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All this has been core to most of the RPGing I've done since the mid-1980s. On the assumption that not all of that RPGing counted as "living world" sandbox, it follows that this core is not unique to that particular approach to RPGing. (EDIT: I've just seen that @thefutilist makes the same...

100% this. I could play the DL modules, exercising complete control for the whole time over what my PC thinks and feels, and that wouldn't stop it being a railroad.

No. My point is quite simple: imaginary things do not have causal impacts. Real acts of imagination - mental states in people's minds - of course can have causal impacts. And some of those may be unintended. I have ideas about the fiction in my Classic Traveller game - for instance, about the...

It answers your question about whether there is success on something that matters without a roll. There is not. Gear is very important in the game. It establishes fictional position; and can also be the basis for an advantage die. EDIT: @Old Fezziwig snuck in just ahead of me!

Imaginary things cannot have actual causal effects. By definition, they are imaginary, and hence have no more real effects than do <spoiler alert> Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. The GM can imagine circumstances in the setting, and on the basis reach a view as to what should happen. That's a...

Well, only when I am accused of lying, or when you say X is clear in response to a post where I've explained in detail why its not the case that X. I've given simple answers. But you reject them, I think because of the apparently radical ideas that (i) the GM would frame scenes always having...

Do you have a view on my question: If you are GMing 3E D&D, and a player builds a ranger with Orcs as a favoured enemy, and so that means you as GM decide to use some Orcs as NPCs, does that count as the player exercising "meta agency"?

I mean, in backgammon it's possible to find myself unable to move - because I have a piece that was hit sitting on the bar, and the other player holds every point in their inner table. So no matter what I roll, I can't bring my piece back into play. That doesn't mean I have no agency in...

Hang on - you keep posting assertions about Burning Wheel that are false! Recently you also made assertions about 4e skill challenges that @zakael19 and I both know, from experience, to be false. (Perhaps they are true of how you played 4e. But you asserted them as universal.) I mean, you...

My PC dying seems like a thing about my character.

Speaking for myself, I don't dismiss plausibility as a heuristic: I use it all the time when GMing. What I deny is that imaginary things participate in actual causal processes. The causal process is GM decision-making, not some imagined event exerting real power.

I respond to what people post. I thought you meant performing mental tasks.

What you're describing here strikes me as radically dysfunction. Like, you turned up to play chess, I turned up to play bridge, and for some reason we're incapable of sorting out the confusion via a simple conversation.

]This is why I say that your preferred approach is, in comparison, GM-driven. Because the GM being required to have regard to anything other than their own vision for the game is "bad rule".

I have posted in this thread, approximately a million times, the following (from pp 11 and 72 of Hub and Spokes): The GM presents the players with problems based on the players’ priorities. The players use their characters’ abilities to overcome these obstacles. To do this, dice are rolled and...

It seems to me that your interpretation of the instinct and belief are not the only possible ones. I mean, they could describe a petulant teenager as much as a spiteful Dark Elf. Which is relevant to the play of Burning Wheel. Aedrhos obviously thinks that he is capable of murder. But is he...

Correct. Authored works do not have any continuity separate from the decision-making of their authors. I don't see the difference, sorry. In Burning Wheel the dice roll also resolves an attempted action in a consistent context. The "consistent context" establishes the obstacle (eg that's why it...

Yes. Way upthread in reply to you, I posted this, from pp 11 and 72 of Hub and Spokes: The game is not intended to have the GM or the players just decide what happens. It's not a collaborative storytelling game.

What's the "it"? I mean, what the player is doing is building and playing their PC. I assume that doesn't count as "meta", given that it (presumably) happens in your RPGing as well. And then what the GM is doing is - as per the rules of the game - having regard to certain aspects of the PC...

It's not an argument, though - it's just an expression of an aesthetic preference.