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Message: <blockquote data-quote="clearstream" data-source="post: 9331369" data-attributes="member: 71699">From the Apocalypse World rulesIt sounds like you might not have employed this technique, so what I find is that by having stakes in mind for NPCs a GM can better discern emergent conflicts. It broadens the definition of "adversary" to include any creature whose stakes could conflict with the characters' which can obviously be just as much about good and positive things those creatures lives hinge on, as malign.In Daggerheart I noticed thisFrom Trollbabe thenSo I think you could possibly read this as only players  "want something and cannot get it easily" i.e. have stakes, but that is not how I read it and Baker implies outright that he did not either. For me, it immediately chimed with something I was already doing which was to ensure creatures had motives... what do they want? what's at stake for them? And it's then in the interplay of those stakes with the players that conflict emerges.Another way (although I had formerly seen it as complementary) is to determine the direction the fiction should go in (via the flow from fiction to system to fiction) and then make the creature's stakes fitting... or ignore them entirely I suppose, embracing them as the philosophers zombies that they kind of are.Okay. Calling it "nature" obfuscated that pretty well. I assumed it was something more than establlishing authority.That's surprising, because it's foundational to Edwards' concept of narrativism. The reason player must be understood as simultaneously author and audience is because of differences in the medium of games (non-linear, dynamic) and books or films (linear, non-dynamic). Narratology eventually had to make an adjustment to this, leading to post-classical narratology. Ludologists like Espen Aarseth called ludonarrative "ergodic literature" meaning it was literature you had to do some work to unearth.I put it myself thatNarrative subsists in a reader traversing a set of signifiers, organised with in mind a meta-property, which is their collective signified. This applies to games as well as books, films, and comics. A reader works to traverse a “text”. Whether that is as little as turning the page or keeping their eyes open, attentive, and processing, or as much as making decisions that rearrange the signifiers. Narrative intention lies in the organisation or curation of the signifiers, without which we could otherwise call ordinary living "narrative".So a ludonarrative is an assemblage of deliberately chosen signifiers (think of elements like snippets of history, illustrations of forests and towers, rules modules such as character ancestries, creature descriptions and parameters, and so on: all containing narrative potential without committing to a single told story).I was using organic but perhaps supervenes is a better word: ludonarrative is the kind of narrative that supervenes on storygames, and not storybooks.I suppose you could argue that the narrative vocabulary (the curated signifiers) are both finite and chosen by the GM, so that in some way the volume containing all tellable stories is predetermined and thus players never get to decide what's at stake for them other that to choose stakes that can exist within that volume. I think that count (of possible stakes) is so vast and unpredictable that it sure seems to me that players are deciding what they want to put at stake and pursuing it. The greater difference is what [USER=16586]@Campbell[/USER] said - "play that addresses the thematic premises embedded in the character" - which now I reread it can be understood a few different ways, but generally a sandbox could conceivably be considered play that address the thematic premises embedded in and between character and world.</blockquote>

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