NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Manbearcat" data-source="post: 8751585" data-attributes="member: 6696971">All good!Alright so there are lots of ways to play games.  What you're depicting above isn't "cheating" because its clearly onboarded by the social contract of a sort of "Writer's Room", freeform way to play these games where we're collaborating, unmediated by system constraints (inputs, outputs, binding resolution procedures...things that resolve/inform gamestate interactions and give a fair measure of form and shape to the unfolding fiction).  In this sort of game, we're either inhabiting a sort of persistent Session 0 or we're toggling in and out of this state at our discretion.  It is "Storygaming" in its most pure sense of the phenomenon and I think this example does well in drawing the starkest of contrast with other forms of play that share kindred interest with this agenda, but go about it a different way because they deeply prioritize the two principles I Iaid out above, concern for Protagonism Undercutting and Competitive Integrity.  This sort of "Writer's Room" freeform collaboration (even if its toggled rather than persistent) isn't concerned at all with Competitive Integrity.  Further, it would definitely lay claim to caring deeply about Protagonism, but this takes a different form of caring than what I'm talking about above.  The differences there have to do with what it means to be a protagonist in TTRPGs and what it means to undercut that.  In the "Writer's Room" Storygaming variety, folks aren't "holding on lightly" nor are they "playing to find out."  The process of a persistent or discretionary toggled Session 0 (where they're collaborating on what they want to happen and ensuring it comes to pass) is definitionally doing neither of those things.  You're not "riding a roller coast" either.  You're not persisting in that state of "audience + vessel."  When you're writing and directing without the influence/constraints of an editor/producer (the binding aspects of system in TTRPG), you're inhabiting a very different cognitive orientation to play...an orientation that is certainly concerned with the literary form of Protagonism, but by definition cannot be preoccupied (consumed might be a better way to put it) by the TTRPG version of Protagonism where play is a crucible and we get to find out "who these people are (and what is this place they live in)?"Hopefully that makes sense.TLDR - One orientation is holding on tightly and concerned with the literary version of protagonism and isn't oriented to "playing to find out what happens" (because they are writers/directors without editors/producers so they have total authority over "what happens").  The other is holding on lightly and concerned with the TTRPG version of "protagonism defined by the remorseless crucible of play" and is "playing to find out what happens" because the system (editors/producers) always has its say (and the footprint of that "say" is robust) and therefore complete autonomy over the fiction and gamestate is not theirs.</blockquote>

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