Quote from: Justin Alexander;736239I'd say the distinction between character creation and actual play is far more relevant. Trying to ignore that distinction seems like a really disingenuous way to pretend that point-buy character creation and narrative control mechanics are the same thing.

I am only including metagame mechanics, not character creation mechanics in general. Metagame character creation mechanics include issues, destinies, traits, aspects etc that describe the character from an authorial perspective. Backgrounds, resources, flaws and other character creation mechanics that describe what the character can or cannot do or owns are not metagame mechanics.

As such, I think my comment is right, but would agree with you if the net was cast unnecessarily wide.

Quote from: Justin Alexander;736239Two different things. The covenant rules in Ars Magica still involve in-character decisions; those decisions are just covering broader (and more abstracted) stretches of time.

Something like the Dresden Files, OTOH, has an entire system by which the players are specifically designing the campaign world and the antagonists their characters will be facing during play.



I'd say the distinction between character creation and actual play is far more relevant. Trying to ignore that distinction seems like a really disingenuous way to pretend that point-buy character creation and narrative control mechanics are the same thing.

there are point buy character generation mechanics that definitely feel like narrative control mechanics.

Like so many of these things there is a spectrum.

Take James Bond 007 - a Trad RPG with complex social mechanics played out through skill rolls, and hero points that allowed you to make authorial change in play in line with genre, from finding  a motorbike with the keys in the ignition just outside the Louvre to happening to have a Deck of The Tarot of the Witches that had 78 lovers cards in it. It still plays liek a trad game.
Likewise some of the point buy stuff in WoD definitely allows you to make authorial changes say you take contacts at 3 points. Then you need a contact with business connections et voila.  The Subculture skills in FGU games worked in a similar way they gave you information about the say the criminal underworld but also allowed you to generate on the fly connections in that subculture.

So its a spectrum one narrative mechanic doesn;t make a game a story game just like a story game having a skill check mechanism doesn't make it a board game.

The point above though wasn't to distinguish story games and RPGs; it was to distinguish narrative control mechanics from point buy chargen mechanics. The JB example has zero to do with chargen.

Neither do the WoD or FGU examples--all are in-play. (Although, slight digression, I think the application of "social contacts" mechanics can vary widely from narrative control to quite traditional abstraction. Dogs in the Vineyard ability to declare relationships being an example of the former, while "roll on your streetwise, with a circumstantial modifier decided by the GM, to see if you can find a corruptible official in town" is an example of the latter.)

A far better idea of chargen as narrative control is when you can take patrons and enemies as in GURPS. Even then, it depends on whether you're limited to patrons and enemies that the GM has already developed.

Raven Crowking has a blog post today on planning, improvisation, and collaborative world building that's worth a look.

Quote from: Simlasa;734426'The Fiction' gets my hackles up a bit because it reminds me of 'The Text' and the literature majors who pepper their talk with that term to cover up the fact that they're speaking nonsense.

Exact same purpose used here!

Quote from: RPGPundit;736373Exact same purpose used here!

I'm glad you know my purposes so well! Honestly, I was a bit confused. I thought that we chose the best word we could come up with, which may be crappy. I had totally forgot that I was trying to appear smarter than everyone while writing an RPG about smacking owlbears with swords and quoting Rush.

Quote from: sage_again;736482I'm glad you know my purposes so well! Honestly, I was a bit confused. I thought that we chose the best word we could come up with, which may be crappy. I had totally forgot that I was trying to appear smarter than everyone while writing an RPG about smacking owlbears with swords and quoting Rush.

Is it about smacking owlbears and quoting Rush, or about creating the piece of fiction where the characters/narrative devices smack owlbears while occasionally quoting Rush?

Quote from: sage_again;736482and quoting Rush.

Now you're just being preposterous.

Quote from: Justin Alexander;736239Something like the Dresden Files, OTOH, has an entire system by which the players are specifically designing a subset of the campaign world and a subset ofthe antagonists their characters will be facing during play.

This would be more accurate if you included the bolded phrases.  It's a significant difference, as usually it's also a *small* subset.

Quote from: Justin Alexander;736239I'd say the distinction between character creation and actual play is far more relevant. Trying to ignore that distinction seems like a really disingenuous way to pretend that point-buy character creation and narrative control mechanics are the same thing.

I'd agree that it's a hugely important distinction.

The irony here is that in general, CWB happens *before* even character creation, and is not a factor during actual play.  Mass world-editing *during* play is something I'd find to be pretty damn bizarre.

Quote from: One Horse Town;736493Now you're just being preposterous.

We quote Rush in the book. It is preposterous.

Quote from: Benoist;736492Is it about smacking owlbears and quoting Rush, or about creating the piece of fiction where the characters/narrative devices smack owlbears while occasionally quoting Rush?

You say "piece of fiction" which I assume means a story, like something that would be written down? In that case, nope. DW doesn't give a shit about your narrative. It cares about action and adventure and dying horribly and maybe living to tell about it.

It's about going into a fictional place where there are owlbears, and you can fight them, and maybe die to them. Since this isn't any one named fictional place, we call it the fiction. We called it other things, but found this the easiest way to describe "the place that doesn't actually exist where the players are which might be a specific known world like Dark Sun or might not be and which encompasses everything going on both known and unknown to the players on all the various planes of existence."

I'll freely admit that "the fiction" might be a horrible word for that. If we ever revise DW I'd think carefully about how we might do it better (though we already thought carefully about it once). For now, that's the game we put out. If we use too much jargon for you, that's cool. We're not perfect, and we might have erred on the side of new-ish terms instead of reusing existing ones that didn't fit exactly. I don't see the case for us being pretentious, but I guess no one thinks they're pretentious. We certainly didn't choose words just to be different because that'd be stupid.

Quote from: robiswrong;736498I'd agree that it's a hugely important distinction.

The irony here is that in general, CWB happens *before* even character creation, and is not a factor during actual play.  Mass world-editing *during* play is something I'd find to be pretty damn bizarre.

Actually that's a good point which we didn't even get to. DW included very little CWB in either character creation or in actual play. Sure, the GM can include it, but the system does no more to facilitate this than any other traditional RPG.

OK, so I started reading this thing online... Is it just me or is this basically "roleplaying for retards" with some hip jargon and convoluted wording thrown in so the Forgeoisie will buy into it? I cannot read this stuff without getting the impression I'm being treated as if I'm some kind of half-wit.

I'm not saying this is intentional, but this is how it comes across to me.

Quote from: dwgazetteer.comThe most important role of a character’s equipment is to help  describe the moves they make. A character without a weapon of some sort  isn’t going to trigger the hack and slash move when fighting a dragon  since a bare-knuckle punch really doesn’t do much to inch-thick scales.  It doesn’t count for the purposes of triggering the move.
  Likewise, sometimes equipment will avoid triggering a move. Climbing a  sheer icy cliff is usually defying danger, but with a good set of  climbing gear you might be able to avoid the imminent danger or calamity  that triggers the move.
  Weapons are particularly likely to modify what moves you can trigger.  A character with a dagger can easily stab the goblin gnawing on his  leg, triggering hack and slash, but the character with a halberd is  going to have a much harder time bringing it to bear on such a close  foe.

I mean... What. The. Fuck. That is some seriously redundant shit.

Quote from: 3rik;736538OK, so I started reading this thing online... Is it just me or is this basically "roleplaying for retards" with some hip jargon and convoluted wording thrown in so the Forgeoisie will buy into it? I cannot read this stuff without getting the impression I'm being treated as if I'm some kind of half-wit.

Sorry about that. Our intent was to be straightforward and explicit and not assume anything. I can understand how that'll come across as redundant if you already get this stuff.

Quote from: 3rik;736538OK, so I started reading this thing online... Is it just me or is this basically "roleplaying for retards" with some hip jargon and convoluted wording thrown in so the Forgeoisie will buy into it? I cannot read this stuff without getting the impression I'm being treated as if I'm some kind of half-wit.

I'm not saying this is intentional, but this is how it comes across to me.



I mean... What. The. Fuck. That is some seriously redundant shit.

Not to mention that doing a two-handed downward stab with the POINT of the halberd into someone at your ankle would not only be a simple move, but a devastating one.