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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9093517" data-attributes="member: 42582">The term narrativist comes from Ron Edwards, and is being used as he used it. It has nothing to do with what you and others have called "player narrative control".If they say what their PC thinks or does or remembers, I would call it playing their PC and normally also action declaration for their PC.If you mean, say, spending a widget to make something true in the fiction that is not connected to their PC, then I'm happy to call it "player narrative control" if that's the preferred terminology. What I am saying is that this is not a very significant contributor to player agency in high player agency RPGs.I'm perfectly happy to accept that there is more play out there than I'm aware of that (using Forge terminology) I would call "vanilla narrativism".But there are things that make me doubtful.I GMed vanilla narrativist AD&D in the second half of the 1980s, and vanilla narrativist Rolemaster for around 20 years from 1990. When I discovered RPGs like HeroWars, and Burning Wheel, and Maelstrom Storytelling, and read critical accounts of them (mostly on the Forge), I was able to relate what was being described to my own play. And to improve my own play, too. (Eg I cribbed techniques from Paul Czege's Nicotine Girls for use in what was, theme-and-trope-wise, pretty standard FRPGing using Rolemaster.)Later on, when 4e D&D was being developed, I was able (i) to see the influence of those games on its design, and (ii) to use approaches and advice from those games to enhance my 4e GMing.The correlative of the above is that, whenever I read someone attacking the Forge, or the approach of the games that the Forge analysed and/or produced; bemoaning "player entitlement" or characterising a narrativist GM as "servicing the players" and just "giving them what they want"; and generally asserting the centrality of the GM in establishing the priorities for play, exercising near-unilateral control over the content of the shared fiction, etc; I infer that they are not doing what I was doing in my vanilla narrativist days.Generally, from their descriptions of their approach, they seem to me to be GMing games that are similar to those I saw going on around me in the 90s: setting-heavy, with the GM establishing a lot of "behind-the-scenes" plot elements that are then used to drive play; and the players' main role being to identify these things and engage with them via their PCs.Obviously all my inferences here are defeasible. But where's the contrary evidence?</blockquote>

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