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Stuff happens in the fiction and maybe it inspires the player to have their character break their code.

This is my feeling as well. In game about honor for instance, you can't have an honor roll, you need to leave that part to player fiat.

It was this post https://www.enworld.org/threads/gm-fiat-an-illustration.712258/post-9636508 I give an example of what I mean by 'play to find out'. The player makes a decision to significantly alter the characters priorities based on what's occurring in the fiction. Which seems to conflict...

Would you say that in my play example given above, the player is just making it up?

Yeah but is the goal of the player the same as the character? To tie this into what @FrogReaver said. So I'm playing Apocalypse World. One of the things I'm interested in seeing is if Midnight will ever actually face her own mortal culpability for the things she's done. That's not a goal of...

I address this in my reply to Crimson. there's a difference between the player goal and the character goal.

How does the GM play a character then? The GM has to prep a character and give them priorities. It's in the same way that a player is accountable to their character. When I'm playing a character I can't just have them do anything, my understanding of the fictional positioning provides a constraint.

I know you like it but I think Blades is a truly terrible game so I can't refer to it for purpose of illustration. We do have some common ground on the issue that we've discussed before, so I'll break down my thought process. Yeah I think internalizing character goals as your own is a very...

I honestly still don't get it. If you're into challenge based play I can see the need for a 'win/goal' state to make the process functional. In Narrativism there's nothing to 'win' and so the whole game paradigm seems as if it leads to confusion. EDIT: What is it people are trying to win?

If the point of play is to see the interaction between the PC and the GM's prep, then the GM must have solid prep that they adhere to, otherwise play is impossible. If the point of play is to have the GM create exciting or thematic problems in the moment, then the GM having prep isn't really a...

4 is kind of interesting. Knowing more about the GM decision process should give the player greater control if they 'are' going for an outcome because it should give them a lever to manipulate. I don't think it does though, or very rarely. It's more like a promise of agency than actual currency...

You and your group should play Inspectres. Or at least give it a try. It has a huge amount in common with Blades (to the extent you might raise an eyebrow) except is has mechanics that bind the GM to a mechanical decision they made earlier. It's one of the early examples of a Narrativist game...

Your thoughts on gamism are great and I get where you're coming from. And yeah I agree, the game state split is where it turns into two separate hobbies that use very similar same tools.

So you have a character perform an action. Say they set a trap or whatever. The GM can use fiat to make it go whichever way the GM chooses, the trap works or it doesn't. The way you framed it. The player has a hoped for outcome. The player wants the trap to work and the GM is using fiat to...

See my previous post but you also hit the nail on the head. Why do you have a hoped for outcome? and why should I care? EDIT: This comes off as too aggressive. My previous post was more moderated.

The issue I have with this framing is that I don't know how (or whether it's desirable) you manoeuvre toward an end state and so I don't know how applicable the general language of games is to rpg's. In chess I want to get the opponent in check mate and so I use the moves I have available to me...

Good points. The owners of the respective characters retain full control over their characters thoughts and actions. So the player can't say 'I make her fall in love with me' because that's for the GM to decide and vice versa. (it's the same split you see in most trad games) If two responses...

I want to return to a play example I used previously if anyone is interested. So the situation is that there's this hitman, he's meticulous, methodical and the enforcer for what's basically corporate organized crime. He lives a solitary, disciplined life. He meets this party girl and she's a...

The framing of a lot of this conversation assumes (often unintentionally) that of the GM mystery cult. The GM needs guardrails and introspection and a good system because they are the primary social and aesthetic facilitator. Given that this is one of my big criticisms of rpg culture in general...

You and manbear have really opened up the problem a bit more. Who cares what the process is when it's transparent to everyone at the table. If it's not transparent to everyone at the table then we're dealing with a very different aesthetic dynamic. I'm surprised I didn't see that earlier but...