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Message: <blockquote data-quote="clearstream" data-source="post: 9331408" data-attributes="member: 71699">For sure it has been notoriously difficult to pin these down, and doubly so in a few short sentences. The "dynamic" aspect of games means that some of the signifiers too are dynamic, or are bound by dynamics. I should add that.So TTRPG is not about traditional-narrative, it is about ludonarrative. Narratism would then be a subset of that.All of them are assemblages of exactly  the sort I described. However, it's not important to me that you understand this. You asked, I answered. Read more on post-classical narratology. I'm morally certain there are folk who are better at explaining these concepts than I am.There are vastly many stories that supervene on Burning Wheel, once you take into account too the signifiers each player contributes to the set in play at their table. Conjectures of the sort you give are exactly what one expects to be able to make, and it is quite right to say "stories of a genre that fits the rulebook"... in a sense, that is what folk have been arguing so ardently about. That stories of a certain sort don't fit the 5e rulebook (so must arise if at all from what players contribute) while they do fit some other rulebooks.And here I think you develop a sense that story exists not just in the rendering of what happens, but in how the rendering is experienced by readers. Hence the reader's traversal in my description.Ergodic literature was an early and somewhat influential take by Espen, and I agree it is inadequate. Espen later revised or supplemented that description of games with other notions. Generally, he proposed treating games ass mechanisms and establishing a meta-model for comparing them.There is a difference there between having such stakes in mind, and deciding what's at stake. The players decide what's at stake. One way is through their choice of what they do, who they interact with and confront, where and when. Another is through saying what they have at stake and GM developing play around that.Sometimes the players look to the GM to force the play, often by bringing someone or something into the picture, or escalating something, that ideally has something to do with their stakes. How hard one wants to adhere to that is a matter of degree, and I observe groups finding satisfying play all along that range.AP play is not at all what I have in mind. I agree that those sort of fully scripted adventures lay it out so that what's at stake in a scene is predetermined. Often by nobody at the table.It can't matter that GM thinks about Birdie getting a better place to live, if diegetically Birdie is completely disinterested in a better place to live and quite (and not falsely) satisfied with where they live now. It can't matter if GM wonders if Roark will live through this, if Roark would rather not live through this. GM ought to be wondering something like, will Roark go out in X way or do X before they go, or whatever. And it cannot matter if GM wonders if Foster will break Uncle's holding if diegetically Foster hasn't the least interest in breaking Uncle's holding.At the same time, in TTRPG, such NPCs have motives on through our pretence.</blockquote>

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