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It's not about whether the GM is telling a story. Thinking about it in terms of story control is fundamentally misunderstanding it. Let me provide a more extreme example to illustrate my point. In a game I was playing recently (as GM) one of the PC's really wanted his lover to accept what he...

My apologies. I was misinterpreting something you said earlier in the thread.

I'm not sure you can. Your plan might not work because the GM thinks it's a dumb idea is the core gameplay loop and that's always going to have the potential for hurt feelings no matter how much you dress it up. I don't mean this in a disparaging way either. Pedantic and Micah play so that...

Yeah that's a good example. Where we differ is that I see fiat as the reason to play an RPG, Or put another way, I want people to have to make judgements about fictional positioning without recourse to system guaranteed position (reliable currency for the theory heads out there) That being...

It's a really good question and I like reading about different approaches. If I'm playing Sorcerer I tend to go by the general rule that fictional positioning can't override the conflict resolution mechanics except in extremis. Is this actually a conflict or a lost cause. If it's any way a...

Well when it's made up, how and the reasons/criteria/principles matter. To use my example from several posts back. If the GM creates a competent hunter at the start of the scenario. Then the hunter is tracking the players and the GM uses what they know about the hunter and how the alarm is...

@Manbearcat I think I agree but we'll see. If fiat is used to force outcomes based on stuff like, what the GM wants to happen, to keep the plot moving, to provide a challenge. Then I agree that that specific approach isn't conducive to challenge based play. The correct attitude would seem to...

Well different procedures lead to different types of player contributions but I'm not sure what that has to do with fiat. Fiat just means you have authority over some fictional thing we're talking about. To create a simple version of the rules above: If you have the time and safety to set...

I'll give it a try but a lot of what I'm going to talk about is upstream of the thread topic so we don't get to social mechanics until much later, if at all because it might become obvious where the differences lie, I don't know. Also I wish I had more PG examples but unfortunately I'm pulling...

There is some kind of fundamental difference in how we parse fiction. If not in general exegetic terms then certainly as it applies to rpg's. It's not that I don't have the problems you, Luke Crane and Andre have, it's that I can't even conceive of how you get those problems. So I suspect it...

I've come up with a jargon version of trying to explain this. People point to differences between physical and mental stuff and tend to be ok with physical resolution and not with mental. I think that's because the division of authorities they use tends to be different (maybe, depends on...

I keep thinking of ways to try and explain my position and I've come up with an extreme one that kind of hits the nail on the head. I don't have in character arguments. There are conflicts of interest but not arguments. We're obviously using the resolution systems to determine fundamentally...

I was latching onto the command thing rather than the princess is irritated thing. If we were playing together I would have gone meta straight away to get clarification, in fact if we were using a basic conflict resolution system with dice (say Sorcerer), I'd do the same thing. I think this may...

Yeah your right. I do play those NPC's in the same way I'd play a PC. IAWA is weird actually and really screws up this type of conversation but in Sorcerer absolutely.

This is because you're still conceiving of this whole thing in terms of 'winning' story control. It isn't. It's about mutually finding out. Here's an experience from a Monsterhearts game. I really really wanted my character to have some kind of salvation. I was really invested in it. At some...

In hindsight I should have used a different word than stalling because of it's implications here. Two people locked in conflict where neither budge isn't stalling, it's just the situation. If there's no give anywhere else then the situation is stable and that's the story.

I play a variety of games and many of them do resolve conflicts with dice rolls. So I see a purpose in playing different systems but this is a bit different to your question, do we need to have certain types of instrumentation to prevent play from stalling? Well in the case of IC conversation...

That's actually really good fodder for debate. The Tl;dr is that I'm slight agreement with you but I'll lay out my case a bit later, I have to go and do stuff now.

Well on a purely technical level it's the GM or the Player through fiat. Although more properly it would be fiat through a mix of the following four things. The constraints of the character as a nailed down entity. The stuff the other player has provided through reincorporation. The stuff the...

Oh right yeah. I think in play there's some amount of OOC discussion to make sure we actually understand what the other is communicating. In systems where conflict of interest potentially lead to a dice roll, that discussion would usually happen then. Also I'm not suggesting you can't say what...