resource like, let's call them "Drama Points" that you can expend to change one particular outcome. Players bid from their pools to see just what will happen, or whose preference will come out on top. And often there are mechanics to twist or alter that preference, so you throw in a dramatic rider. If one person gets to determine "He gets away with the loot," another mechanic adds a "but" to it, like "but in the process he left something he values at the scene."
This is the process of "Story definition" in the game. When I exclude, for instance, "Assassin X kills John Doe now," that definition of what The Story (in my mind) is not simultaneously defines the border of the domain of what The Story is. The point of making that directly my choice is the assumption that I have some such preferred conception in the first place. If not, then give me that old time RPG in which "stuff happens" without my needing to manage any more than my character.
Sure. I believe in the case of most story games, you may or may not have a preferred conception from the beginning of the scene, as the scene is expected to evolve. Plus also, scenes and stories evolve like potluck dinners, as each player adds new complications and such.
The enemy was too powerful, so the PCs were captured: "The dice have spoken; they rolled critical hits and y'all rolled fumbles."
The characters were meant to be captured, so the enemy was too powerful: "Well, duh; if I wanted to narrate something else then I would have narrated something else!"
And presumably the mechanical part played out sufficiently that you were able to pull off that narration.
I really am not trying to be your dogged opponent here. I'm really just trying to elaborate more on what the "game" part of story game might entail. For instance, I don't think that most people go into an average scene knowing the specifics of how it ends. They may apply solid narrative control to the beginning of a scene, but that's somewhat different.
If I seem a bit persistent here, it's because the idea that an average scene in a story game is predestined to end in a certain way implies a certain level of futility. Most story games are faced with that problem, and work to solve it in interesting ways (you may know the basics of an ending, but the devil is in the shifting consequences, or you don't know how a scene ends but you know a lot about how it begins). It's kind of a negative thing, and some (not you) have maintained that story games
must be futile because of the presence of narrative influence or control.
I apologize for reading that implication of futility into your original post; I can only hope you can see how someone else, bereft of vocal tone or facial expression, could have gotten that reading.
