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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ovinomancer" data-source="post: 7396451" data-attributes="member: 16814">You've, like just about everyone else, misrepresented Eero's piece in mostly the same way.  This is frustrating because he's so damn clear about what his piece is about:  the uncritical addition of narration sharing to games that have either strong backstory authority or strong character advocacy.  He doesn't say that players can't have backstory privileges as part of the game, but that adding those to games where backstory is supposed to be strongly held or where the players are also expected to have strong character advocacy as a focus of play may cause things to go wobbly, sometimes to detrimental effect.So, the argument that Eero really means that a game where the player has designed backstory privileges to add a secret door or cultist lore through a game move IS NOT what he's discussing -- those are games that have critically considered the effect and understand how it shapes/holds the game.  This is very clear in his piece that he's more than fine with as he directly cites his own game that has both backstory authority sharing and has play that switches focus on character advocacy to focus on what's best for the story because he's considered the impact critically and designed to accommodate them.  This twisting of Eero's general advice to be careful about willy-nilly adding in narration sharing -- specifically to take a moment to understand the game you're playing and what impacts the addition may have that undermine the premise/mechanics/gestalt of that game -- is NEVER a general pronouncement that player action declarations cannot involve backstory creation.  This is counter-indicated by his explicit examples of action declarations that involve backstory.Adding to the backstory through player action declarations is JUST FINE.  Arguing that Eero either says that you shouldn't or that action declarations are special cases are both so wide of his rather mild point of understanding what game you're playing before making changes that can affect it.  Eero focuses on Narrativist games here because that's where this particular issue of a community encouraging narration sharing is crossing over into games where, while Narrativist, will likely be made poorer for uncritical additions of narration sharing.  That's it.  There's no deep analysis or truth about playstyles here, it's just a well written opinion on a niche topic withing RPGs.  That people have spent so much time imaging it as either a validation of their playstyle (when it doesn't really speak to that at all, just cautions against uncritical changes) or that it contains the one idea that will prove that another playstyle fails (when it just talks about specific possible failure modes when changing the game system conceits) is effin ridiculous.  It's a good piece, it makes a good point about how you should consider the impacts of changes to your game, but it's not a treatise on how to do it right in all cases and it certainly doesn't warrant the hair-splitting of "well, clearly, since I believe this article is validation of my play, I must assume the author REALLY meant that action declarations cannot cause backstory to be authored and I cannot rely on this piece as a strong defense of my playstyle choices otherwise!"  Climb down, people, Eero wasn't defining your playstyle or your game, and he's perfectly happy that you can author backstory secret doors and cultist lore in your games because that ability wasn't an uncritical addition to your game and is, in fact, both intentional and functional to the intent of play for that game.Gah.    [MENTION=23751]Maxperson[/MENTION], you drug me back into this.  I shan't forgive you. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /></blockquote>

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