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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Thomas Shey" data-source="post: 8648132" data-attributes="member: 7026617">This probably relates to a comment I've made several times that there's genres and genres.  The examples I give in contrast are Westerns and superhero stories.  Western genre stories are primarily about certain initial state expectations in time, space and situation; once you've set those how the story plays out can look quite a bit like other stories where the time and space components are quite different (this is why The Seven Samurai and The Magnificent Seven can be so much the same story).Superhero stories (and I tend to use these because they have very visible genre conventions, but they aren't alone; noir detective stories and fairy tales also have very strong genre conventions), on the other hand have more than that.  If you don't have those baked in some way (either by group convention or mechanics) then they can very quickly look nothing much like a conventional superhero story, but more like, say, the subset of urban fantasy where the magic and supernatural entities have become openly visible.  The initial rest-state won't do all the lifting for you.This is one reason I criticize GNS lumping both "high concept" and "process" together as Sim; the latter can engulf a rather large number of genres and stories because they don't necessarily require any dramatic conceits to work, where the former really can't; there's a degree of stylization baked into them that shows no relationship to each other.(And to forestall some comments I can see rolling in from people who haven't seen my earlier posts on this, no the former does not forbid SF and fantasy genres intrinsically.  Most of their story conventions are simply extreme changes in rest state; everyone in their settings know (and in some cases understand why) magic works or FTL drives function.  In the kind of genres that require baked in genre conventions, those conventions are largely invisible to its occupants (certain fourth-wall breaking exceptions notwithstanding) and in fact would change the texture of those settings strongly if that was not true).</blockquote>

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