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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8348421" data-attributes="member: 42582">I've never played the sort of game he describes.The closest I've come to running a game in which setting is the source of theme/premise, and is used in the way he talks about, is 4e D&D. But that game didn't involve the sort of Glorantha-style "embeddedness in place" that he refers to in part because the whole point of the 4e setting is to propel its violently capable protagonists into gonzo D&D-esque action.The two games I've run that most closely resemble his approach to embeddedness in place have both been one-shots set in late Victorian England - Cthulhu Dark and Wuthering Heights - but in those games the setting wasn't really the point but more served as the backdrop for finding out what happens to the characters.I've put these two quotes together as they both deal with the same thing.I think AW brings a genre - there are hardholds, and cars and bikes, and the bikies travel in gangs. There are lots of guns. And there's a psychic maelstrom, and as a result there are strange psychics and fortune-telling cult leaders and a little bit of weird tech.It can be spelled out in those few sentences, and I've put them together by reading the playbooks. I could have looked at the discussion of Fronts and might get a bit more detail - there are mutants/grotesques, for instance - but I think there's nothing in that extra detail that one wouldn't be able to get to from what I've stated above. And there's nothing stopping a MC from pushing in slightly different directions that Vincent himself didn't think of!Burning Wheel is fairly similar: there are Elves, Dwarves and Orcs - all very Tolkien-esque, and when you read the lifepaths there's little or nothing that would catch one by surprise - and then there are humans with lifepaths that drive home a strong mediaeval feel with a hint of sword-and-sorcery coming out of the Slavery & Servitude and Death Cult lifepaths. In other words, its classic FRPGing but whereas D&D leans into the gonzo BW leans into the serious.If that's what is meant by developing a setting in advance of play, then there's no conflict with Story Now. You can do it the BW way - brainstorm together, get some ideas, build the PCs and then get going in that implied world (or, as I did in my first BW game, say "Hey, the GH map would work for all this" and so we start with that); or the AW way, of playing out the first session and building the initial relationships and then having the GM/MC go away and prepare a setting that makes sense of all that.But if we're talking not just about a genre and a broad palette that signals the sorts of themes that might figure in play, and are talking something much more specific - there's this village here and they do things this way; there's this stronghold here and its overlord is a cultist of such-and-such a god; etc - then we've moved into the heart of Edwards's "setting dissection" essay. The most traditional models of this sort of setting - eg MERP, the well-known D&D settings, the 80s and onwards Traveller Imperium, etc - all tend to be at odds with "story now" play because they build in not only the premises of conflict but its resolution. One striking feature of the real world as a site of play is not just that most people know at least a bit about it, but it notoriously doesn't supply its own answers!</blockquote>

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