NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ondath" data-source="post: 8626194" data-attributes="member: 7031770">I'm obviously not [USER=16814]@Ovinomancer[/USER], but if I understood them correctly, I can see where they're coming from. When we're talking about the emergent story à la OSR, what we mean is that we see the threads of a story that came together in retrospect (which happens because OSR games do not force any narrative structures but let players play according to the assumptions of the universe). The kind of emergent story here is what I call "this could only happen in D&D", like the example of my players beating Cyan Bloodbane with a Bag of Beans seed that sprouted a small pyramid to which they lured the dragon. All of this happened with no regard to a story structure when we were playing and happened only because I was simulating what should happen given the previous circumstances ("Cyan is vain and wants easy treasure", "the roll on the bags landed on sprouting a pyramid, so I guess I'll now adjudicate how that pyramid would sprout even if it completely derails the adventure" and so on). Only when we looked back on that game and said "Wow, what a crazy game!" did it become a story in retrospect.In contrast (though admittedly my only experience with narrativist games is badly running a FATE Accelerated Pokemon oneshot and a few Cortex Prime games and reading some PbtA books, and apparently FATE isn't even categorised as a Story Now game so I might completely wrong), Story Now is about having mechanics that stricly distribute power over the fiction so that a narrative has to emerge. However, this emergence is (as the name suggests) in the moment and not retrospective like an OSR game. When you play Marvel Heroic Roleplaying and a character causes a d12 to be added to the Doom Pool by botching, the mechanics force everyone at the table to explain how the stakes got worse. That pushes everyone to add something to the narrative that reflects the mechanical effect. You might say that the Hulk throwing Ultron to incapacitate him revealed innocent civilians hidden behind that wall, and now Ultron has taken those civilians hostage. Now the opposition pool to anything the players do will have an extra d12 as a reminder of the raised stakes. This is not a piece of narrative that emerged only when you look back upon it, but it is a narrative that is forcefully made to emerge as a result of player-GM cooperation in shaping the fiction.</blockquote>

Verification