@pemerton I wondered if you take it that assertion is impossible in TTRPG? So that no participant can ever have sufficiently high-ownership (say of their character) that they can make additions to the fiction without that being contingent.
My view is that there is little, perhaps no, utility in positing such things in the abstract. And that doing so tells us little about RPG play and hence gives us little guidance to RPG design.
Consider, for instance, this:
An example is to read a transcript of play such as
Dolmenwood ep 03 night and morning at the ruins of an abbey. At one point player characters are "loudly complaining about the night's sleep". But no one says what those words in fact are. That's a detail that won't get filled in. It's entirely possible in this case that one player pictures blowing on their hands and grumbling about the cold, a second imagines instead that they're stretching their back ands commenting on the stony ground, while a third has nothing particular in mind for that at all. We're more than capable of unravelling details as needed, but in this case never discover what "complaining" truly amounted to.
Later the same morning characters encounter someone "not blocking the entrance and standing outside the entrance with a spear sort of raised but shaking a little bit is a woman who was dressed head to toe in animal skins basically um expertly uh you know whatever uh skinned um and um she has uh long braids that kind of come out of this fur cap that she's wearing um like you know long dread sort of thing that kind of fall down her hair and she has like and she's baring her teeth and she's like like really scared she's got a big gap right in the middle long dirty brown locks and she's basically filthy she's shivering a little bit in the cold and she's got her spear out um at the ready and she's like peering at you guys she's like who who goes there don't come any closer". How tall is this woman? What colour are her eyes? What's her apparent age? When she speaks, what's the tone and pitch of her voice? Such details are left open for each participant to have a different - or no - draft of in their individually-maintained fictional state.
What I observe is that fictional states are "lazily" maintained.
Suppose that this transcript took place in a game in which the following additional things were true:
*The players, as their PCs, had been told to be on the lookout for a green-eyed woman;
*The GM has a note that the woman is green-eyed, but has decided not to tell the players this unless they specifically ask;
*No player asks the colour of the woman's eyes, because (i) they're careless, or (ii) they assume that this is not the woman they're looking for, because they think it's a random encounter (perhaps (iia) the GM even "faked" a die roll just before the encounter to help give this impression), or (iii) they assume the GM will tell them if someone is green-eyed, given they know that the GM knows that that is important to them, or (iv) some other reason;
*The GM subsequently conveys, in the course of play, that the woman is green-eyed - eg perhaps has a NPC remark on it, or perhaps the woman is killed and he then mentions to the players that their PCs notice her green eyes staring lifeless and glassy.
Normally, the GM has a high degree of ownership over, and credibility in respect of, a NPC. But the scenario I just outlined seems to me to be exactly the sort of thing that might cause a group bust-up, or at least irritation and frustration, as the players might rightly feel that the GM has exercised their ownership in an unfair or even misleading way. They might think it is obvious that, if the woman was green-eyed, then their fictional position would include their PCs knowing that the woman is green-eyed; whereas the GM has deliberately allowed things to develop as if the players' fictional position included their PCs' ignorance of her green-eyed-ness (or indeed of her eye colour altogether).
The history of RPGing is rife with stuff of the sort I've just described. I've experienced it as a player. I've probably given rise to some of it as a GM, when I was inexperienced and overly influenced by advice about not giving the players a free lunch. I've read about this sort of thing in many others' posts over the years.
An analysis that retreats into abstract assertions about "prior agreements" and in-principle distributions of authority and responsibility won't change actual facts about what is involved in establishing a shared fiction, which include expectations about who is under a duty to say and do what, which in turn are related to all sorts of expectations about fictional position and what is permissible, including (for instance) when it is reasonable for the players to push back on the GM in relation to the GM's NPCs. (A paradigm of this, which tends to produce bad play, is the quest-giver who betrays the PCs. These scenarios tend to trade on a strong expectation that the players' fictional position
not include doubts about the bona fides of the quest-giver, the taking up of the quest being necessary for the game to happen at all; the betrayal then trades on this - eg the PCs attend the quest-giver's house without their full accoutrement of arms and armour.)
Baker's analysis does not build in, at the ground floor, an assumption that RPGing will be successful. Rather, it builds in, at the ground floor, an understanding of what is
necessary for RPGing to be successful - namely, agreement as to the shared fiction and hence the players' fictional position - and then begins the task of understanding how this success might be realised, via ownership and authority and consensus, and mechanics and whatever other methods form part of the repertoire of RPG play and hence fall within the scope of RPG design.
