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Message: <blockquote data-quote="innerdude" data-source="post: 7359962" data-attributes="member: 85870">There's lots of subtexts running beneath this topic of player agency vis-a-vis narrative pacing. [MENTION=23751]Maxperson[/MENTION] 's question of, "Why not start your scene frame here instead of there?" is a good one, and as [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] notes, it's really contextual. No one is going to allow a player to declare in the first 15 seconds of Session 1, "I take the One Ring to Orodruin and throw it into the fire." But not all groups are going to want to start out with, "You're all Level 0 halfling rogues in the Shire" either.My wife has written several novels now (none published yet, sadly), and she and I talk constantly about story and narrative pacing, character arcs, plot arcs, etc. There's lots of "rules" around how to write effective fiction, but two of the most important are "Never let your protagonist earn a victory cheaply," and "Don't let your characters act out of character.""Story Now" play, as I see it, is an attempt to directly address the second point. If players/characters aren't allowed to advocate for their narrative agenda in RPG play, they are in effect, "acting out of character." At which point, the player is forced to subsume their actual character design and just "go along with it."  This is essentially what I ended up doing with my PC for a year in the last Savage Worlds game in which I was a player. I had established clear narrative stakes for her through her character background and her choice of magical talents---she will valiantly fight against any and all forms of slavery. Yet that dramatic need got addressed for maybe all of two sessions out of 27 or 28, and in mostly perfunctory, unsatisfying ways. And at one point I would have willingly traded out that character for one more suited for "GM scene tourist" play, but by that point she was kind of critical to party strategy. Her unorthodox set of magical talents complimented the rest of the group, and other players had already made character building choices based on some of her characteristics . . . so, she stayed on as a PC. The other thing that keeps coming to mind is, neither side (GM and players) is immune to making mistakes from time to time. Sometimes players will wrongly advocate for a fictional state change that would, in fact, make the game worse. Sometimes the GM will wrongly impede players from advocating for their character agendas. Sometimes the GM offers too few concessions to the narrative, sometimes the players ask for too many.GM experience plays a big role in making this work. It's very easy for me to see why an inexperienced GM would be adverse to a "Story Now"/player-front style---they haven't yet mastered techniques of pacing and scene framing, or possibly are unsure about how to appropriately re-frame player action declarations that cross the line of the Czege Principle. As far as the problem of allowing the PCs to have their victories come too cheaply, this is not unique to "Story Now"/player-front play. Every edition of D&D from 3.x onward has had encounter difficulty guidelines to specifically address this. It doesn't matter if player victory comes too cheaply because the GM didn't set encounter difficulty high enough, or it comes too cheaply because the group consented to an inappropriate level of fictional authoring----the result is still unsatisfying.</blockquote>

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