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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7405345" data-attributes="member: 42582">I'm pretty sure that AbdulAlhazred was referring to a passage I quoted from <a href="http://adept-press.com/wordpress/wp-content/media/setting_dissection.pdf" target="_blank">Ron Edwards's essay about how to do setting-heavy "story now"</a> - I think in the other thread. The key bits (sblocked for length):[sblock]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 . . . Character-centric Story Now play is consistent with epic literature and myth, classical drama, and adventure fiction of all kinds. . . . [H]istorically, 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]the game I first really applied this model with . . . [was] Hero Wars. . . . [R]ight off the bat, making characters draws directly and consequentially upon the available cultures in the chosen location. In other words, the first thing you do to play is pick a spot on the world map, which provides the options for character creation in addition to the particular political and religious crises hitting flashpoint at that time – as opposed to having a character-type list spanning the whole setting to pick from. . . . 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. . . . Although the organizing person should provide more detailed handouts or photocopies as an ongoing feature of preparation, everyone else must definitely be oriented and enthusiastic concerning the prevailing thematic crises that are made concrete in setting terms. The good news is that full expertise isn’t necessary to achieve this, and in my experience, asking and answering questions about the options for the geographically-limited character creation usually generate sufficient knowledge for the first sessions of play. . . . 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. . . . [O]ne 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. I will now provide a set of concepts and practices to bring out what seem to me to be these games’ best features for setting-centric Story Now play. The 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.He then goes on to suggest a concrete set of steps for PC gen, prep, and play: ignore "adventurers" and "adventure", but rather create PCs who belong in the particular chosen place, and have connections ("Each [PC] carries a few NPCs along, implied by various details, and those NPCs should be identified. It is helpful for at least one, preferably more of them to be small walking soap operas"); and establish scenes that put these characters (PCs and NPCs) under pressure (in terms of the relationships to one another, the community, the location) and see what happens.[/sblock]Of well-known D&D settings, this would seem to be a way to do Dark Sun.</blockquote>

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