I'm not sure "GM decides" covers the same ground though as "Mother May I".
The GM decides a lot of things in general, and so it makes the terminology a bit vague.
As I've been using the term
GM decides in this thread - which I think is pretty close to what [MENTION=463]S'mon[/MENTION] has in mind - I've been meaning
the GM decides what changes occur in the fiction as a result of a player declaring an action for his/her PC. I'm pretty sure that that is what the OP in the progenitor thread of this thread had in mind in using the phrase "Mother may I" - the connection between that latter phrase, and the
GM decides method of action resolution, being that if a player wants to produce change X to the shared fiction, s/he has to guess what action declaration might lead the GM to decide to change the fiction in way X.
The contrast, then, is with action resolution methods which allow a player to change the fiction in way X
without that having to be mediated through GM decision-making about outcomes and consequences - D&D combat is mostly an illustration of such a method, provided X is
make it true in the fiction that such-and-such a charcter/creature is dead, and the RPGs that I play tend to use similar action resolution methods for a range of non-combat matters also.
I agree that if you take the phrase "GM decides" out of the context of this particular focus on the changes in the fiction that result from action declarations, it is rather broad. But in this thread I believe (or at least hope!) that the context and focus have remained pretty clear even over 1000+ posts.
It's not a matter of crossing the street, simple legit actions declarations etc, it's a matter of having the Gm willing to cooperate and build on players input.
Framing scenes and all that stuff.
Just leaving the PC loose hanging around without support in the fiction, is not freedom, looks more like loneliness.
I think this is a really important point
in the context of this thread and its progenitor thread.
I think there's probably almost no RPG play where the players can achieve literally
no changes in the fiction without being blocked by the GM.
I walk behind the tree.
I go to that nearby pub. I take off my hat.
I pick a blade of grass and put it between my teet.
But implicit in the idea of
action resolution changing the fiction in way X is that
way X is something that has some degree of consequence or meaning or heft for gameplay; that X provides some sort of platform or impetus for further gameplay; and the like. That X actually
matters to play.
That's why, in this post and in my post not too far upthread replying to S'mon, I talked about
outcomes and consequences. When a player says
I walk behind the tree s/he is envisaging not just the immediate outcome, within the fiction, of his/her PC having moved a few metres so as now to be behind the tree. S/he has some reason for declaring this action, is anticipating some sort of gameplay-significant consequence to follow from that.
If the GM accepts, and regards him-/herself as
obliged to accept, the action declaration - so it's now true in the fiction that the PC is behind the tree - but the GM doesn't accept any further consequence - the PC is just left "hanging around" with nothing further happening in the fiction that responds to or builds upon the player's action declaration - then we still have an instance of what I am calling the
GM decides approach to resolution.
Only if the GM is obliged to accept not just the immediate. literal content of a player's action declaration, but is also obliged to accept in some fashion, or to have regard to, the player's intention as to how the fiction is going to change in some meaningful way, are we starting to move into non-
GM decides territory. There are different ways such an obligation can work and be systematically implemented in a game - "say 'yes' or roll the dice" coupled with "fail forward", which amounts to
if you, the player, win the toss then the fiction changes how you wanted it to, but if you lose the toss then the fiction will change in some way which speaks to what you wanted but in an adverse sort of way is an obvious one, but not the only one. It can be done through mutually respectful back-and-forth about the fiction - this is how stuff can happen in a Marvel Heroic RP/Cortex+ Heroic Transition Scene, for instance - but the back-and-forth approach is (in my experience) only modestly robust under pressure, when the stakes get high and the player wants to push the fiction one way and the GM is interested in pushing it back the other way. That's why MHRP/Cortex+ Heroic uses a different approach, which is a version of "say 'yes' or roll the dice" with some bells and whistles added on, during Action (= high stakes) Scenes.
To further lengthen this post, I aso want to say something about free kriegsspiel, which [MENTION=463]S'mon[/MENTION] in particular has talked about in this thread; and it connects also to a discussion with [MENTION=6688277]Sadras[/MENTION] upthread.
In a RPG where the GM has already pre-established important, salient parts of the fiction - a dungeon map and its key is the paradigm of this; a wildereness map is another example - then some "action declarations" don't really constitute
attempts to change the fiction in way X. They're really more like
attempts to learn the content and parameters of the fiction as already decided by the GM. For this reason, the concept of
GM decides is (in my view) not really even applicable to them.
But - and this is to reiterate something I've already said in this thread, and have said more about in some other threads over the years - the boundary/contrast between
"action declaration" to learn content/parameters of the fiction and
action declaration to change the fiction in way X can fairly easily become rather non-robust, and is also highly vulnerable to a unilateral decision that what the player intended as the latter is really the former.
A concrete example: a player declares
I cast Dimension Door. The GM responds
Nothing happens (because the GM has made a determination that the area that the PC is in is teleport warded). It seems to me that most of the time, in this sort of case, the player has intended to change the fiction in way X (
now my PC is here rather than there) but the GM has, by his/her approach to adjudication, rendered what the player did into a discovery of the paremeters/content of the fiction. From the GM's point of view, s/he is facilitating the player's
exploration of the fiction. But from the point of view of the player, who was not setting out to
explore the fiction but rather was hoping to change it, this may well be experienced as a rather striking case of
GM decides.
Whether or not this sort of case, in which the player who was hoping to
change the fiction discovers that s/he is really
exploring it, is a
problem will obviously be something that varies from table to table. That it
might be a problem I think is obvious.
