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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 7375069" data-attributes="member: 82106">I think there's plenty of ways that pacing and dramatic structure can be achieved. The biggest one is by how the GM frames things. So, you may have a criticism of [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION]'s framing in this instance, which is a legitimate aesthetic question. I'm not sure it is really a generalized flaw of Story Now. In fact I don't even feel like I have a good enough feel for how the specific game was paced or structured in detail to offer criticism myself. I said earlier that the "find something before I leave town" goal seemed rather subsidiary. Making progress on it doesn't seem like it was necessarily bringing up some sort of 'climax'. In fact it feels a lot more prefatory to things that happened later on, part of a larger build up, not some crazy instant major plot crisis. Anyway, nothing in my understanding of Story Now demands that you move willy nilly from one climax to the next without anything in between. Just that the in between WILL be related to your player described interests, not just random wanderings in streets and byways, unless that IS your interest. Exactly! How does he know? The CHARACTER doesn't know, and neither does the player until after he resolves a check which decides the issue, in this case against. What if he succeeded? Maybe the feather still turns out to be only modestly useful. Its really going to be up to the player to determine that in large part. If his choices are to go around using the feather to defeat a balrog, then it will probably turn out to be handy. How, when, or why are still open questions. Does the player care about his alignment? In fact, isn't alignment kind of a burden? I mean, its a system that effectively imposes some GM-determined (because NO two people agree AT ALL on what alignment means, and I won't even consider an argument otherwise, EnWorld is chock full of the proof) standard of behavior on a character and then punishes them for transgressing, often for transgressions that the player doesn't even agree are legitimate. I think, at best, alignment can be a 'character trait' that the player can leverage and the GM can use judiciously as a signal and in framing, but I am not real fond of it. In any case, Story Now is full of tests and dilemmas and whatnot. It would be perfectly reasonable to create a hard choice for a character, save your brother or save those children! Its just definitely going to be about something the player cares about.Well, its hard to disagree with this in some abstract sense, but we get to play maybe 30 weekends a year, and I'm not into spending a lot of them on learning the specific layout of the alleyways in lower dockside, which are actually little more than lines drawn on some graph paper late one night. I guess what I'm really saying is, there's X amount of creativity and 'juice' that can go into a game, based on people's time and imagination. Exploring many fairly trivial details of an invented location might not usually be the best use of that time and energy. Again, if you really just play for nothing else, that's an agenda and someone should get on with it, but most players only passingly find that kind of thing engaging, and from a pure gaming standpoint details like that can be added in scene framing when they DO make a difference (or in action resolution, etc.).I just don't think that game worlds get all that deep to be perfectly frank. Most of these vaunted details are forgotten within 20 minutes, perhaps they add some color, but again that doesn't require vast depth. I think, in some sense, a world is DEEPER and MORE meaningful when the action within it speaks to universal dramatic themes.And I honestly think this is a misconception. The player arrived at this point through entirely free choice, not even dictated by the GM. Yes, the GM invented a bazaar, but he did that in your game too! And your bazaar was built to hold what YOU found interesting. You may HOPE that the players also find it interesting, but my bazaar, definitionally interesting to everyone! Only if they know substantively what the consequences and ramifications of all their actions will be. Otherwise they're just pulling levers and watching to see what happens. If I, with no other context, describe 5 levers in a wall, does a player congratulate me on giving him a lot of choices when he has to pull one? And this is quite true, and this forms the highest ideal of the form of play you are espousing, but it is the LOWEST possible form with Story Now. It can only go higher from here! I'm beginning to draw a comparitive analogy between your game and mine (and I dare say most others) in a sports-TV format: your game is the 10-minute highlight show where you see just the goals and key plays while everything in between gets skipped; where mine is the whole 90-minute match including all the buildup and stoppages and everything else, and the viewer doesn't miss anything.</blockquote>Again, I largely disagree. A reasonably well-formulated and run Story Now game will feel like a pretty coherent narrative. It MAY deal in less detail with some relatively peripheral things than your game might, but the story will be complete and should feel complete and dramatically cogent to the players. No game I ever ran was ever described by anyone, to my knowledge, as a highlight reel. Nor is it in any sense shorter than your game. Maybe you get to play more than I do? Possible, and good for you, but on the whole we're likely to each play some amount of RPGs and whether its slogging through lots of trivia or high adventure isn't going to change that.[/QUOTE]

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