I wanted to assay some takes on the utility of each lemma to the mode of play
Okay. I'm not quite sure what that means, seeing as how I see the three horns as being...pretty clearly problems to be avoided. But I'm willing to listen.
Inviting the GM to disclose setting is important to the experience of exploration. Players make these guesses in the direction of their interests, to unearth what is there. Often involving satisfying chains of inferences.
Relatedly, one way I have thought about knowledge skills is that their purpose can be to enable players to invite GM to contribute narrative along specific lines.
Okay, but that...doesn't seem to have taken this horn of the trilemma at all? Like this is just saying "Exposition, and player participation in its development, is important and one of the critical parts of sandbox play". I completely agree with that. That's not controversial in the slightest. But does it address the
risk (again, not the
guarantee, just the
risk) of a GM placing excessively high expectations on the players to provide the needed prompts/questions/etc. to trigger the reveal of critical information. I gave an example above of that problem, where I (in the absence of people
explicitly telling me otherwise) would 100% guaranteed never have considered to ask the one-eyed man at the tavern about stuff,
especially if the GM never says anything about the one-eyed man
unless I specifically ask a question about the patrons of the tavern and what they look like. Which was the point of that horn of the trilemma: if you say too little and/or demand too-specific a question/prompt in order to divulge information, the game descends into what is derisively called "pixelb!+
©#ing" and what might more charitably be called "inadequate prompting".
GM curation serves the same purpose here as curation may elsewhere: elevating the experience through intelligent, witty, fascinating, etcetera inclusions (and exclusions) that cohere. That is true of many modes of play beyond sandbox, of course.
Sure, but folks have been
highly insistent that they don't do that thing. That their job is
never to "elevate the experience", but only to furnish a coherent world in which the players may participate. Putting too much emphasis on specific things A and B and not enough on the seven million
other things that theoretically could permit interaction very easily becomes "the GM put her thumb on the scale" rather than "the GM merely provided inclusions and exclusions to improve the experience". Where the previous situation is a (potential) faltering by way of making it
too difficult to know what things are of great importance and what things are not, this is a (potential) faltering by way of making it
seem like only the "inclusions" matter, and everything else is simply set-dressing.
Skill in GMing includes knowing how much to add to the group's shared ongoing narrative at any given moment. In this way no different from any other TTRPG. It requires no more than modest sensitivity to player interests to avoid this risk.
Really? I find that...a bit hard to swallow. Going into excessive detail on too many things (especially if one is attempting to avoid, as I would term it, "privileging" some answers over others and thus inducing player choice) seems like quite an easy pitfall to fall into.
There's a useful analogy to draw here with classic adventure games, which are the original source of the term "pixelb!+
©#ing" and thus (I should hope) reasonably non-controversial to use analogically here. That is, classic adventure games often did fall, repeatedly, into a similar trap:
- The items, entities, or locations you need to interact with are so small, they can only be found by tedious fine-toothed-comb analysis of the world. Where a reasonable search can be fun, an unreasonable one becomes unpleasant--and a clear boundary between the two is functionally impossible.
- The items, entities, or locations in the world you need to interact with are conspicuously different from everything else. You see this problem in a lot of old cartoons too--objects that are usable, or which will/can do something, are a noticeably different color from those that aren't, making everything else just backdrop, flavor-text, necessary filler but not actually meaningful, even if the creator's intent is that no such things be viewed that way.
- The items, entities, or locations you interact with are mixed in amongst an enormous number of irrelevant things that won't actually provide any benefit and don't actually lead anywhere, so it becomes easy to go down irrelevant rabbit-holes or get caught up doing something genuinely unproductive to one's goals. (This was rarer in adventure games, but DreamWeb had this problem for example.)
All of these are real problems that actually do crop up in other media--hence, it is reasonable to at least ask how one would go about
consistently averting them. Hence why I said the bit you responded to below. One cannot simply declare that these issues never ultimately matter; such a bald assertion isn't enough. There needs to be something more beyond just "well it always(/nearly always) works for me so your concern is irrelevant"--okay, HOW does it (nearly) always work? What do you do when it doesn't? How do you learn from times where it didn't work so you can prevent that type of mistake from occurring again in the future?
That strikes me as a philosophically skeptical view of GMing. More or less pointing out that it is impossible. It may be that the explaining is harder than the doing. In any case, similar skepticism can be levelled at GMing -- or even playing -- any TTRPG: the whole art form is an impossibility.
It is not a philosophically skeptical view of GMing in general. It is an unconvinced view that
this very specific type of GMing, where the GM is committed to populating and iterating on a world, but simultaneously consistently avoiding anything that (for lack of a better term) "incorrectly" induces player action, is workable in practice without
any process or procedure beyond intuition--which is what I have been repeatedly told is the case for many, if not most, GMs of this style. That there simply, flatly ISN'T any kind of process or procedure, and thus it is flatly impossible for someone to explain any part of their process or procedure because such a thing just doesn't exist.
Above I said "(for lack of a better term) 'incorrectly' induces player action", which I think warrants a bit of explanation. There are some things that induce player action which I am confident are acceptable to GMs of this style. For example, a provocateur NPC getting up in a PC's face is pretty clearly an inducement to action, but I suspect that would be
generally acceptable to players of this style (and I would not see it as an issue in general, only if overused). But, conversely, a GM that put too much emphasis on only a single pathway forward would be seen as inducing player action "incorrectly"--the inducement doesn't arise (or at least
seem to arise) from logical conclusions and known entities, but rather seems to arise from "well I know this HAS to happen in order for THAT to happen" or the like.
It seems quite clear to me that avoiding this "incorrect" type of inducement is of overwhelming concern for GMs of this style. But doing so in a way that avoids all three of (a) providing insufficient information, (b) privileges only the well-detailed options above any others,
and (c) overwhelming the players with too much information, does not seem to be the trivial task you have painted it to be.
