Blatant GNS questions...

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Ian,

I think we're on the same page now.

Neil, is any of this helpful to you? I do want to point out that you and your group currently have at least four very similar threads running concurrently, and that it's easy to confuse yourselves and everyone else when that happens.

With respect, could you consider which ones to emphasize for a while, and which ones to let sit, for re-visiting later?

Best,
Ron

[M. J. Young]

If the players are primarily motivated to address premise, then front-loading will support narrativism.  If not, then it won't.

Indeed, I see this often, particularly with worlds like Orc Rising. I drop the player into a post-fantasy setting in which magic is fading, being replaced by the sort of primitive societies known in our history (but that the elves are agrarian and the dwarfs are metallurgists) and smack in the middle I place this ethical quandary about the orcs. The free peoples are destroying their habitat, crushing their culture, and enslaving them in the name of bringing them into the modern civilized world. The orcs aren't good, and the free peoples aren't evil, but this issue is writ large across the screen. Some players become very involved in trying to figure out what they can do about that issue; others just wander around the world largely ignoring it, with a "when in Rome" attitude about how to relate to slaveholders.

So front-loading premise is a fine way to facilitate narrativist play for narrativist players, but it doesn't convert a simulationist or gamist to a narrativist in itself.

--M. J. Young