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Message: <blockquote data-quote="innerdude" data-source="post: 9521813" data-attributes="member: 85870">So coming back to this after a brief hiatus --- I brought up Emberashh's prior claims because I wanted to evaluate them in light of a Vulture article I've shared here several times now, where the author looks at the video game and TV series The Last of Us with an eye to probing the tension between game and narrative. [URL unfurl="true"]https://www.vulture.com/article/the-last-of-us-is-not-a-video-game-adaptation.html[/URL]"Here, we may rightly speak of interactivity: One may care about a character on television, but one must care for a character in a video game. In fact, The Last of Us suggested that care, by definition, means choosing to have no choice, holding onto another person so tightly their survival becomes an inescapable necessity."Of course, a TV show may treat these themes too, and the adaptation acquits itself admirably; the point is not that a video game, like other art forms, can show us something about love, but that love, at its most monstrous, can have the unyielding structure of a video game. This only a video game can teach."This was the thing I wanted to bring up in relation to Ironsworn. In Ironsworn, the key mechanic of swearing an Iron Vow goes hand in hand with the idea of choosing to have no choice so that a genuine character narrative can and will arise.Mechanically, as a player, completing Vows is the only way you gain XP and advance your character. But in the game, the Vow mechanic is a striking, hard-coded way of forcing you as a player to care. To choose to have no choice.If you're playing Ironsworn rules as written, once you've sworn a vow, you as a player cannot simply send your character off in a totally different direction without direct, negative effects. Your character literally suffers and becomes less mechanically effective when he or she breaks an Iron Vow. The Iron Vow basically enforces the idea that this isn't a game of "hexcrawling" or "living world sandbox" where as a player you can simply change the idea of what you want to do on a whim. Iron Vows tether you to your character and your character's relationships with other characters (PC and NPC alike).The exercise of performing the "Swear an Iron Vow" move should trigger some introspection on the player's part --- Why am I choosing to swear this Iron Vow versus another one? What has happened in play that has driven my character to this point? What does it say about how I'm interpreting my character's place in the game world? What does this particular Iron Vow say about what's important to my character?You have to care about the character to engage with this mechanic. If not, you're missing one of the fundamental, core reasons to play Ironsworn in the first place. So the question is, can you as a player, GM, and group collectively create a narrative if you aren't willing to embrace the idea of choosing to have no choice? I think Eero Tuovinen talks about something similar here: [URL unfurl="true"]https://www.arkenstonepublishing.net/isabout/2020/05/14/observations-on-gns-simulationism/[/URL]"What I would like to offer as a modest alternative to old-fashioned railroading theory is that the purpose of the GM story hour is not to cheat and create an illusion of freedom; it is to exquisitely prepare nuanced literary material for intimate consideration. The strength of the railroading game structure is not in hiding the tracks, but rather in ensuring that those tracks travel through scenes worthy of spending some time in. You’re literally only bothering with the railroad tracks because you don’t want to waste time preparing complex content and then just have the other players skip it; it’s much better to take the track as a given and focus on how to make your content worth the trip."I’ve written about this in more detail elsewhere, but the key consideration is treating your game prep the same way an adventure video game does: your core strength is being able to prepare carefully, and the freedoms you give to the player are carefully constrained to ensure that you actually get to show off your stuff. It is still interactive, as the player has the primary control over the pace (how quickly you go over your material) and focus (what parts of your material are particularly observed) of play, even as the GM by definition holds primary content authority. The GM decides what play will be about, but the other players decide how they investigate that aboutness."------I think this is a similar process of choosing to have no choice as a player---if the point of "GM Story Hour" is to engage in something worthy of exploring the narrative, then the players have to agree to lose some components of choice so that the narrative beats arise. I think the bigger problem you run into is that you get GM's who don't realize this is the case. The GM doesn't quite grasp that GM story hour, if you're going to do it at all, should be a tight, closely-wound narrative component that's worth telling and worth experiencing. One final thought from the Vulture article: "Gamers were so appalled by the clothing system of Cyberpunk 2077, in which combat bonuses could be reaped only by rocking truly hideous pieces of streetwear, that developer CD Projekt RED later added an option for players to stick with one acceptable outfit without falling behind in their armor class. But none of this had any effect on the game’s narrative, which despite its many branching plotlines, romance options, and endings was still just one story that could be told only a finite number of ways. There is a big difference, in other words, between mere customization and true narrative control — if such a thing even exists."The contrast here is what draws me -- narrative control is NOT merely character customization. More thoughts later.</blockquote>

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