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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7356537" data-attributes="member: 42582">I don't understand your point. I haven't defined agency. I have made it clear what I'm talking about. If you want to talk about something else, go right ahead. That doesn't have any bearing on what I'm saying about my topic, though, does it?He doesn't have to - he expressly states that he's discussing an approach to play - narrativism - which has been analysed in detail on The Forge: <a href="https://isabout.wordpress.com/2010/02/16/the-pitfalls-of-narrative-technique-in-rpg-play/" target="_blank">"I won’t explain what narrativism (Story Now) is here; if you don’t know, find out."</a>And he identifies some games as exemplars of what he's talking about: "Sorcerer, Dogs in the Vineyard, some varieties of Heroquest, The Shadow of Yesterday, Mountain Witch, Primetime Adventures and more games than I care to name".I've just been reading DitV (which Vincent Baker himself identifies as owing a great design debt to Sorcerer) - it's all about player agency and player-driven play, with many admonitions from Baker to that effect throughout the rulebook. And it's representative, not distinctive, in this respect.I quoted Ron Edwards only because you were arguing Eero Tuovinen says something different from what I said that he says, and you mentioned GNS in the course of that! If you aren't interested in talking about things through a GNS perspective, why raise it?But anyway, it's a bit weird to have someone explaining something to me that I'm extremely familiar with, and actually put to work in RPGing on a pretty regular basis.Not really.Ewards is not saying that play focused on the immediate scene only - eg many systems that are typically played in a "story now" fashion (I'm thinking Dogs in the Vineyard, HeroWars/Quest and Burning Wheel, for instance) incorporate rules for relationships, which establish mechanical links between present events and past bits of backstory.And consider Vincent Baker's advice from DitV - "Escalate, ecalate, escalate!" Escalation frequently means taking up some concern or outcome from prior events and pushing it harder, stepping up the pressure, forcing the player to ask "Do I still agree with what I did then?" In my main 4e game, one important element of escalation is around the role of the Raven Queen, and the PCs' ongoing sequence of decisions that confer upon her more and more power. This is not a focus on the immediate scene only.And DitV is all abour the PCs travelling from town to town and reacting to what the characters encounter there. My 4e game has a cosmological situation that the PCs react to. "Story now" games can have plenty of setting.As Ron Edwards says, "story now" means that, right now, we are - through our play - establishing and thereby experiencing something which is recognisably story in the literary sense: there are protagonists, who have dramatic needs (the "issue" or "problematic feature of human existence") which are put to the test; there is rising action, climax and some sort of resolution.</blockquote>

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