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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9330624" data-attributes="member: 42582">The notion that anyone in LotR is a PC or NPC makes no sense to me. It's a novel.My point is that, in the inspirational fiction for D&D, a major ruler - Theoden - is challenged in his court and has his mind changed.If the players are not expected to challenge the GM's NPC tyrant, why is the GM framing them into that scene at all? There may be an answer, but it's obviously not going to be one that connects to player-driven RPGing!Well, I'm pretty confident that I know what [USER=6785785]@hawkeyefan[/USER]'s contrast was about, as I described it and hawkeyefan liked my post and didn't post any correction of me. (Whereas, when I understated what he meant about RPG as a medium that is different from film, he did politely correct me.)I don't know of any RPG that permits what you describe - the player establishing an NPC's backstory like that. But I know plenty of RPGs that take it for granted that the players can establish what is at stake in a scene, and what their PCs' goals are in that scene.I don't really know what "ludonarrative" means - it's not a term I'm familiar with - but I'm not surprised that some of what you describe about RPGing is not narrativist. After all, you are not a notable advocate or expositor of narrativst RPGing.There are many, many variations on this. Who gets to decide the PCs' goals within the scene, and what is at stake? I mean, as you describe it this could be an episode of Apocalypse World - but AW permits the players to establish stakes (by use of moves like Read a Situation, Read a Person, Seize By Force, and Seduce/Manipulate).Or it could be a total railroad like the example from 5e Curse of Strahd play that I linked to upthread.Without specifying the system whereby what is at stake in an action resolution, and how it is described - ie basically everything that matters in approaches to RPGing - we can't tell what's going on in terms of player agency and narrativistic or non-narrativistic play.I don't know what you mean by "players set the scene up". I mean, is a player saying "I look around for a <useful person fitting such-and-such a description>" and then succeeding on the check (say, Streetwise in Classic Traveller - a 1977 RPG! - or Circles in Burning Wheel) an example of this?Is the player saying to the GM "I'd like to go and visit my friend the blacksmith" and the GM responding "OK, you turn up at the smith's place - but they seem to be missing!" an example of this?I don't know what you mean by a player being empowered to "edit the scene". In MHRP the player can, under certain circumstances, declare an action to establish an Asset, or spend a PP to establish a Resource - does this count as editing the scene? In some versions of D&D, a player can spend a spell slot or memorised spell to make it true that the scene includes a creature under their control (in the fiction, the PC casts a summon-type spell) - does this count as editing the scene?These descriptions of play that are devoid of specifications of actual play processes, of the relationship between clouds and boxes, etc, seem pretty unhelpful to me.This just makes no sense to me at all.As far as I know, of active participants in this thread I'm the one to have most recently run <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/middle-earth-lotr-rpging-using-cortex-heroic.670013/" target="_blank">a MERP/LotR-type game with Gandalf statted up as a PC</a>. In that system - a MHRP variant - there are multiple ways that Gandalf freeing Theoden could be resolved. Theoden could be a Scene Distinction - King Burdened by Weariness and Wormtongue - and Gandalf's actions would be aimed at eliminating that Distinction, with Wormtongue as a statted NPC providing the opposition.Or Theoden could be statted as a NPC, suffering from Mental and Emotional Stress, with Gandalf performing recovery actions, and Wormtongue adding to the Doom Pool and/or directly opposing those actions.Which approach to use is a matter of taste and skill in GMing that system. I don't know how either is supposed to fit into your A/B/C schema, which as I've said doesn't actually make any reference to the processes of play that I and (I believe) [USER=6925338]@soviet[/USER] and [USER=6785785]@hawkeyefan[/USER] are interested in.</blockquote>

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