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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ariosto" data-source="post: 5086971" data-attributes="member: 80487">Yes; the very first chapter. Has anyone here read it? (I think they got Robin Laws to write at least a portion.)So, the difference looks to me like this: In the "non-storytelling" game, the player makes a choice and consequences follow; the freedom to choose is directly actual. In the "storytelling" game, that really just presents a choice for the GM: whether to allow the consequences or to replace them with 'guidance'.In another kind of "storytelling" game, player choice is in a sense even more direct. Instead of choosing actions for a particular character, the player chooses outcomes -- changes in state for the wider world. A seemingly classic example is the player whose choice is not "I look in the wall safe" but rather, "I find the Maltese contract," or even "I find something that causes a scandal that removes my rival from the political arena."The outcome, then, is not a consequence of choices of action; it dictates creation of a narrative of actions that rationalizes after the fact how the new state of affairs came to be.On the continuum of those three kinds of game, the imagined world of space, time, identity, and causality becomes increasingly amorphous.To some of us those are most definitely different things, the question of just which we're getting into being in fact the essential question! This is a position very well founded in a long and well documented history, so conventional as to be about as trivial a thing as I can imagine. Prefer away, whichever you will! Denial of the fact of alternatives is not helpful, though.The question is how they get to "make meaningful decisions that have significant consequences." I can make vague and unsupported generalizations for myself; I ask a question of someone else to be informed! Was the USSR "a democracy"? Citizens in the Soviet Union got to vote for the Communist Party candidate of their choice. The devil is in the details, not in the hand-waving.</blockquote>

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