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The reason we cannot know what happens on success (beyond the player achieving whatever their intent was) is because the GM has not framed the next scene. There's no mental model to perform if-then analysis on because there is no mental model of things that have not been established. On a high...

I think what's relevant is that for the first time since Vampire - The Masquerade's cultural explosion there is another roleplaying game manufacturer that has an in, on a cultural level, to bring in people who are not already existing players and have financial resources to engage in actual...

I think playing your character with authenticity is important but also creating a character that is suited to purpose for the sort of game we're playing is on the player. For any group I care to play with that means one that allows you to play within the principles and agenda of the game and...

The sense of being there, in character, is deeply important to me (like maybe most important thing at times). However, that also includes, access to my character's intuition about the world around them, which to me should be different from my own intuitions. There's also the matter that the...

Sometimes clarification isn't about arguing a point or however you and others choose to play. Often it is about accurate representation of the craft of both game designers and the players of these games. It's about not spreading a false impression of how stuff works. This is why very few...

@pemerton One area that Eero Tuovinen really fails to grasp at when it comes to simulation (and I think this has been a general failure within our community but especially within the Forge) is not really grasping with the legacy of Pendragon, Ars Magica and Vampire. Particularly the way in...

What I personally find frustrating is that many people approach from the perspective of there being this like platonic form of roleplaying, a golden structure of play, even if just a golden structure for them. And they basically have no respect for play that does not meet their standard or...

I'm not sure why it was used as an example in the linked article. I think it's a terrible example because it lacks the greater context that these techniques require to be understood. I think there's a desire to analyze the difference on the task level, but the issue with that is that these...

People are responding as if the people who are taking exception to the fail forward example are trying to sell them on fail forward as technique, rather than show why we view the example as reductive analysis of other people's play. The cook example is representative of poor use of fail forward...

The point of "make it some other complication" isn't trying to sell you on it. It's to address the faulty way the technique is being described. Acting like any of this is trying to sell anyone on anything in this thread is missing the point from my perspective.

That's fine. They don't have to. I'm not asking them to. I'm asking you and others to either present other styles of play in an accurate way that shows all the nuances of technique involved or not to present examples. The point isn't about what you and others want. It's about the reductive way...

If your issue is that fail forward means we're no longer in task resolution / sim mode, cool. You do you. An example of what fail forwards looks like is not needed to make that point. But if your issue/point is that fail forward means the results will lead to inconsistent or implausible fiction...

Kind of amazing how an example designed to make fail forward look ridiculous makes it look ridiculous. A much more artful version of the scene frame that happens on failure would be the cook coming in from a different room, looking around because of the noise the PC was making picking the lock...

Regardless of play techniques the GM is determining it. The question is based on what principles, priorities and constraints.

This all day. My favorite traditional games are ones like Chronicles of Darkness and Achtung Cthulhu! where you pretty much start out topped out the stuff you are specialized in and maybe get slighter better at this thing or that thing, but what you can do is pretty much what you can do from the...

So, the way I tend to view the listed GM Moves in any given game is that these are the things that you explicitly have the authority to do and also a list of the sort of things that you should be doing for the most part. But these lists are incredibly open-ended and usually if your reaction to a...

I think it's a huge mistake to cast GM Moves as just what GMs do. I know that a lot of us kind of intuitively picked up scene framing and so it seems like that's what GMing just is, but it's just one way to approach roleplaying games. Especially when it comes to moves like separate them that are...

Rand al'Thor and Luke Skywalker are just about the worst zero to hero examples one could come up with. They are good at just about everything they try, have special magic juju, come from great lineages even if they do not know them and are pretty much the embodiment of chosen by destiny tropes.

As a player and GM, I'm much more partial to the latter, largely because I have experienced so many times where we play to get to the experience we actually want and never quite get there. Easier to just start where we really want to get to.

Any game, wherever it's discussed, ought to be discussed within the context of its own design. Taking out pieces of a game design and analyzing them within the context of other structures of play will never bring understanding. Understanding starts with empathy, stepping into the mentality and...