they over think it to avoid the basic questions I've asked. All of this ridiculous navel gazing is all to avoid the questions I have asked. It's pathetic really.
Seriously? I gave XP to your OP and replied to it.
I believe that most games in the 70's and 80's were entirely actor stance.
Nonsense. Most classic D&D play is in either author or pawn stance - the player makes a decision for the PC because it will help beat the dungeon, and then there may be retroactive attribution of the relevant desire or motivation to the PC.
Actually read, or reread, pp 107-109 of Gygax's PHB. All the advice there, which is aimed at AD&D players c 1978, is about making choices that will help survive and beat the dungeon. There is absolutely nothing there about attributing a personality to the PC and then extrapolating actions and decisions from that personality (which is what actor stance involves).
Likwise with his comments about alignment, on p 35 of the PHB:
It is probable that your campaign referee will keep a graph of the drift of your character on the alignment chart. This is affected by the actions (and desires) of your character during the course of each adventure, and will be reflected on the graph. You may find that these actions are such as to cause the declared alignment to be shifted towards, or actually to, some other.
In other words, the reason a player is given for caring about PC alignment is not because that is what is involved in being true to the PC, but because breaking alignment can bring consequences from the referee who tracks it on the graph! That is pure author stance.
If I am driving into a large city, and I start looking for a McDonalds because my knowledge of civilization is that there are McDonald's everywhere, I am absolutely in character stance. Most cities have taverns and inns in the worlds I create. Yours may vary.
I don't know what "character stance" means.
But
director stance means a player establishing an element of the gameworld that is outside the influence of his/her PC. A player who says (in character) "I pick up a rock" without asking the GM "Is there a rock?" is declaring an action in director stance. That's the whole point: there is no correlation between stance and mechanics. If there was - eg if "director stance" just meant "metagame mechanics" than the terminology would be redundant and wouldn't have been invented.
My players do tend to say "Is there a tavern?" If though they said "We are going to go to the tavern" there would be an implied "if one exists". If one doesn't I will quickly tell them that they can't find one. I would never allow the to invent it with their words which would be director stance.
I already discussed this upthread.
If the GM vetoes, then the GM vetoes. But if the GM lets it pass, then the player declared an action in director stance.
Now maybe, in your game, that never happens in relation to taverns because you have every tavern in the gameworld specified ahead of time. But I would find that hard to believe for rocks.
Or if the PCs are on a wilderness expedition and a player declares "We catch a rabbit for our dinner." If the GM replies "OK, what's your hunting skill? 16, you say? OK, no worries, you catch a rabbit" - well, again, that player declared an action in director stance which brought it about that the fiction includes a rabbit being caught by the player.
I understand, in principle, your desire to avoid metagame mechanics, although I find your actual categorisation pretty weird (to me, as a long time RM player, hit points are a thousand times more metagame than second wind or action surge, which remind me quite a bit of RM adrenal moves). But your stuff about stance just implies that you don't actually get what Ron Edwards and others who coined the terminology of stance were talking about. It's not helping you explain your preference.
