Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="chaochou" data-source="post: 7324531" data-attributes="member: 99817">It's worth noting that there are games which feature collective, collaborative world-building. And which do so as part of play, giving players a central role in creating the terrain - geographic, political, social and economic - that will underlie events.Diaspora, the sci-fi version of Fate, starts Chapter 2 like this (p13):The first session of a Diaspora campaign is used to create the setting and the characters. This is intended as a full group activity - Diaspora is not a game that rewards lonely character creation and lonely setting design. Rather, this is a game that rewards social interaction to create co-operatively.It goes on to note that during world-building the group need not have decided who will referee. Each person has full narrative authority over the elements they create. And it gives a procedure for developing solar systems, with dice rolls for stats, free description, and aspects. Everyone is describing to each other what they create as they do so, completely transparently. After this the players are fully able to create dramatic characters who are invested in the tensions, problems and struggles they've just created in the universe.What does this tell us about Diaspora? Well, it tells us it's not a game about discovering the hidden content of the GMs notes. It's not a game in which a GM contrives a 'plot' and players are expected to reverse engineer reasons to follow that plot. It's not a game where action resolution outcomes can be revised to conform with the GM's notion of an pre-existent 'reality'.It also tells us that the universe in Diaspora does not consist of the little bit that the players have discovered and the submerged iceberg of material the referee keeps secret. Everyone starts out knowing all that is known, and both players and referee set out together to discover all the things that are not yet known, focused around what happens to the characters as they pursue their own agendas.Collective world-building can be used to great effect in any similar game where the players generate the themes and key conflicts which will drive play as part of character creation. Apocalypse World and Burning Wheel both shift in this direction without the explicit procedures of Fate.</blockquote>

Verification