Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Manbearcat" data-source="post: 9342599" data-attributes="member: 6696971">As far as I can tell, what you've done here is the following:1)  You've turned a proper noun (the specific, named concept of Story Before coined by The Forge) and transmuted it into a common noun (story before) that you're now coining for usage of a very general concept.2)  You're obliterating the distinguishing characteristics between that Forge-coined proper noun of Story Before and your newly-minted common noun of story before.  Why I don't know, but it looks a lot like the only work it does is (a) confuse things and (b) bin basically everything into this newly-minted common noun of story before.  So far as I can tell, it makes the significantly distinguishing characteristics (in design, in play, in articulation of concepts) of all of the below...disappear:* Participants opt into the play of a game with any kind of premise or any kind of setting, backstory, cosmology, etc.* Players have systematized content authority over the elements that play orbits around so their PCs can collide with coherent opposition and vie for outcomes (thereby “finding out” who their characters are in the course of play).  While this includes input on varying initial conditions of play, it does not prescribe outcomes (because that is anethema).* Players have content authority over their character preconceptions and extreme (or total) ownership of their character arcs that materialize through play.  This necessitates a level of prescriptive control over both initial conditions and outcomes (via social contract or via working in concert with their GM to script seminal content or player fiat via a systemitized, highly gameable currency economy whereby low stakes consequences are accepted for the means to ensure high stakes consequences never see play; varying forms of player-side railroading).  * Players have little to no actual content authority over initial conditions or whether/how play orbits around theme & premise embedded in their characters.  The GM has control over initial conditions and all facets of setting and situation, adjudication/resolution mediation including rules, genre credibility tests, what constitutes player best practices and what is verboten....why would you want to do that (obliterate these distinctions)?I don't know where you're drawing writers' room from colloquially or otherwise.  But my best understanding of a writers' room is that the participants have total control over all three of initial conditions, trajectory, and the outcomes of the story that they are collectively stewarding into existence.  Whether this is democratized in some fashion or goes through some other means of collective action to get from initial conditions to finished product, its theirs...start to checkered flag...no countervailing forces of system nor colliding interests that must be resolved via extra-social means (so negotiation isn't sufficient to resolve the dispute...some intermediary in the form of a procedure or resolution process does the work of deciding "who gets what" or "how things resolve") to get in the way of their machinations...to exert pressure toward, and the generation of, dynamism.  Those are the dynamics of writers' room as I understand them and that is how I use the term to convey distinction between that sort of design dynamic or social dynamic and how it generates a novel form of play (that is quite different from others).Again, it seems a very bad idea indeed to mute or obfuscate the differences between the above and all the various forms of distinct authority distribution and content generation via participant input that happens in the TTRPG-sphere.</blockquote>

Verification