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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7401774" data-attributes="member: 42582">Here's a sblocked self-quote:[sblock][/sblock]Sorcerer is clearly not a game that involves GM worldbuilding of the sort described in the OP of this thread.Sblocked, fFrom Ron Edwards (designer of Sorcerer), <a href="http://adept-press.com/wordpress/wp-content/media/setting_dissection.pdf" target="_blank">"Setting and emergent stories"</a>:[sblock]This essay is really about setting but I found that I had to explain the story part first. . . . n the interest of the whole essay’s point, I’m specifying here that we’re talking about a game text which includes a detailed setting, in which the various locations, problems, and NPCs . . . are easily identifiable or can easily be created once you’ve studied it in some detail. Enjoyment of the setting’s content as such is one of the intended joys and significant features of play. . . . Story Now play does not merely inject a dose of flexibility or improvisation into Story Before play. It’s a different animal entirely. For example, the classic “play my character vs. play for the story” dichotomy is literally impossible. There simply isn’t any “the” story. The only way to get a story is through people playing their characters. It relies heavily on situational crisis within the fiction, and not only the knowledge among the players that their characters are significantly embedded in it, but their enjoyment of that because the characters’ allegiances and priorities are free to unfold and change during play. . . . nitial preparation doesn’t start with setting but rather with an evocation of setting, providing the necessary environment in which to visualize a character, and no more. Therefore setting information is deliberately kept sketchy at the outset, without any points of interest except for how it provides adversity toward the characters, if indeed that occurs at all. And when it does, the setting remains strictly facilitative of the primary conflicts embedded in the characters themselves. Other games which rely on this model include Dust Devils, Lacuna, Primetime Adventures, shock:, Sign in Stranger, Poison’d, and Dogs in the Vineyard . . . Story Now design has typically favored the character-centric approach probably due to the influence of Sorcerer . . .[/sblock]In that essay, Edwards goes on to discuss how worldbuilding can be adapted to Story Now play, by departing from the Sorcerer approach (emphasis added by me):[sblock]Character-centric Story Now play is consistent with epic literature and myth, classical drama, and adventure fiction of all kinds. . . .I went into this much detail about this way to play because historically, it was developed first as an explicit alternative to the Story Before methods described earlier. Therefore in early Forge discussions, a perceived dichotomy formed which contrasted Setting with Story Now (Narrativism).  Here, I’m firmly calling this dichotomy false and showing that Story Now play can function very well using a setting-centric approach. . . .[T]he game I first really applied this model with [was] called Hero Wars . . .Enjoying the setting isn’t an end-stage outcome, it’s a starting and prevailing commitment. Nor is a single person expected to be the docent for the textual setting; rather, it belongs to everyone for inspiration and use. Play deepens it and provides nuances, and most importantly, changes it. . . .One concern that crops up a lot for playing this way is how expert people have to be even to get started. Although not everyone must be expert, certainly no one can be ignorant either. . . .In my experience, the solution begins with a single person choosing the location, at least when the group is playing the game for the first time. He or she should provide a brief but inspirational handout which summarizes the entire setting, focusing on colorful and thematic points; if the opening text of the game book provides this, a quick photocopy will do. . . .I want to focus on several game texts that present explicitly powerful settings which as I see it simply scream out to be utilized as I’ve described above, but which are also saddled with play-advice that undercuts the potential. . . .The origins of this problem are obvious: simply aping the models provided by D&D2 (especially Dragonlance) . . . Among many others, one consistent problem with such texts is being forced to reconcile the deeply community-oriented problems of a given location for play with the inappropriate assumption that player-characters are a team of outsiders who’ve just arrived from very far away. Since these can’t be reconciled, each text repeats a whole circular and unsuccessful mantra about it without managing to deliver meaningful or even engaging instructions. . . .[F]or setting-centric Story Now play [t]he idea is to embrace the setting as a genuine, central source of the colorful thematic dilemmas explicit in the games’ introductory text, and to resist the retraction and retreat to comparatively tame Story Before which are explicit in the later GM-advice and scenario-preparation text.[/sblock]In the context of this thread, the most striking element of Edwards's description of setting-heavy "story now" RPGing is that it is the group, not the GM, that "owns" the setting. And Edwards is certainly not talking about the sort of establishment of setting that we're seeing discussed at this stage of this thread (eg that a secret door does or does not exist in a certain wall; that a bribe is or is not willing to be bribed; etc).My use of the default 4e cosmology in my main 4e game, and of Dark Sun in my 4e Dark Sun game, is something like what Edwards describes here, although both settings are "light" and stereotypical enough that play also bleeds into the character-centric approach.</blockquote>

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