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For someone who’s been posting regularly on these forums for years? That’s absolutely demonstrating a lack of curiosity about the broader structure of the TTRPG hobby. Which is fine in the broader population, but is going to make me views any statements you make with some suspicion. Heck...

Yea, but that’s every designer (and pretty much everyone in the world!). Much like running a campaign setting, impartiality is an illusion.

Believing that the player should have 100% authority to determine a character’s mental state is an aesthetic choice that not everyone agrees with. I know this because we had a fairly intense thread about it a few years back.

You can do whatever you want, man. But if you tell me “I’m running my setting as an objective, unbiased creation” I’m not going to believe you. I believe that YOU might thank that.

Well, yea. There’s only three ways to decide the outcome of what happens in an encounter in a roleplaying game. 1) The GM decides. 2) The player decides. 3) A resolution method (dice, cards, Jenga towers, etc.) decides. The rules of a game tell us when and where to do each of those three...

This is a troll, right? Please tell me you’re trolling.

This is the exact passage I was thinking of when I made my post.

To be very clear, it's not a game. It's a statement of play principles.

It's pretty hard to be involved in the OSR online space and miss the Principia. It's pretty much Matt Finch's primer 2.0, and directly influenced a lot of the more popular NSR works like Knave and Cairn. https://lithyscaphe.blogspot.com/p/principia-apocrypha.html

"Roll a d6. On a 4+, the player dictates what happens next; on a 3-, the DM does." is a fully comprehensive rule set. Rules don't need to dictate outcomes, they only need to dictate the exchange of authority to make statements.

I don't see it as possible to disentangle the two. Even if 2 GMs run the same published world, they will extremely rapidly become two separate entities.

I would note that "high-stakes" and "combat" are not intended to be used synonymously. "High stakes" is generally intended to mean, for these use cases, "situations that will challenge or possibly change a character's beliefs or conceptions of themselves."

That wasn't what I was intending to say. I'm merely saying that the idea that any DM can be "objective" in how they drive forward the fictional state, even just using mental heuristics to "model" the setting outside of PC participation and at-table play, is inherently flawed.

For me, it's not about trust. Especially since I don't want that heightened level of authority when I am DMing. It's because I feel play flows the best when the player and DM are both heavily involved, and when narrative control and the driving of play volleys back and forth between...

Of course not. But I also don't think that "objectivity in worldbuilding" is really a worthwhile goal for TTRPG play.

No one ever said it wasn't a sandbox. (And I followed the chain of quotes to be sure.) @Hussar even said it was a great idea! It's simply not a case of a game that is player directed. "Players having agency to explore" is not "player-directed".

Sure, I somewhat agree with that, although the knight being in love with the king could easily be the result of a rule. But I still disagree that a game entirely bound by resolution processes is more like chess. As long as the gameplay requires a shared narrative space to function, it's at...

Sure, but that doesn't drive play. If you choose to move your knight to expose your queen because you're roleplaying the knight as "in love with the king" and the knight wants the queen to get murdered, that's cool, but that's not chess; that's a roleplaying activity with chess trappings.

To me, it seems a matter of "the DM is presenting lore, and wanting the player to choose to be interested in a portion of the lore." That can work with certain motivated players, but I find it easier to get player buy-in when they invest in the setting.

Oh, for sure. I worry about that whenever I run, and I interrogate my own play to see how often I've gone with DM force/illusionism/secret backstory to provide dramatic impetus. Everything we discuss here are ultimately techniques to get my game into a state where the players are excited...