So setting is never a source of opposition? How would you define your use of the term "setting" here? Many words have multiple meanings and I want to have a clear understanding of what you're posting.
From the post you quoted:
There is no single best way to use the setting in "story now" play. In some games, it is likely to be mere backdrop or context - after all, the imaginary events of play have to happen somewhere, and the setting provides those places.
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In saying that setting is backdrop or context, that doesn't make it uninteresting - upthread I posted an account of some BW play, which included a bazaar scene and a wizard's tower. When we were playing, I think these were quite colourful and engaging. What I'm trying to get at, in describing them as backdrop/context, is that they did not, in themselves, really generate the opposition or contain the players' concerns for their PCs.
<snip>
Just to be clear, setting that is introduced as backdrop and context might still figure significantly in particular moments of action resolution: for instance, in the BW episode I described, at a certain point the players decided to have their PCs infiltrate the wizard's tower, and so appropriate actions were declared and resolved. In the MHRP game, Rhodes called in his armour via remote control, and then grabbed one of the villains and flew up to the top of the Washington Monument and left her dangling from it. To reiterate: describing the setting as backdrop/context is not dismissing it as a source of colour and an element of the action, but rather pointing out that it is not the source of opposition, player-established concerns for their PCs, etc - it is introduced subsequently, to facilitate and develop those things.
<snip>
The contrast with this is provided by RPGs where setting is more than just backdrop, and is reasonably tightly integrated with the PCs and so more fundamental to players' concerns for their PCs and a source of opposition in itself. In this sort of "story now" RPGing, the players need to have a handle on the setting from the outset, so that they can position their PCs in relation to it. An example of this approach is 4e D&D played with the default setting/cosmology: 4e D&D presents the setting to the players in the race and class write-ups, and in the descriptions of gods and alignments); and it invites the players to build PCs with concerns directly connected to that setting
As you can see, the post
contrasts two possibilities - setting as backdrop/context vs setting as a source of opposition. The first possibility is "no myth" or at least very low myth. The second is not. I mention 4e D&D, but probably the most paradigmatic (if less widely known) example of the second is HeroWars (the setting, in this case, is Glorantha).
What do you mean by "generic concerns" for PCs here? What would be examples of "specific concerns" for PCs?
From the post you quoted:
Prince Valiant and MHRP are two RPGs that (in my experience) exemplify (ii): the PCs have somewhat "generic" concerns, to do knightly things (Prince Valiant) or to do superheroic things (MHRP), and as a GM my job is to present situations that speak to these concerns
In the post I also pointed to the post upthread about Burning Wheel, which illustrated specific concerns:
In a Burning Wheel campaign, one of the players built a sorcerer PC who had some key features that linked him into the broader setting/situation:
*A Reputation as a minor illusionist;
*An Affiliation with a sorcerous cabal;
*A hostile Relationship with his older brother, who had been his teacher but is now possess by a balrog (a type of demon);
*a Belief (=, in this context, a PC goal) that he will find a magic item to help end his brother's possession;
*an Instinct (= a type of character-specific free action) to use Falconskin (a spell that turns him into a falcon) if he falls.
I also gave some examples in the post you quoted:
they are devotees of the Raven Queen, or trying to restore the glory of lost Nerath
As a GM, facilitation of the generic concern to do knightly things, or superheroic things, puts fewer constraints on the sort of fiction you introduce than facilitating those more specific concerns. This is why the Prince Valiant RPG has terrific little scenarios (or "episodes", as it calls them) in the rulebook and the supplementary episode book; whereas BW doesn't (there are example scenarios for BW, but they come with pregens already authored with the appropriate specific concerns).
Part of the point of the post you quoted was to say a bit more about prep, and no/low myth, as flagged in the OP. It's not true that "story now" = "no myth", nor that "story now" = no prep. Some "story now" tends towards both - eg BW. Some is no/low myth but can use prepped situations/scenarios/episodes - eg Prince Valiant. Some starts from shared myth - eg 4e D&D, HeroWars.
I think it's fair to say that none uses secret, GM-controlled backstory/setting in the manner of (say) the DL modules, or a typical WotC module.
Ron Edwards
makes the following observation about "story now" RPGing that uses what I am calling "generic" PC concerns:
Situation-based Premise is perhaps the easiest to manage as GM, as player-characters are well-defined and shallow, and the setting is vague although potentially quite colorful. The Premise has little to do with either in the long-term; it's localized to a given moment of conflict. Play often proceeds from one small-scale conflict to another, episodically. Good examples of games based on this idea include Prince Valiant, The Dying Earth, and InSpectres. . . .
The point is that the Situation doesn't have any particular role or importance to the Setting, either in terms of where it comes from or what happens later. The setting can be quite vague and might even just be a gray haze that characters are presumed to have travelled through in order to have encountered this new Situation.
This type of Premise does carry some risks: (1) the possibility of a certain repetition from event to event, but probably nothing that you wouldn't find in other situation-first narrative media, which is to say serial fiction of any kind; (2) the heightened possibility of producing pastiche; and (3) the heightened possibility of shifting to Gamist play.
I haven't found (3) or even really (2) to be a problem in Prince Valiant play. (I can easily imagine both being a big problem for a certain sort of superhero RPGing - the risks are obvious even just in reading the modest number of MHRP books that got published while MWP still enjoyed the licence.)
The way we have dealt with (1) is (i) to change the backdrop of play over time, and (ii) to shift, over the course of play, towards some more specific PC concerns, for two PCs mostly focused around the building up of their warband and using it to wage a crusade, and for the third PC mostly focused around his relationship with his wife. In Edwards's terminology, this is moving away from purely situation-based premise (=, or ~=,
theme) towards character-based premise. In the post you quoted, in my example of Classic Traveller play, I gave an example of moving away from reasonably generic PC concerns to setting-inspired ones, which in Edwards's terminology means moving from situation-based premise to setting-based premise.
Could you also define "de-protagonisation" as you're using the term here?
As per the OP,
At the heart of "story now" RPGing is the players bring the protagonism. The players decide what it is that their PCs care about, what their motivations are, what their projects will be. I'll bundle all these up as the players' concerns for their PCs.
<snip>
when your players declare actions, you have to respond.
<snip>
The big pitfall here is prejudgement. If your responses impose your own prejudgement of how things "should" go, then you've lost that player protagonism you were aspiring to. It's fine to inject your own ideas - you're a creative individual, just like your players! - but your ideas should complement and build on what the players have contributed, in accordance with whatever the rules of your game say. They shouldn't contradict or override them.
De-protagonisation occurs when the GM makes decisions - in responding, or otherwise in presenting the fiction - which undercut or contradict or override the players' endeavours to
bring the protagonism by deciding what it is their PCs care about, what their motivations are, what their projects will be.
In the post you quoted, I gave this example of de-protagonisation:
if a player chooses to build their PC as a Raven Queen devotee, hostile to Orcus, an interesting situation is one in which the player has to choose how hard they will push, and how much they will risk themselves and others, to pursue some undead. But it would be de-protagonising to present a situation, early in play, which reveals that the Raven Queen and Orcus are really collaborators, with their supposed rivalry just a ruse: because that undercuts the whole logic and orientation of the player's concerns for their PC.
As another example, consider my BW actual play from upthread and quoted just above: suppose the GM just declares that the balrog has stopped possessing the PC's brother; or suppose the GM just declares a magical effect occurs which teleports the PC to another plane, where he can no longer interact with his sorcerous cabal, no longer trade on his reputation as a minor illusionist, and no longer meaningfully pursue the project of redeeming his brother: those would all be de-protagonising decisions.
Here is a quote from Ron Edwards (same source as above) that sets out the issue in more abstract terms:
the other issue regarding protagonism is the problem of de-protagonizing, a term coined by Paul Czege. . . . Nearly all of the dysfunctional issues described later in the essay concern deprotagonizing in the context of Narrativist [= “story now”] play, which is best defined as Force: the final authority that any person who is not playing a particular player-character has over decisions and actions made by that player-character. This is distinct from information that the GM imparts or chooses not to impart to play; I'm talking about the protagonists' decisions and actions. In Narrativist play, using Force by definition disrupts
The key thing to recognise, in my view, is that there are many ways to exercise authority over a characters decisions and actions besides declaring them (which is what players typically do) or vetoing them (which is a standard image of a "viking hat" GM). In the examples I've given just above, the GM exercises authority over a character's decisions and actions by completely changing or removing the fictional context in which the
player's decisions about those things - that is to say, the player's decision about their PC's concerns - made sense. In my imagined BW case, of the PC being teleported elsewhere, nothing stops the player imagining that their PC still cares about his brother and remembers his time with the cabal, but the player is precluded from declaring actions that engage those things, because the GM has established a framing (ie the PC is trapped on some other plane) in which such action declarations aren't feasible. That's an exercise of what Edwards calls "Force", it is de-protagonising and hence, as Edwards says, it disrupts "story now" RPGing.
I like where you're going with Story Now I'm just not completely convinced it's necessary to bring along the construct of the Gamemaster. When we're discussing the evolution of TTRPGs, the GM appears to me as that runaway dog with its leash attached to a trash can: the owner thought tying the dog to a trash can would keep the animal in place. But, the dog runs, starts dragging the can, and runs even more because it's now terrified by this loud can chasing it everywhere. Maybe the trash can is the concept of Campaign, and maybe if players are grasping more control of the campaign, we can unleash the GM from it?
I'm not 100% sure what you've got in mind, but in writing the OP and in my thinking more generally I'm heavily influenced not only by Edwards but also by Vincent Baker, who
said this about the GM (around 20 years ago, the same time Edwards was writing what I've quoted):
Doing Away with the GM
You need to have a system by which scenes start and stop. The rawest solution is to do it by group consensus: anybody moved to can suggest a scene or suggest that a scene be over, and it's up to the group to act on the suggestion or not. You don't need a final authority beyond the players' collective will.
You need to have a system whereby narration becomes in-game truth. That is, when somebody suggests something to happen or something to be so, does it or doesn't it? Is it or isn't it? Again the rawest solution is group consensus, with suggestions made by whoever's moved and then taken up or let fall according to the group's interest.
You need to have orchestrated conflict, and there's the tricky bit. GMs are very good at orchestrating conflict, and it's hard to see a rawer solution. My game Before the Flood handles the first two needs ably but makes no provision at all for this third. What you get is listless, aimless, dull play with no sustained conflict and no meaning.
In our co-GMed Ars Magica game, each of us is responsible for orchestrating conflict for the others, which works but isn't radical wrt GM doage-away-with. It amounts to when Emily's character's conflicts climax explosively and set off Meg's character's conflicts, which also climax explosively, in a great kickin' season finale last autumn, I'm the GM. GM-swapping, in other words, isn't the same as GM-sharing.
I hope the influence of these thoughts on my OP is obvious.
I have a currently active BW game in which there are two of us playing, each with a player character, and we use the sort of approach that Baker describes to handle GM duties - I frame the adversity for my friend's PC, and narrate the consequences of his failed action declarations, and he does the same for me. (You can see actual play posts
here and
here.) It produces very "local", "intimate" situations and stakes, because there is no "external" GM who is drawing on a bigger picture to bring in grander or more sweeping backstory. I think this works in Burning Wheel because the game's action resolution system easily handles those sorts of stakes (contrast, say, 4e D&D which probably doesn't) and the system more generally copes with very low myth and has robust mechanisms for players to send signals about what scenes they want framed (or even to trigger the framing of scenes - eg via Circles checks).
As far as "the campaign" is concerned, I don't think that's a terribly useful notion once it's taken outside the Gygaxian framework, except in the most basic sense of "a series of sessions broadly concerned with the same characters". My two-person BW game is set in Hardby, and notionally takes place at the same time as the BW game involving the sorcerer with the demon-possessed brother - the reference in my actual play report of the two-person game to "the bottom has fallen out of the market in soft cheese" was a joke between us, based on the fact that in the other game the wedding of the Gynarch of Hardby had been called off (and hence there would be no need for soft cheese as part of the wedding celebration). But I don't think it helps us make sense of the play of either game, or the techniques being used by the participants, to posit that they are both elements of a common "campaign" or "campaign world". Each game is its own thing, with its distinct protagonists and its distinct established fiction and its distinct trajectory.
The idea of "canon", as something distinct from what we've all agreed on as participants in this game, being a constraint on play, is antithetical to "story now" play. (That's why, for setting-based "story now" play,
the players need to have a handle on the setting from the outset - the deployment of "external" canon by the GM will be as de-protagonising in that context of any other instance of GM Force.)
) have also used Greyhawk (for BW) and medieval England (for Prince Valiant).
