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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8635678" data-attributes="member: 42582">My post wasn't responding to the proposition in your first paragraph, nor to your edit. It was responding to this:That question only make sense if there is some sort of balance between (i) a vivid game-world that players inhabit, and (ii) pure shared authorship. And I am expressing doubt about that premise: I don't see any particular reason to think those things are in balance.Perhaps some pre-authored settings are vivid game-worlds. Perhaps some others are not. (So it may be true that a vivid game-world might be pre-established in the way you suggest Stonetop does. That wouldn't tell us anything about there being a "balance", though.)Perhaps some pure shared authorship creates vivid game-worlds. Perhaps some others are not.As I posted, I don't see why the notion of "balance" is being deployed here. I have played RPGs in which the setting was authored by the participants in the course of play. There have been examples of that where that setting - the game-world - was vivid.In your edit to your reply to my post, you ask a different question - does 229 pages of setting detail forestall "story now"? I haven't read the Stonetop pages, so can't comment on them. There are more than 229 pages of detail written by JRRT about Middle Earth, and I have done "story now" RPGing set in Middle Earth (<a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/middle-earth-lotr-rpging-using-cortex-heroic.670013/" target="_blank">using Cortex+ Heroic</a>). Paying HeroWars/Quest in Glorantha might involve engaging with a fair bit of pre-authored setting. But not all pre-authored material is conducive to story now play. Consider <a href="http://www.indie-rpgs.com/_articles/narr_essay.html" target="_blank">Edwards's remarks about Over the Edge</a>, which begin with a quote from the rulebook:The first time I [ie Jonathan Tweet] played OTE, I had a few pages of notes on the background and nothing on the specifics. I made it all up on the spot. Not having anything written as a guide (or crutch), I let my imagination loose. You have the mixed blessing of having many pages of background prepared for you. If you use the information in this book as a springboard for your own wild dreams, then it is a blessing. If you limit yourself to what I've dreamed up, it's a curse. All I see, I'm afraid, is the curse. The isolated phrases "mixed blessing" and "(or crutch)" don't hold a lot of water compared to the preceding 152 extraordinarily detailed pages of canonical setting. I'm not saying that improvisation is better or more Narrativist than non-improvisational play. I am saying, however, that if playing this particular game worked so wonderfully to free the participants into wildly successful brainstorming during play . . . and since the players were a core source during this event, as evident in the game's Dedication and in various examples of play . . . then why present the results of the play-experience as the material for another person's experience?In the same edit, you ask yet another question: might Strandberg's inspired and carefully considered world be worth playing in, compared with what we come up with on the fly? Presumably the answer to that depends at least on (i) what we feel like doing and (ii) what we might come up with on the fly. I don't see any reason to think there would be a unique answer to that question even for a single group of RPGers, let alone the RPG community in general.</blockquote>

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