I've bundled these together, as I think they are related comments/questions that I think invite an integrated response.
In the interests of some (not maximal!) brevity,
I'm also going to build on my post just upthread about The Dying Earth, which includes quotes from Ron Edwards. And to get it into the same discussion-space, I'm going to post
another quote here which I think I already mentioned upthread:
In Simulationist play, morality cannot be imposed by the player or, except as the representative of the imagined world, by the GM. Theme is already part of the cosmos; it's not produced by metagame decisions. Morality, when it's involved, is "how it is" in the game-world, and even its shifts occur along defined, engine-driven parameters. The GM and players buy into this framework in order to play at all.
The essence of "story now" play, as presented by Edwards, is
the participants, and in particular the players, expressing judgments. What is the subject matter of the judgements?
@EzekielRaiden has used the concepts of "issue" and "value". Edwards
talks about "premise", by which he means an "engaging issue or problematic feature of human existence". These are not presented as definitions in the mathematician's sense. They are attempts to use natural language to capture the difference between (say) a diagram and a painting (of the sort one might see in a gallery or museum), or a mannequin and a sculpture, or even (perhaps more subtly) a script and a performance.
A painting isn't
just a visual representation of a thing - it conveys something the artist thought about the thing. A sculpture isn't just a model of a person - it convey something the sculptor thought about the person. A performance isn't just an oral presentation of a script - it conveys something that the actor(s) thought was worthwhile or interesting or challenging within or about the script.
RPGing has a certain standard form (which is why I've not responded to
@clearstream's question about Thousand Year Old Vampire - I don't think we get clear accounts of play by beginning with borderline examples of the activity): at a given moment of play, some participants (most typically, one participant) is managing the setting and backstory and drawing on that to frame a situation; the rest of the participants (most typically, a single digit number greater than one: one-on-one games aren't deviant, but I don't think they're typical either) are managing characters within that situation.
All the participants create fiction:
You see a doorway, the other side of it too shadowy to make anything out. I walk up to it and stick my torch through - what do I see? So we don't draw any distinction between RPGs by talking about "player authorship" or "player control over the fiction". Because that's ubiquitous.
Story now RPGing involves creating the fiction in such a way as to invite the players to manifest their own judgements or responses, in something like the way other creators/performers (painters, sculptors, actors, novelists, etc) do,
by way of their RPG play at the table in the moment. At this level of description,
that's it. But of course the devil is in the detail:
how does one set up the activity of RPGing so as to make this happen, reliably and as a key focus of play?
This is where dramatic needs come in: that is one - character-based - recipe for achieving "story now" play as just described. The players create PCs with dramatic needs. The GM frames situations which put those dramatic needs at stake. The players declare actions to try and resolve those dramatic needs. And because there is no "morality" or evaluation or judgement built into the system as and input or constraint (hence my remarks upthread about alignment; and see Edwards contrast of Pendragon and GURPS with The Riddle of Steel) the players can't look to the system to tell them what actions to declare: they have to choose. And because the action resolution is open (see my posts upthread about that, including the one contrasting "open-ness" with a more typical notion of what would or wouldn't count as railroading) the choice
matters - it can shape what comes next. And the GM is expected to respond to that choice, and how it unfolds (via the mechanics) in framing the next situation. (This is what Vincent Baker, in Apocalypse World, labels "moves snowball".)
So the player-expressed judgement is
in the action declarations made in response to dramatic need.
The above is not the only way to have "story now" play, but I think it is the most common. At the level of technique, Wuthering Heights and Apocalypse World and Burning Wheel are all quite different RPGs; and TRoS is closer to BW but still different in its detail; but in the basic structure of their play I think they are all like the above. I don't know BitD very well but I think it is similar too at this level of description.
The Dying Earth is not character-driven in the same way. Characters matter - they have to, because they are the vehicle that most of the participants are using to engage in the gameplay - but as the rulebook notes, and as @AbdulAlhzared has pointed out, they are basically all the same and their "dramatic needs" don't extend beyond a list of temptations (gluttony, indolence, etc). The recipe this game uses to achieve "story now" play is to have the GM frame situations in a certain particular fashion.
Here Edwards quotes from the rulebook and then comments:
When creating an adventure, dream up a bizarre rule or activity on which a community's existence depends. Figure out at least one way in which the PCs could wreak havoc on the community by disrupting the activity or subverting the rule.
Then create a reason for the PCs to do so ... [actually, the entire character creation process for this game takes care of this detail - RE]
So the players' action declarations don't carry the same thematic weight as in (say) AW or BW. But the player is having to make decisions about how to engage with the absurd and cynical world of the Dying Earth, and is looking for - and trying to create - opportunities to pronounce their taglines. And so a type of judgement - satirical, cynical, ironic, absurdist - is being manifested by the player in play, and that's the point. It's where the "fun" is.
Edwards also characterises Prince Valiant as situation-driven narrativism, but based on my play experience I think it's a bit different from the Dying Earth. Obviously the genre is different - the situations are typically ones that invite response from knights errant - but also, because there are not personality mechanics and nor are the persuasion mechanics as strong as in The Dying Earth, players have a bit more expressive control over and investment in their PCs. And so dramatic needs loom a bit larger, within the genre confines of Arthurian romance. My group regards it as a type of Burning Wheel-lite.
Setting-based "story now" is also a different way of achieving the play goal of players expressing judgements in play. Rather than dramatic needs of individual characters, the invitation to player judgement and response is "externalised" into a setting in which there are conflicts, trajectories, relationships, etc. In his "setting dissection" essay that I linked to upthread, suggests that the core of this approach is to choose a setting that is situation rich, and then build the PCs
within that setting and load them up with relationships, obligations etc that all reinforce the sense of being part of the setting. And then begin play with a trigger event that destabilises the setting in some fashion: a political vacuum, a religious upheaval, an economic collaps, etc, relying on the characters' relationships and networks within the setting, and the conflicts these engender - rather than their dramatic needs as such - to drive play. The upshot won't necessarily be characters that are transformed (as one would expect in character-driven story now play) but rather a setting that is transformed.
Edwards nominates HeroWars/Quest - Robin Laws's game, first published in 2000, and aimed at playing in Glorantha - as an example. (RQ is the original Glorantha game, but in play tends to produce either process-sim or high-concept sim play - it doesn't particularly support setting-focused story now, and while it could be drifted that way there is no real framework beyond GM decision-making to feed the setting directly into the PCs and action resolution, or to generate changes in the setting based on what the players have their PCs do. HeroWars/Quest does have a framework for both these things.) I would also nominate 4e D&D, with its default setting, as a pretty good vehicle for mechanically heavy and thematically fairly light setting-based story now. The characters are rich, but their goals and dramatic needs are "external" and linked to the setting and its cosmological conflicts. So they won't necessarily change, but they will change the setting in ways that reflect and respond to their position within it, and that can't be known in advance of play.
Having said all the above, here are some signs that play is
not story now:
* The players' actions that they declare for their PCs don't change the setting in any significant way, but leave it largely untouched unchanged and/or reaffirm its status quo (a lot of FR play looks like this to me; there are various ways of doing this, including limiting PC capabilities relative to the gameworld, or the GM using deus-ex-machina techniques to ensure PC failures (or successes) don't engender dramatic change, or framing situations that simply don't matter relative to the larger setting);
* The GM established the characters' dramatic needs, via an in-media-res plot hook or via a quest-giver, with the players' focus therefore being on "how to we achieve the goal the GM has set for us" rather than on expressing judgement by acting on dramatic needs in the sort of open fashion I've described (most post-1984 module-based play looks like this, on the surface at least);
* There are a lot of social cues or signals or pressures, or there are overt directives in the rules of the game itself, that dictate answers or responses to questions of value that the fiction of the game might generate (alignment and associated notions are the poster child for this, and even when the rulebook says alignment doesn't matter its clear that their are social pressures at work at many D&D tables; and there are many non-alignment-related social pressures that can operate here too, like pressures to make choices or declare actions that will reinforce the cohesion of the party/team, that will follow up on the material the GM is presenting, etc).
It's fairly easy to avoid these, but it does require a different orientation towards setting, prep, etc than what I typically see discussed on these boards in the context of the play of D&D or similar "mainstream" RPGs.
) albeit I am afraid that, whilst I feel I at least somewhat understand the point you're trying to make on theoretical level, how it manifests in practical application yet remains at least partly clouded in mystery.
