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The Principle of Legitimate Intentions
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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 8997979" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>[USER=71699]@clearstream[/USER]: There are an excessive number of response I could make to that, but I'm going to for the sake of focus limit myself to just a few of the things I'm most interested in at the moment.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>Guidelines and principles whether stated or unstated would not fall for me under the heading of rules but would be part of the non-rule processes of play. Rules for me are almost synonymous with mechanics. Instructions on how you should think about things are attempts to govern or communicate the desired processes of play. They are not rules and in many cases they aren't even consciously thought about by the participants. They become glaringly noticeable mostly when you move from the culture of one table you are familiar with to a table with a completely different culture, or when you are familiar with one game and then move to a different one that asks of you a different mindset. People mistake the mindset for the rules, and I think that's a mistake in that it associates the outcome of the game with the "rules" when in fact different tables can play completely different games with the same rules. An trivial example is AD&D played at a "Monte Haul" table versus a table played with an antagonistic and stingy DM with "Killer Dungeons". The two groups might both enjoy the game, and be shocked to discover the game of the other table, be shocked to think that someone thinks that they are "doing it wrong", and typically think that the other table is "doing it wrong". Yet both could be theoretically following the rules exactly. </p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>In traditional play this is just the right to adjudicate the fortune - narrate the results in colorful language as you put it. It's who gets to state the new fictional positioning after we cranked the rules engine and got input about whether we had success or failure. Matt Mercer plays a traditional RPG with a FitM cycle publicly and as a traditional GM he's the secret keeper and holds all the narrative authority. But one thing you will see him consistently do is hand over narrative authority to a player who has just taken down a Boss and say, "What do you want to happen?" And that handing over the narrative authority while it seems like just the right to narrate in colorful language what we all just saw happen is still quite powerful and impacts the transcript of play.</p><p></p><p>But in the larger case, it's not as simple as (and rarely as simple as) just stating the obvious, because in the general case it is not at all obvious what will happen. To give just one concrete example, in a sandbox I was running the PC's had ended up in a guerrilla war with a race of intelligent flying foxes. In their wandering they encountered a small village of these killer squirrels in a highly eroded karst complex that was built atop a towering limestone spire. One of my players was an earth shaman, and decided that they would start turning the spire into mud with the intent of collapsing the spire and with it the whole village. Now the first order effects of turning stone to mud was well defined, but what was not well defined was how much stone would have to be removed before the spire would collapse. As GM I had the narrative authority to decide for myself when I thought the shaman had undermined the village enough to bring it down, as well as all the consequences of that collapse, and all the consequences of literally dozens of cubic yards of mud sloughing off the spire in the process of achieving that. The rules wouldn't help with that situation. Too much is going on that the rules are silent on and for which we have no well described mini-game to play. My "colorful language" narrating what is happening with the fictional positioning has enormous importance. And in my play this sort of thing happens multiple times a session. It may be obvious that the player succeeded, but what results from that is not obvious.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 8997979, member: 4937"] [USER=71699]@clearstream[/USER]: There are an excessive number of response I could make to that, but I'm going to for the sake of focus limit myself to just a few of the things I'm most interested in at the moment. Guidelines and principles whether stated or unstated would not fall for me under the heading of rules but would be part of the non-rule processes of play. Rules for me are almost synonymous with mechanics. Instructions on how you should think about things are attempts to govern or communicate the desired processes of play. They are not rules and in many cases they aren't even consciously thought about by the participants. They become glaringly noticeable mostly when you move from the culture of one table you are familiar with to a table with a completely different culture, or when you are familiar with one game and then move to a different one that asks of you a different mindset. People mistake the mindset for the rules, and I think that's a mistake in that it associates the outcome of the game with the "rules" when in fact different tables can play completely different games with the same rules. An trivial example is AD&D played at a "Monte Haul" table versus a table played with an antagonistic and stingy DM with "Killer Dungeons". The two groups might both enjoy the game, and be shocked to discover the game of the other table, be shocked to think that someone thinks that they are "doing it wrong", and typically think that the other table is "doing it wrong". Yet both could be theoretically following the rules exactly. In traditional play this is just the right to adjudicate the fortune - narrate the results in colorful language as you put it. It's who gets to state the new fictional positioning after we cranked the rules engine and got input about whether we had success or failure. Matt Mercer plays a traditional RPG with a FitM cycle publicly and as a traditional GM he's the secret keeper and holds all the narrative authority. But one thing you will see him consistently do is hand over narrative authority to a player who has just taken down a Boss and say, "What do you want to happen?" And that handing over the narrative authority while it seems like just the right to narrate in colorful language what we all just saw happen is still quite powerful and impacts the transcript of play. But in the larger case, it's not as simple as (and rarely as simple as) just stating the obvious, because in the general case it is not at all obvious what will happen. To give just one concrete example, in a sandbox I was running the PC's had ended up in a guerrilla war with a race of intelligent flying foxes. In their wandering they encountered a small village of these killer squirrels in a highly eroded karst complex that was built atop a towering limestone spire. One of my players was an earth shaman, and decided that they would start turning the spire into mud with the intent of collapsing the spire and with it the whole village. Now the first order effects of turning stone to mud was well defined, but what was not well defined was how much stone would have to be removed before the spire would collapse. As GM I had the narrative authority to decide for myself when I thought the shaman had undermined the village enough to bring it down, as well as all the consequences of that collapse, and all the consequences of literally dozens of cubic yards of mud sloughing off the spire in the process of achieving that. The rules wouldn't help with that situation. Too much is going on that the rules are silent on and for which we have no well described mini-game to play. My "colorful language" narrating what is happening with the fictional positioning has enormous importance. And in my play this sort of thing happens multiple times a session. It may be obvious that the player succeeded, but what results from that is not obvious. [/QUOTE]
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