more 'classical' DMs might well take hints from their players and the sorts of equipment, backstory, previous activities, etc. in order to draw in elements that speak to those player's desires (and thus dramatic needs of their PCs which those desires may express). Of course this technique is not really defined or often well-understood in classic D&D play. I mean, I didn't understand it in any formal sense until 10 years ago, even after GMing all sorts of games for many years, and often using those techniques.
I think its hard to judge what people are doing in such situations. Imprecise language is used, and analysis is lacking. You are probably correct, along with Chauchou, in trying to get everyone to clarify and get on a page about terminology and meta-theory, but it obviously won't happen. Still, I think most really successful GMs have had to learn to bend somehow and address the things that, at least their more demanding players, want.
I agree that it can be hard to judge what's going on.
Sometimes I'm reminded of
these comments from Ron Edwards:
[Heck]! I'm playing Narrativist
In Simulationist play, morality cannot be imposed by the player or, except as the representative of the imagined world, by the GM. Theme is already part of the cosmos; it's not produced by metagame decisions. Morality, when it's involved, is "how it is" in the game-world, and even its shifts occur along defined, engine-driven parameters. The GM and players buy into this framework in order to play at all. . . .
[W]hen you-as-player get proactive about an emotional thematic issue, poof, you're out of Sim. Whereas enjoying the in-game system activity of a thematic issue is perfectly do-able in Sim, without that proactivity being necessary. . . .
Many people mistake . . . techniques like Director stance, shared narration, etc, for Narrativism, although they are not defining elements for any GNS mode. Misunderstanding this key issue has led to many people falsely identifying themselves as playing Simulationist with a strong Character emphasis, when they were instead playing quite straightforward Narrativist without funky techniques.
and
Jesse: I'm just still a little confused between Narrativism and Simulationism where the Situation has a lot of ethical/moral problems embedded in it and the GM uses no Force techniques to produce a specific outcome. I don't understand how Premise-expressing elements can be included and players not be considered addressing a Premise when they can't resolve the Situation without doing so.
Me: There is no such Simulationism. You're confused between Narrativism and Narrativism, looking for a difference when there isn't any.
Like you, I was running player-driven games before I had an analytic vocabulary to describe what was going on. The lack of vocabulary didn't stop me doing it, although I think it sometimes meant I was confused about what techniques were having what effect in my games. To give a couple of concrete examples:
(1) I read a lot of GM advice books - RM ones, but others too (eg WSG) - which emphasised the importance of strong world-design (maps, pantheons, etc) as important to a good RPG experience. To the extent that I did some of this stuff, it didn't actually seem to pay off. When I ignored this stuff, and just focused on play, nothing bad happened and often good things happened. The basic geography tended to be public knowledge (eg I would lay out my maps of GH and not keep them secret), and the "secret" geography tended to be introduced as part of framing particular situations (an example I can think of is when I decided that the PCs, flying on a demon skiff through the Crystalmist Mountains, came across the Brass Stair from the RM Shadow World module "Sky Giants of the Brass Stair"). Having the tools to think more systematically about the function of backstory, framing etc in the game has helped me get better at this.
(2) RM has a lot of mechanics - <pause for laughter> - that make it almost impossible to draw an end to a scene: spell durations, spell point recovery, injury recovery, even quite a bit of magical healing that requires tracking the time spent concentrating on restoring (say) 1 concussion hit per round, etc, etc. Without an analytic vocabulary for thinking about scenes, framing, etc, while it was obvious to me that some of this stuff was a bit clunky, it wasn't obvious exactly where it was causing problems. (A little-remarked upon feature of 5e is that it has got rid of all those X minutes per level durations, and breaks them down into "1 fight", "1 exploration scene" and "until next rest" durations, just without telling anyone!)
So anyway, if we were doing it probably others were and are. On the other hand, it can be very hard to tell. Multiple posters in the past few days of this thread have said that the source of framing material is irrelevant - are they GMing in accordance with their professed principles, or are they misdescribing their own approach to play?
It also seems clear that a lot of non-combat stuff is being resolved through free roleplaying. But in the absence of any actual play examples, and concrete accounts of how GM pre-authored understandings of the situation factored in (like eg who is amenable to being bribed, and who isn't), it's almost impossible to tell what's going on. Which is where the issue of vocabulary comes in again: a recount of the fiction doesn't take us anywhere in terms of understanding how the game actually happened. But there are very few accounts in this thread of actual episodes of play that illustrate how a GM working from notes, together with the players expressing their agency, actually generated some episode of play by way of free roleplaying.
