Not to sound like a total fanboy or anything, but something I’ve grown to love about the *World system and it’s focus on the conversation over narrative is that it actually uses OOC knowledge to invest the players in the game.
In most other games, the GM chapter often has quite elaborate sections about why meta-gaming should be avoided, and it’s often accompanied with advice on how to do so.
The “setup phase” for the play-by-post game I’m in has just ended, and we’re about to start actual play. I know a lot of things about the other PC’s that Roklo, my six-armed White Ape Wizard, doesn’t have a clue about yet.
I really like that, because now I’m interested in those characters and their goals, and I want to see them conquer their challenges as much as I want to defeat my arch-nemesis Breko, whom they know of only out of character.
Meta-game knowledge is a tool like everything else. Just as you wouldn’t use a hammer to straighten glass, you should use meta-game knowledge as an in-game motivation. It’s all about using what you have, when you can use it for something great.
I just wanted to get this out there.
DISCLAIMER: I do not mean that the *World system avoids narrative, rather it ignores it and lets the conversation shape it.
I think the narrative emerges from conversation. At the end of a *World game you can look back at what happened and see a story that was told without any one person having absolute narrative authority.
“narrative emerges from conversation”
isn’t that basically a definition of RPGs
Adam McConnaughey not really. Lots of RPGs involve a planned narrative that is revealed by conversation, not a narrative that arises from the conversation itself.
Dylan Boates I agree with you here. I asked questions about people’s experiences on relying on nothing but improv, and everyone seems to think that “improv” is what happens when the players derail the GM’s plot. Many doesn’t seem to grasp the concept of sitting down at the table without a preplanned plot.
DW goes to great length in making it easy to improvise, since monsters are so unfathomably easy to make up on the spot, and it emphasizes the importance of asking questions and building on the answers. I use that advice to make up events on the spot, that will later unfold as a story, based on the conversation. I often have no idea what will happen next.
That is what I call improv, and that is how the narrative arise from the conversation, and how the conversation doesn’t arise from a preplanned plot.