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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 4028575" data-attributes="member: 42582">What you describe here has nothing to do with narrativist play. Again, it is an example of the GM using force to make the game take a certain direction, and (as I noted previously, and Skeptic also has noted) is high concept simulationism.In the same way that A Tale of Two Cities is a simulation of the effects of the French Revolution. But nevertheless Dickens was writing a novel, not a history, and its purpose is different. When we look at an RPG, we can ask - what's the point of the GM introducing those particular game elements, and what are the players expected to do with them (notice I say players, not PCs)? Different points and expectations produce different sorts of play - simultionist, gamist or narrativist.Lost Soul has elaborated on this above. So has Skeptic.I don't really follow your continuing focus on the GM.Answer to the question that is implicit in the premise. For example (drawing again on literature, which is a more familiar and better developed art form than narrativist RPGing), The End of the Affair gives one answer to the question "How does God speak to humanity?"Maybe, maybe not - that's completely orthoganal.The point of narrativist play is for the play itself, that is, the unfolding of events in the gameworld (as determined by the player, not just the GM), itself to constitute an answer to a question in the sense identified above.The novelist offers answers to such questions by writing a novel, the poet by writing a poem, the singer-songwriter by composing and performing a song. The narrativist RPGer does it, collaboratively with others, by playing an RPG. Notice that it is the act of play which is the creative act - whereas all your examples involve the GM having already made a creative decision and trying to have the players act that out. That is why your examples are not of narrativist play, but of simulationist play (where the parameters for simulation are set by the story the GM has written prior to play).(Most narrativist play is, of course, not on a par with Dickens or Graham Greene as an artistic endeavour. But, for a participant in such a game, it does have the virtue of being their own creative and expressive endeavour. As Lanefan noted, there's also all the fun social stuff of playing an RPG.)</blockquote>

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