Judgement calls vs "railroading"

[Manbearcat]

In regards to #1 - the odds might be low. But don't Story Now games sort of have a higher incidence of coincidences like this, since you're attempting to tie everything back to the characters and their motivations?

I can think of a lot of possibilities for the hat being there. But again, isn't that also discouraged in Story Now games? That is, thinking of possibilities ahead of time?

Based on what you've described with the Relationship role, the brother has to come into play at some point, right? I think the hat is a very cool way to go about it.

So my question is this - the hat was there. Now what? Can you start to define the brother's place in the story even though he's still offscreen? Or do you have to wait until the right circumstance?

There are all sorts of reasons you can come up with as to why the hat was there, but not his brother. If the brother doesn't show up now, you've just planted a seed that the brother is present in some manner. It could be any number of sessions before the brother actually shows up, right?

If it were me, I would not have the brother show up yet. Right now it's just the hat.

I'm also curious as to when you decided the brother's hat was on the table.

1) See my post above to [MENTION=16814]Ovinomancer[/MENTION]. I wasn't asserting my own opinion. I was soliciting yours. I may not have framed things in a way to get that across.

When you say "Story Now games sort of have a higher incidence of coincidences like this," that is exactly correct. Table time for the players and on-screen time for the fiction should be spent "on the action". Baker's axiom for this in Dogs is "at every moment, drive play toward conflict."

But I was asking you personally about it because I've seen a lot of concern for "realism fidelity" and "table time/on-screen time exclusively spent on 'the action' " aversion throughout this thread (not necessarily all from you).

2) See my post directly above to Ovinomancer on GMing this scenario. To help, I'm going to give you some Dog's specific GMing direction straight from Vincent Baker:

a) "Follow the players' lead about what's important and what's not."

b) When you create The Towns, "something's wrong (Pride, Sin, False Doctrine, False Priesthood, Hate & Murder), of course...that's what makes the game interesting."

c) Setup; "you need some NPCS with claims to the PCs time, some NPCs who can't ignore the PCs' arrival, some NPCs who've done harm, but for reasons anybody could understand."

d) Don't have plot points in mind beforehand..."don't play the story". Just play The Town. Present the PC's with choices; "provoke the players to have their characters take action then...react (with your NPCs/The Town)!" Always do this to keep play driven toward conflict, over and over, escalating as necessary, until all conflict in The Town is resolved. (DitV 137-139)

e) Reflect between Towns with the players. Use what they've gained, lost, and given you to "push them a little bit further in the next Town."

 

[Manbearcat]

Still doesn't make sense as written. Let me substitute a simpler frame for illustration:

I did a thing. Which do you think:

1) should I have done a different thing? or;
2) what should the thing really be?

See? 1) is asking if you were correct to end up with your vignette at all. 2) is asking if, since you've already established the hat, what should it be? These choices aren't coherent with each other, and seem to get at entirely different questions. I could, for instance, answer both 1 and 2 -- you shouldn't have done it, but now that you have it should be the brothers. Or neither -- you should have done it, but it shouldn't be the brother's hat. They're not actually different choices, as presented.

That's fine. Whatever way gets the point across and conveys the question at the heart.

I was trying to evaluate his mental processing discretely with respect to both (1) and (2).

With (1) I was investigating the thread-wandering questions of:

- "Is realism fidelity prioritized?"
- "If so, why is "constant on-screen action for a PC" a problem to realism? I ask this because (a) just because "the action" is what we (the players) spend table time on doesn't mean there isn't plenty of mundane activity (dusting out your boots, having a piss, lighting a pipe and enjoying a sunset) happening in any given setting inhabitant's life. We are just aren't spending time on it. Further still, forget about genre fiction (which should be more what we're aiming toward), (b) there are plenty of folks in real life whose lives are constantly riddled with hardship, tragedy, conflict, and significant (moral etc) weight from moment to moment. Why can't our Dogs in a Wild West shot through with supernatural and mundane sin be just like those folks?

With (2) I was investigating his thoughts on the GM or player driven angle of this thread:

- "Who ultimately decides what is important and what is not (see the post directly above for what Dog's designer has to say about that)?"

Well, I meant 3 or more, but that's it, too, so yes, thanks.

You're welcome and no problem. I also changed "Raise" to "See" (you Raise with 1 or 2 dice while you See with as many as it takes with 3 or more being required triggering Fallout).

Ah, cool, wasn't clear on how you were using this, as I've read DitV, but never had the opportunity to play.

I highly, highly recommend it. Its a beautiful, fun, provoking game...especially so if you like the genre and the thematically relevant material (which I suspect most TTRPG players and D&D players specifically do). I don't want to go too deeply into its dice mechanics, Reward Cycles, etc (that will mostly distract from our discussion), but any issues you may find with them can easily be remedied by saavy gamers (which I believe you've got 2 decades + under your belt).

 

[pemerton]

By railroading I mean the GM shaping outcomes to fit a pre-conceived narrative. (This is broader than some people use it, I know. If the players get to choose for their PCs, but what they choose won't change the downstream storyline, I am counting that as a railroad.)

For railroading to occur, I think that there has to be at least three things present:
1) a predetermined plot/story outcome by the DM, or at least a consistent bias to the DMs plot/story/preferences
2) an action/adjudication by the DM that disregards the player's actions in the determination of the results. That is, the players actions and choices don't have a meaningful impact on the plot/story.
3) the players don't want, or have the expectation that the DM won't do, #1 and #2

<snip>

In my opinion, railroading is a negative thing. That is, it's something the players don't want. So if the players agree that part of the DM's job is to keep things moving in the "right" direction, it cannot be a railroad.

So, in the OP I mentioned your (1), implied (2), and took (3) for granted.

I would not have required a Perception check. If the player's argument is plausible, then I'd just go with the idea that there is a vessel of some sort. A Perception check isn't to determine if something is there

I take this to be a statement of your techniques, and that eg the last sentence is not claiming that I made a mistake.

 

[Manbearcat]

Not sure if I answered a couple of things explicitly so...

I can think of a lot of possibilities for the hat being there. But again, isn't that also discouraged in Story Now games? That is, thinking of possibilities ahead of time?

Prep and thinking about things ahead of time isn't what Story NOW games try to avoid. Its the thinking about things ahead of time of times in high-res setting, firmed-up backstory, metaplot-ish chunks. Backstory, setting, and tropes need to have a lack-of-fixedness and broad-brush type considerations when it comes to prep.

You might have a flash card with Betrayal, Infidelity, Border Dispute, Temptation written on it. Then you'll have your NPCs and roughish Town info like I wrote above.

Based on what you've described with the Relationship role, the brother has to come into play at some point, right? I think the hat is a very cool way to go about it.

Thank you. This is the kind of stuff you do as a Dogs GM. You might do the same thing by putting a potential social conflict (that may likely escalate) in a saloon where one of the dogs has a d6 Trait "I've licked my affair with whiskey".

So my question is this - the hat was there. Now what? Can you start to define the brother's place in the story even though he's still offscreen? Or do you have to wait until the right circumstance?

There are all sorts of reasons you can come up with as to why the hat was there, but not his brother. If the brother doesn't show up now, you've just planted a seed that the brother is present in some manner. It could be any number of sessions before the brother actually shows up, right?

If it were me, I would not have the brother show up yet. Right now it's just the hat.

Well, with respect to the specific scenario that played out, this gets into system-specific stuff including the table deciding what is at stake in the social conflict to come with the rancher-subsidized, owner/operator of the brothel. Not sure if you want to go that deep into Dogs.

Generally speaking, the brother's place in the unfolding conflict doesn't need to be cemented until either (a) the rules say it does (the codified results of some play procedure) or (b) the fiction says it does (he shows up and its inescapable what is at hand...he's having sex with the prost...he's dead in a shallow grave...he admits lost the hat in a gambling hall).

I'm also curious as to when you decided the brother's hat was on the table.

When the player signaled the nature of his brother's relationship (the fiction of it and he wanted it to be a complication), I knew my job was to provoke the PC with the betrayal of that heroic status (through sin), dire peril (his brother getting caught up in something), death/loss (and therefore tempt the Dog to escalate things toward murder), or something thereabouts.

I sneakily used an NPC confession in that same session to tease out whether this particular Dog would feel worse if someone precious died vs if someone precious fell from grace (I used a testimonial and the player of the PC commented on it with his own testimonial). That made me think of the hat (because the border dispute and the brothel were already in play). Things went from there.

 

[pemerton]

it isn't "illusionism" if the players have already agreed as a group that the tomb is central to their PC's needs/agenda. If they've already made that decision, then I ABSOLUTELY want to ensure that they make it to the tomb, at least so long as that objective remains part of what the PCs are pursuing.

<snip>

in the sense of "scene framing," the real goal is to present relevant obstacles to the players/PCs that they will enjoy overcoming. I've discovered I have to be willing to re-frame scenes as the PCs' intent/objectives change. In some ways it's better to simply identify what the PCs' objectives are, and then identify a list of obstacles that could potentially be framed into scenes that will appropriately challenge those objectives/needs.

<snip>

Once I've established the obstacles in general terms, I can then start framing in the actual relevant bits (locations, NPCs, potential encounters) based on the PCs' existing experiences and their declared action declarations, while maintaining appropriate consistency with prior events / established fiction. And as the PCs' needs/objectives evolve, you have to be willing to metaphorically "reshuffle the deck" and change the nature of the obstacle to the PCs' goals.

Right.

This is what I've been posting: there's no illusion in framing the PCs into scenes their players want them to be framed into. And there's no illusion in the GM engaging in prep/brainstorming which inform that framing.

The difference between, on the one hand, prep/brainstorming, and on the other hand, authoring elements of the fiction which are secret from the players and will be used to adjudicate outcomes, is pretty crucial to this.

in many cases the GM may feel that they're not trying to "push an agenda," but are rather simply trying to "stop the players from becoming too powerful / getting their way"---without realizing that this is, in fact, still an agenda. My current GM seems to suffer from this. It's like he's afraid that if he lets us succeed "too much" in our PCs' intent, it will somehow lessen the experience.

Personally, I find this a really toxic approach to GMing. It feels like the worst of the Gygaxian legacy with none of the good bits of that legacy!

In D&D play I think it is in part an artefact of (i) mechanical weaknesses conjoined with (ii) certain design features - because (i) the game breaks down when the PCs gain a certain degree of mechanical prowess, and (ii) various NPC/monster opponents are "locked in" to certain HD/levels of challenge, the GM feels it is important to contain things within those parameters.

For me, this is one of the striking elements of 4e - it mostly avoids (i), being mechanically playable across the full spectrum of levels, and it is very flexible vis-a-vis (ii) because of the way its NPC/monste-building rules allow levelling up or down very easily with a degree of autonomy from the details of the fiction.

But stepping back a bit from the details of D&D and thinking about the point more generally, my own view is that if the PCs succeed at this, that's no reason why I as GM can't go on to challenge them (and thereby their players) by way of that.

And at least in my experience, there is no "cheapening of the experience" by the players getting to have experiences of their PCs doing well engaging things they care about.

 

[pemerton]

Isn't the classic case of Illusionism the GM providing two choices that lead to the same event or encounter?

I made a long post about the absence of pretence in "story now" play, and that the main pitfall is that the GM's framing and narration misfire - ie the GM fails to identify engaging challenges/choices for the players.

I don't really understand how the post above, that you made in response to my long post, is relevant to anything that I said!

For a start, you seem to be assuming that the game is not a story now one! Because in a "story now" game, the GM doesn't just "provide two choices". You come to a fork in the road - which way do you go? is not (to borrow Eero Tuovinen's phrasing) an example of a GM "fram[ing] scenes according to dramatic needs" or "framing . . . an interesting situation in relation to the premise of the setting or the character . . . that provokes choices on the part of the character."

Rather, it is exactly an example of the sort of "exploration of situation" gaming that you quoted Ron Edwards upthread contrasting with "story now" RPGing.

So if I sit down to play (say) BW, and the GM says "You come to a fork in the road - which way to you go?" and there is nothing else at stake, no indication of how this choice might relate to something that matters to my PC (and therefore me as a player) then issues of illusionism are not even on the table. Rather, there is the more basic problem that I flagged in the post to which you replied that this GM doesn't seem to know how to frame engaging scenes.

Are you saying that there is no point where the DM could provide two choices while having a result in mind and that's the only result presented? How would you know whether the GM actually had two results in mind? If the result is speaking to the character's motivations I don't think there would be any way you could tell that he didn't actually have a second result available.

Again, none of this really makes any sense from the point of view of "story now" RPGing!

If the GM thinks an encounter would be interesting and engaging, then why is s/he not just framing my PC into it? Why is s/he "hiding" it behind "which fork do you take"? It's not illusionism, it's just bad GMing in the "story now" context.

So if I build a city, and provide two roads, one to the west and one to the east, and place the city on whichever road the players take - is it not Illusionism if the players desired intent is not subverted? If they have no idea what might lie either way, and don't have any particular goal in mind when taking the road they select, is it still Illusionism?

What approach to RPGing are you envisaging?

If it's a Gygaxian or Cook/Marsh-style hexcrawl, then either you've written up the map in advance, or are generating it randomly as the PCs move across it. So there is not just "placing a city".

If you are playing a "story now" game, then why do we care whether the PCs are travelling east or west. If nothing is at stake, why are we wasting time on that? If the interesting thing is going to occur when the PCs arrive at the city, then just narrate - "As you travel along the road, you see a city on the horizon".

If you are using the second technique but pretending to the players you are using the first technique, well that looks like it might be illusionism - but is any here doing that?

As for the rest of it, we're not going to agree, so I'll stop trying to make my point.

Obviously it's your prerogative to disagree with whomever you want to - but which bits are you disagreeeing with?

Do you think I'm wrong in saying that the main threat to good "story now" RPGing is not illusionism - for which there's no scope, because you can't hide whether or not something engages the PCs' dramatic needs - but rather a failure to frame engaging scenes?

 

[Manbearcat]

Do you think I'm wrong in saying that the main threat to good "story now" RPGing is not illusionism - for which there's no scope, because you can't hide whether or not something engages the PCs' dramatic needs - but rather a failure to frame engaging scenes?

This needs +1 and reiteration.

Illusionism isn't a threat to Story NOW games failing. A Story NOW game might fail because one of a few things:

1) The PC build mechanics, dice mechanics, and Reward Cycles aren't tightly and coherently integrated enough to provoke the precise feel/emotional provocation that they're intended to.

2) The experience is too mentally demanding on players who are really just looking for casual content consumption.

3) The GM struggles to consistently frame engaging scenes with interesting decision-points that are premise-relevant.

4) The GM struggles to consistently frame scenes that intimately engage with the pressure points/thematic heft of the PCs which was signaled by the players.

From the GM side, 3 and 4 is the biggest adversary to overcome.

 

[pemerton]

Illusionism is the illusion of a choice.

Now that I go look at the Forge definition:

"Illusionism
A family of Techniques in which a GM, usually in the interests of story creation, story creation, exerts Force over player-character decisions, in which he or she has authority over resolution-outcomes, and in which the players do not necessarily recognize these features. See Illusionism: a new look and a new approach and Illusionism and GNS. Term coined by Paul Elliott."

Notice that the Forge definition - which is the one that [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION] expressly has in mind - doesn't define Illusionism as the "illusion of choice". The illusion in illusionism is that the resulotion outcomes that appear to result from player-character decisions in fact result from the covert GM exertion of force.

The illusion is an illusion about the process of authorship, namely, how were the new elements of the shared fiction (ie the "resolution outcomes") established?

If the GM exercise authorial power overtly then there is no illusion and hence no illusionism. Here are two examples of overt GM exercise of authorial power:

(1) The group is playing the Keep on the Borderlands. The GM reads some introductory text, and then tells the players "You have taken lodgins at the Keep, and following the directions given to you by the good worthies of that place you now stand at the entrance to the valley. Before you stretches the wooded valley floor, while to either side of you rise the valley walls. Caves dot the hillsides like grim eyes looking down at you. What do you do?"

(2) From the OP game. The players have both just failed in a contest Speed check against the assassin. I, as GM, tell them "As you race to the room where Joachim is resting unconscious, you see that Halika has beaten you there. She calmly raises the ritual sword inlaid with the evil eye that she took from the orc captain in the Bright Desert, and then brings it down in a swift strike <rolls some dice - note that all dice rolls are seen by all participants - for the NPC to see if her decapitation succeeds: it does> and Joachim's head is lopped off, falling to the floor."

One of the players adds "And rolls across the floor to lie next to the body of the unconscious elf" (another PC, the tower mage's bodyguard, who had been blasted unconscious by the wizard-assassin Halika).​

The first is pretty classic - the GM presents the starting situation of the module to the players. No illusionism.

The second is pretty standard for "story now" or "standard narrativistic model" RPGing - the players failed a check, and the consequence ensues, in this case being that the NPC has a chance to decapitate the unconscious mage, which she does. No illusionism.

A classic example of illusionism is quite common in "event-style" modules: the module presents a chance for the PCs to acquire a clue. If the PCs don't acquire the clue, then the module has some fall-back advice for the GM whereby a friendly NPC provides the clue instead.

This is illusionism because it appears that the resolution outcome - ie do the players get the information or not - turns upon a player decision (eg whether or not to search a room, or interrogate a prisoner) but in fact it does not. Another example would be where a GM uses some sort of deus-ex-machina device to save an NPC who is losing in combat: this is illusionism because it appears that the resolution outcome (the NPC's life or death) depends up on the player decisions (eg in declaring attack actions) but in fact it doesn't.

In illusionistic play the players' decisions about such matters as whether to search, or whether to atack, provide colour (eg the PCs acquired the clue through their own efforts rather than needing to be told) but don't determine outcomes.

"what techniques?" If it's a family of techniques, what are they?

Here are some: ignoring or fudging dice rolls; manipulating the fiction "behind the screen" to eg introduce deus-ex-machina story elements (the example above, of the NPC who supplies the "missed" clue, is an instance of this); exerting various sorts of social pressure to ensure that the players don't declare "problematic" or "disruptive" actions. [MENTION=16586]Campbell[/MENTION] has especially emphasised the last of those in this thread. An example - which, judging both from GMing advice I've read and ENworld threads I've participated in, is fairly common - is the following: the players and their PCs know that a certain NPC (say, the vizier) is a villain, and want to declare an attack action against said NPC, but the GM - by way of social pressure and soft authority - "blocks" that action declaration (eg "You can't do that in front of the emperor!") - thereby making the outcome of the situation a result of GM force rather than players' decisions for their PCs.

The classic example is along these lines: The DM has prepared an encounter. We'll say it's an ogre.
The characters have a choice - could be a fork in the road, but we'll say the forest or the swamp.
Regardless of the choice made, the players encounter the ogre.

Scenario #1
1) The players are given a choice.
2) The results aren't fixed until the choice is made. The DM doesn't place the prepared encounter until after the choice is made.

What about a random result? It's the same fundamental thing:
Scenario #2
1) The players are given a choice.
2) The results aren't fixed until the choice is made. The DM determines the results randomly after the choice is made.

What about when the result isn't prepared ahead of time?
Scenario #3
1) The players are given a choice.
2) The results aren't fixed until the choice is made. The DM determines the results on the fly after the choice is made.

Until we know what the players think will be the consequence of this choice, we can't know whether or not any illusionism is involved, becaus illusionism is about the covert exertion of influence over the content of the shared fiction.

This also goes to the claims by [MENTION=6785785]hawkeyefan[/MENTION], [MENTION=48965]Imaro[/MENTION] and [MENTION=16814]Ovinomancer[/MENTION] that "story now" RPGing can involve illusionism. In "story now" RPGing, either (i) the players already know what is at stake in the choice, in which case if the GM then overrides that the use of force is overt, not illusionistic; or (ii) the players don't know what is at stake in the choice, in which case the GM is failing to do his/her job properly (ie to frame scenes that engage player-authored dramatic needs and thereby provoke PC choices) and that failure is overt.

This is why the concept of "illusionism" is simply not apposite in relation to "story now"/"narravitistic" RPGing.

The only way to avoid Illusionism is to ensure that any choices provided have at least two actual results. Which means the results need to be pre-determined

Huh? This is just false. Here's one (of myriad) counterexamples:

In my 4e game, at a certain point the PCs were travelling through the Underdark on their quest to find Torog's Soul Abattoir. This was being resolved as skill challenge. A check (either Nature, Dungeoneering or Perception - I don't recall anymore) was made and failed, and hence the skill challenge failed - which is to say that the PCs' desire to successfully navigate the Underdark was thwarted. I narrated the PC fighter falling through a thin sheet of stone in the floor into an uderground river that carried him away.​

There was no pre-determining of results. The final check occurred in the context of exploring an abandoned duergar fungus farm - and the existence of that farm, the existence of the thin bit of stone, the fact that the thin bit of stone was over a river that might carry a PC away - was all authored in the course of the session, as elements of framing and resolution.

This also highlights why your "fork in the road" example doesn't have any real bearing upon "story now" play: as you present it, there is nothing of dramatic significance at stake in the choice, and so the player decision to go left or to go right, or to go to the forest or to go to the swamp, is mere colour. It's not the resolution of a scene. It's the players' participation in framing a scene. Once it is established whether the PCs are in a forest or in a swamp, and the GM tells them that they are confronted by an ogre, well then we have a scene that might speak to dramatic need and provke a choice. (At which point the colour might become more than mere colour, because the fictional positioning is different in a forest - "We climb into trees where the ogre can't reach us!" - compared to a swamp - "We lead the ogre into muddy ground where its great weight means it gets bogged".)

EDIT: I saw this, which says the same thing I'm saying:

A Story NOW game might fail because one of a few things:

1) The PC build mechanics, dice mechanics, and Reward Cycles aren't tightly and coherently integrated enough to provoke the precise feel/emotional provocation that they're intended to.

2) The experience is too mentally demanding on players who are really just looking for casual content consumption.

3) The GM struggles to consistently frame engaging scenes with interesting decision-points that are premise-relevant.

4) The GM struggles to consistently frame scenes that intimately engage with the pressure points/thematic heft of the PCs which was signaled by the players.

From the GM side, 3 and 4 is the biggest adversary to overcome.

 

[pemerton]

I've been arguing against the BW model all the way along for a couple of reasons: first, that there's a severe risk of inconsistency arising within the fiction

And I continue to retort that this is mere assertion, with no evidence base to support it.

 

[pemerton]

The player doesn't know that the villain is their father. That is part of their backstory. Since it is not known to the player until it is revealed, it is a secret part of his backstory.

No. It's not part of any backstory until the moment of revelation.

As I posted upthread in reply to [MENTION=61721]Hawke[/MENTION]yfan,

IMy point is that, qua element of the shared fiction it is neither permanent nor impermanent, becuase it is not part of the shared fiction at all.

<snip>

The distinction isn't meant to be facetious. And it relates to [MENTION=16586]Campbell[/MENTION]'s point, made somewhere upthread, that in some approaches to RPGing the GM's status is closer to that of just another player.

Players have ideas for stuff they would like to have in the fiction, from the short term - "I want to cut this orc's head off!" - to the long term - "My guy would like to build a fortress on the plains outside Greyhawk and attract some followers as a result." But those ideas don't, automatically, become part of the shared fiction. They are regulated by rules, mechanics and associated techniques.

For instance, the stuff about castles and followers might be regulated in part by rules about class build (eg AD&D fighters, the Leadership feat in 3E) and in part by rules about gold pieces as a player resource (an AD&D fighter doesn't get a castle for free). Possibly also action resolution rules (maybe the PC needs to recruit an engineer-architect to supervise the building of the castle, which is a type of social encounter).

The stuff about chopping off an orc's head is, in most RPGs, regulated by action resolution rules - in many RPGs by a distinct set of combat mechanics.

So, going back to GMing techniques - a GM who has sketched out a map as a mixture of brainstorming, ideas, and preparation for framing hasn't established anything in the shared fiction either. It has the same status as the player's plans for orc heads and castles. When the right opportunity comes along, the GM - like the player - has a power to make this stuff part of the shared fiction, but - like the player - this is regulated in various ways but - unlike the player - the regulations are different: they are regulations that constrain framing, narration of consequences of player action declarations for their PCs, etc.

A GM making a note - "If the appropriate situation arises, X claims to by Y's rather" - is not establishing any backstory, secret or otherwise. It's just brainstorming.

You are also disregarding what Eero Tuovinen says about the GM narrating the revelation:

The correct heuristic is to throw out the claim of fatherhood if it seems like a challenging revelation for the character​

In other words, all that the GM's narration establishes is that this NPC claims to be the PC's father. Nothing is established, in virtue of that, about who the PC's father is.

Eero specifically points out backstory elements that the player themselves does not know and are not authored by them.

The only thing that is established as true in the fiction is that the claim has been made. Which the player knows.

I've given examples, in this very thread, of events similar to what Eero Tuovinen describes:

The discovery that the mage PC's brother enchanted cursed black arrows before being possessed by a balrog, which suggests that his evil caused his possession rather than that his possession caused his evil. This was a "challenging revelation" narrated as a consequence of failure.

The revelation that the two brothers don't have the same father - that the possessed brother is the son of Bernard the Holy. This was a slightly less "challenging revelation" narrated as part of framing. The fact that it is less challenging was relevant to my decision to narrate it as part of framing rather than as a consequence of failure.​

This sort of GMing is completely different from (say) a standard mystery adventure module, where the answers are all written in the module, and the GM will adjudicate action declarations by reference to those answers.

If one thinks of the father example, for instance, one can imagine the player setting out to establish it as true that the claim is false. That would not be possible in a "secret backstory"-driven game; but is eminently feasible in a "story now" game.

Another example that I posted upthread - also in reply to [MENTION=61721]Hawke[/MENTION]yfan - exmplifies the same features:

My main 4e game is at 30th level. Which is to say, in mechanical terms the PCs have reached their peak, and in story terms that are at the culmination of their Epic Destinies.

The main focus of the game has turned out to be this: Is the Dusk War upon us?

The PCs (and the players) know that the Dusk War is prophesied, and that there are certain signs of its coming.

One of these is that the Tarrasque will ravage the world. And when the Tarrasque entered the world and they confronted it, they found it being warded by Maruts, who were there to meet an obligation to the Raven Queen to ensure that no one interfered with the Tarrasque's end-of-days ravagings.

The PCs' response (which was chosen by the players) was that the Maruts had got their timing wrong - this was not the end-of-days ravaging of the Tarrasque, and hence not the one that the Maruts had to protect againsgt interferrence! And the PCs proved this to the Maruts by way of the ease with which one of their number was able to dispatch the Tarrasque near-singlehandedly: the tarrasque, at least on this occasion, could not be the harbinger of the end times whom the Maruts were contracted to protect, because it clearly lacked the capacity to ravage the world.

This resembles the absence of a map in this way: there is no pre-established timeline. But it differs from the map example in this way: the temporal location of events is not mere colour (unlike whether the interesting place is down the left or the right tunnel), and so is not going to be settled just through framing narration: whether or not the period in which the game is taking place is the time of the Dusk War, or not, is going to be determined via play, that is, via the consequences that follow from action resolution.

The claim that the Dusk War is upon upon us! is the challenging revelation. The PCs deny it. Play will show whether or not they are right. This game literally could not be played if I as GM had already decided whether or not the Dusk War has come. That would turn the game from a struggle over the fate of the world into a mystery or puzzle-solving game - an instance of what you quote Ron Edwards describing as "exploration of situation".

I don't want to play a game in which the players explore the situation. I want to play a game in which they drive the situation. This is utterly at odds with the truth and the outcome of the situation already being established in the form of "secret backstory".



EDIT: This also seemed relevant:

1) I shouldn't have made the hat his brother's. I mean...what are the odds? That isn't very realistic. A better choice would have been to have just made it a dusty hat smelling of sweat, booze (sin), and gunpowder (possibly sin). That is still very relevant to the general premise of the game (vulnerable, gun-toting Paladins risking everything to mete out justice and protect The Faith in a Wild West that never was) if not the specific thematic material signaled in (a).

2) Yes, go with the brother's hat, but even if the fiction hasn't established the nature of the hat's place there, if I thought it would be interesting to find out what happens if the brother does indeed reveal a serious moral downfall and sin against The Faith here, I should keep it that way and ignore (c).

I take it that, implicitly, there is a third option: leave (c) on the table and play to find out?

EDIT THE SECOND: I've read on, so I think the answer is - yes, there is a third option, but [MENTION=6778044]Ilbranteloth[/MENTION] seems not be to be very keen on it.

Needless to say, as per my post just above this, I think that the presence of that third option is crucial to GMing this sort of game, and that is why "secret backstory" is, on the whole, inimical - because it answers the question before it is even asked in play!