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Right. The GM is right there where the fiction unfolds, reading the room and having their finger on the pulse of the events. That is why I gladly give them the final say over a distant rules writer, no matter how skilled, who is not there.

No. In my example, it was primarily me, the player, who felt that the coherence of the fiction would be violated by strictly following the rules. In a sense that if GM gets to decide certain things, then the player cannot be deciding them. But the same happens when you outsource the decision...

I don't agree. For instance in this case it is unclear to me who "de jure" would even have authority to grant the exception, if anyone. In practice I asked for it and the GM agreed. Was it a GM decision, or a group decision? Unclear, and didn't really matter. Now for the sake of clarity, I think...

Perhaps. Maybe. I'm not sure actually... Like yeah, it makes certain logical sense to view it like you say, but given that substance of the game is fiction, not rules, I feel inflexible rules can sometimes limit agency in uncomfortable ways. Like recently in our Blades game we had a situation...

RPGs are not like "any other game". They are collaborative creative exercises with some rules as scaffolding. It is art, not science. And that is no way a player can exercise agency. To say it is not, is obviously a biased attempt to twist the definition of player agency. "Rules" that are...

@bloodtide I don't think you know what "sandbox" means. It definitely doesn't mean that the game world is player authored (or even co-authored) quite the opposite. The GM creates an expansive and detailed world (the proverbial sandbox) for the players to play in. The player freedom comes in the...

I think meaningful choices are at the core of the agency, and I think the OP correctly identifies, that this requires certain level of predictability and coherence. However, in comparison to some other games like chess, I believe there happens a category error. For most games rules are what the...

My long-running D&D campaign is rather sandboxy. The setting even has a massive desert in middle of it! What I wanted from this campaign was pulpy sword and sorcery adventures, instead of one long fantasy epic with overarching plot, so this lead to more sandboxy approach. There are of course...

Indeed. At that point the last surviving humans probably have more pressing concerns than the copyright.

Yes, it indeed could happen that a GM overrides a rule in manner you do not like. Now in a game where everyone is on the same page this is unlikely to happen, but still. But what it also means, that the GM can override a rule to allow your character to do something that would make sense in the...

Like I said last time you mentioned this, I don't think this is quite true, unless you mean "gameable space" only in very mechanistic sense. In a game of fiction, the gameable space is the fiction, not just the rules. What is required is that fiction to be coherent and consistent enough, that...

So how does Torchbearer handle situations where the camp would be threatened by an already established opponent? Like if there was a bounty hunter or assassin after the party etc? Or even if just the generic type of threat was known? ("The Gloom Forest is known for its ravenous trolls.")

Why do you need to constrain it? A good GM will however have principles they follow to run the game fairly and consistently. By creating situations with meaningful decision points.

But you also generally want the characters to succeed and not to die. Or maybe you don't, but this goes back to earlier discussion about goals in narrativist games. And yes, the game tells you to advocate for such things, hence the writers' room. That is indeed a super viable way to play...

I'm sure it can. Piracy is illegal though, so by this logic these robotic buccaneers should be as well.

First, thank you for the information on the rules. They seem to be way more involved and specific than I imagined. I am however still somewhat confused what the camp event roll actually does though. I found this bit: "In the Torchbearer core book, you roll to determine whether a camp is a...

They are not objective in sense a that they produce predictably consistent results. Like here: Like does this seem "objective" to you? It is just a GM decision, seems pretty damn fiaty to me. Perhaps. But different printed games have different printed principles, some more explicit some...

You have been asked to cite the relevant rules several times; you haven't. What is the point of this? What is the point of bringing up a game mechanic as an example in the first post, but actually not provide the rule and keep people guessing for 258 pages and admonishing them for guessing...

Well, then it means that you certainly cannot be found with vision, as hidden gives you invisibility, and invisibility means you cannot be seen. 🤷

It doesn't actually say that though.