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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8636416" data-attributes="member: 42582">It seems tautological that pre-authored and not pre-authored are mutually exclusive. (If one ignores the temporal dimension, that events of authorship that at a certain time are yet to occur have, at a later time, already taken place.)But it is not tautologous, and in fact seems to me false, that only one of those possibilities involves a game-world that is vivid and inhabitable.My point is simply that you are associating "vivid and inhabitable" with one and not the other approach to setting. And I am contesting that association.Edwards doesn't take the position that you both state here, ie that any setting is inconsistent with "story now" RPGing. In this thread, not far upthread, I've quoted his discussion of Glorantha. And there is his whole "setting dissection" discussion.<a href="http://www.indie-rpgs.com/_articles/narr_essay.html" target="_blank">To quote again</a>,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?Glorantha, as presented in RQ and HW/Q sourcebooks, is not the result of a play experience. It is pre-authored (at least originally, by Greg Stafford). So is not within the scope of Edwards' criticism of Over the Edge, which is a particular criticism: producing one person's play experience as the input for another person's play. Notice how Baker - who surely must have created many vibrant setting elements in the playtesting of Apocalypse World - doesn't present that stuff as an input into others' play. That's just one respect in which the whole design of AW flows from Edwards' essay.To ask whether Stonetop's setting is useful for "story now" play, we would want to ask things like how was it created, what conflicts does it present to those who use it for play, etc. I don't know the answers to those questions. They're not answered by pointing out that it is over 200 pages - as I posted, JRRT wrote more than 200 pages about Middle Earth and that is no obstacle to doing "story now" Middle Earth/LotR RPGing.</blockquote>

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