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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8638206" data-attributes="member: 42582"><a href="http://www.indie-rpgs.com/_articles/narr_essay.html" target="_blank">These Edwards quotes</a> seem relevant to [USER=6696971]@Manbearcat[/USER] and Not-AW world.On the GM role(s) in story now play:I suggest that considering "the GM" to be either (a) necessarily one person or (b) a specific and universally-consistent role is badly mistaken - we are really talking about a set of potential behaviors (roles, tasks, whatever) which may be independently centralized within or distributed across a group of people. Here are some of those GM behaviors, roles, and tasks: - rules-applier and interpreter, as in "referee" - in-game-world time manager - changer of scenes - color provider - ensurer of protagonist screen time - regulator of pacing (in real time) - authority over what information can be acted upon by which characters - authority over internal plausibility - "where the buck stops" in terms of establishing the Explorative content - social manager of who gets to speak when A given role-playing experience must have these things - there is no such thing as "GM-less" play. But which of these require(s) enforcing varies greatly, as does whether they are concentrated into a particular person, and as does whether that person is openly acknowledged as such. What matters for Narrativist play, however, isn't any specific point in the diversity-matrix of these variables - it's about what the person (or persons) currently in the GM-role is responsible for. . . . It all comes down to this: a "player" in a Narrativist role-playing context necessarily makes the thematic choices for a given player-character. Even if this role switches around from person to person (as in Universalis), it's always sacrosanct in the moment of decision. "GMing," then, for this sort of play, is all about facilitating another person's ability to do this. . . . [T]he question is not whether there is a GM (there is always one or more for any scene during play), but rather how the GMing tasks are distributed. The potential range of diversity is staggering. The most important variables include: - Which of these roles are most important to be formalized for this game - Whether the roles are centralized in one person - The concept of "the buck" - in the event that different people suggest different things, who says what goes . . . It's also easy to get distracted by the word "GM." A person may have a mental tautology going between "GM" and "power," with a corresponding death-grip on his or her perceived responsibility to perform and entertain. Once the term is understood to be a set of independent roles which may be distributed differently across the participants, then the whole thing becomes a lot easier.And building on that "mental tautology" and the resulting "death-grip", there is this on "freeform" RPGing and GM-force:Going "no system," especially for IIEE aspects of play [ie action declaration and resolution], combines the undermining aspects of both of the above two approaches [ie metaplot and reinforcing exploration], especially when the author idealizes story as a product rather than Narrativist play as a process. Don't forget, all role-playing has a system; turning it over to "oh, just decide and have fun" merely makes the system crappy and prone to bullying. . . . Why am I being so harshly critical? It all goes back to Force - if establishing the IIEE circumstances is under one person's control, without reference to any System features, then scenes' outcomes become the province of that person. Which in turn means that the decisions and actions of player-characters are now details of this one person's decisions. Narrativist de-protagonism is the near-inevitable result.Manbearcat has also argued that this is not very good for gamist play either.And where does it tend to lead?What happens when you want a story but don't want to play with Story Now? Then the story becomes a feature of Exploration with the process of play being devoted to how to make it happen as expected. The participation of more than one person in the process is usually a matter of providing improvisational additions to be filtered through the primary story-person's judgment, or of providing extensive Color to the story. Under these circumstances, the typical result is pastiche: a story which recapitulates an already-existing story's theme, with many explicit references to that story. . . .  creating pastiche is primarily a form of fandom, pure homage to an existing body of work. Most High Concept Simulationist play gravitates toward it, and some game texts are explicitly about nothing else. . . . The GM has the story decisions, i.e., wields substantial Force. "Story" isn't coming from player decisions at all and may be considered, itself, a piece of Explorative-material input from the GM. Everyone else is providing color and material through pseudo-decisions.Edwards advice in relation to this possibility for RPGing isIf you're doing a solid Simulationist game with a strong story emphasis via Force, say so and don't bleat about "players control their characters' decisions" (see Call of Cthulhu and Arrowflight).I've got a copy of Arrowflight but have never played it. (And am not sure I've even read much of it.) But I've played CoC, and see it as a classic high concept vehicle. There is no player protagonism: as a player, I'm there to experience the story - the solution of the mystery and the descent into madness. And it's the GM's job to deliver those things. And it's a variant of Not-AW, just with a different setting, and with insanity rules that sometimes limit the player's decision-making about what their PC thinks and does.</blockquote>

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