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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Arilyn" data-source="post: 7412817" data-attributes="member: 6816042">Playing in someone's pre-built world and engaging in an adventure is not the same as reading a novel or watching a movie. It's too improvisational. Scripts and novels are, hopefully, carefully crafted. It shows when they are not. I wasn't surprised to discover that Lucas started filming "Phantom Menace" before his script was written. There can be similarities between rpging and stories, especially if an adventure has been prepared by the GM. This can be very rewarding. I was playing in a Buffy campaign where the GM was very good at crafting Buffy style adventures, and it was a blast. How is this different from watching the show? Well, there was more immersion, we were making decisions which affected the plot, and we were experiencing  our own, never before seen stories, with our own characters, in Joss' universe. There are similarities between classical play and a "choose your own adventure." A living GM, however, is way more complex, and can adjust, add, and rewrite  "pages" on the fly. I have gone through a few surprisingly well done "choose your own adventures", but no matter how well created, they can't come even remotely close to the same experience as a classical adventure with a GM.The world created by the GM is described verbally from written description. It's shared with players, who have more or less agency to add to the world, depending on the GM. Then, if all goes according to plan, the magic happens. The world and the stories come to life in a shared imagination space. Excitement and immersion occurs through conversation and a few (or none) simple props. The world acts as a shared language in a way, a short cut, helping players understand where they are, and what is expected of them I think that's why familiar tropes work best in rpgs. Create a too unfamiliar world, and players feel at a loss. But space opera, fantasy, horror, we can get that right away. Story Now is a rpg style hoping to create stories too. With the narrativist approach, however, it's not simulating stories, in the way pre-built adventures are. Story Now is creating them at the moment of play, with very minimal world building, and absolutely no preconceived notions of what players might do. It's very immediate, focussed on dramatic moments which come entirely from the player characters drives, foibles, etc. When it goes right, the players can look back and see which threads wove together into a story. This is really neat and surprising. If you are engaging in Story Now, however, the players also have to accept the fact that some sessions are going to have those threads end up in a gnarled mess. Price you pay for greater agency...In these games, I suppose, the characters become the shared language, taking on most of the role of traditional world building. You don't need both.pemerton's questions did let me think more deeply about these topics. I don't know if he'll feel that I answered him sufficiently, though.<img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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