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Message: <blockquote data-quote="niklinna" data-source="post: 8627286" data-attributes="member: 71235">Any chance you can give me a post # for when the tangent began? It's a long thread!I think I've addressed the nut of this in my previous post, but....I would not disagree that character immersion in a heavy Story Now game (that is, one in which you start with very little) would require simultaneous, at least alternating, author/actor stances. There is a tension there, and if you don't like that tension, it won't work for you. Some people enjoy that sort of tension though.We'd have to do a survey for that, I'm afraid. I know that when I first started with a game featuring heavy use of Story Now techniques (Blades in the Dark—this is not to say that BidD "is" a Story Now game), we had a few questions on the character sheet to answer, by picking from preset lists: heritage (national origin), background (social class), one friend, one rival ("Mercy, a cold killer"), and a vice. We were instructed to provide one detail about heritage & background. And that was all the book said.Of course, it being my first such game, I wrote up more, about my character's parents and his relationship with them and all that. And then we started playing and it was 100mph from the get-go and so much emerged from our play that my character's backstory turned out to be not that important. I did try to drag it in at some point but it felt strained because who else had a stake in it? Also, when it precluded taking actions I might have otherwise done, on the spot, well, it interfered with oportunities for action! On the other hand, when something came up involving another character's backstory (made up on the spot), it clearly involved a stake my character had some interest in—but that was a lucky chance and I could have claimed a stake on the spot in any number of ways.That example right there shows that there's a lot to be gained from looking hard at what is necessary and what isn't necessary. My character's backstory was kind of important to me, but it wasn't necessary for play to proceed. It also closed off play options I might have had, and yet provided one later. None of this is right or wrong, but it does affect enjoyment and gameplay in particular ways.Totally valid. But see the crack there! What is the size of that foundational core, how large or small does it need to be, what specifically does it contain? What is incredibly shallow to you may be a wide vista of possibility to another.I would say the opposition is to the assumption of necessity of (prewritten) backstory. Necessity in the general sense. For you, it is a necessity in order to have fun. Totally valid. But it is not a necessity for others.As for how it usually works in Story Now games, well, there's a variety of games that put emphasis on the Story Now approach, but they do so to different degrees. Blades in the Dark is pretty minimal, but even then it's more than my stripped-down example.That sounds like an insight worth exploring, to me. <img class="smilie smilie--emoji" alt="😉" src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" title="Winking face    :wink:" data-shortname=":wink:" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" /></blockquote>

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