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Correct - the GM could have stepped in (or rather, dropped out of character from the role they were playing as the ghost lord NPC) at any point. They simply didn't. Equally, yes, there was no formal power here. To draw the analogy with @pemerton 's runes, the player only had the power to...

For this case, I'd think I'd agree with @TwoSix in that the authoring here was largely subconscious - a process of fabulation. By being immersed in the character I subconsciously generated and spoke "memories" from them, the process didn't feel like active authoring. In this case, for me, at...

Sure, that makes sense. In this case, the village was ruined and all the relevant NPCs were dead or gone, so it's not the kind of thing the GM had prepared, nor were the exact details of what happened likely to be relevant in the future so it largely boiled down to colour.

In this case, it was a grievance against my character from the NPC. I'd agree that collaboration was needed, and we did, just during the course of play rather than outside it. I'd agree on orthogonal - it's neither required nor does it necessarily prevent immersion. I'd also agree it was...

I forget the precise details, but this argument involved the treatment of at least two previously unspecified NPCs, at least one location that didn't yet appear on a map and IIRC, a local tradition. All "made up on the spot" - nothing that violated established fiction, all plausibly...

To give an example from a few years ago. Game is 13th Age set in Greyhawk. My character is an elven princeling playboy and is in conversation with the ghost of a local NPC lord. We'd established the two characters knew each other and had been friends, but had parted on bad terms when they...

I can certainly see where you are coming from I suspect that's not how we actually narrate failures in a lot of cases. The examples of breaking ropes, crumbling handholds and so on for our climber kind of demonstrate this - I posted upthread about the idea that we'll often narrate an external...

The argument may well be because the rules are silent on how to construct a "hit table" of this sort (this kind of thing is, ironically enough, almost exactly how WoW does it (or at least used to, years ago) behind the scenes). So for a character with plate and a shield so an AC of 20, you...

How is it not playing the game right? All prep is being honoured. All mechanical interactions are being resolved in accordance with the principles and rules agreed by the table. All action declarations are being made in good faith and are being resolved in good faith. The location may be one...

Are we allowed to call principles what we like? Like Blorb, for example? Secondarily, it's entirely possible for the game to be being played but both the players and characters to end up bored. For example, the characters are searching for a secret door. Due to other principles, the GM is...

So, stop engaging about it? If you aren't interested, just drop the topic?

And how in the first use of the term, spell levels and character levels are not the same thing or gained at the same rates (in all but one D&D edition), despite the underlying meaning being similar. The point is more that shorthand terminology that needs interpreting in the context of the...

What does level mean?

I'd agree with that - I think it's probably possible to come up with "worst practices" but I don't think best practices would be negations of those things.

Or alternatively it's advice against certain styles of GMing, for example "soft railroading" where successes aren't honoured because it's not felt that the win has been "earned" yet, leading to repeated tests until failure. It can be argued that it's just fairly standard good GMing advice but...

Right - this is something that makes sense in the context of games in a specific context where leveraging certain types of power alters the inter-party balance. To offer a recent example where this hasn't been a problem in a game of Vampire I'm in at the moment, we have a highly placed lawyer...

We could for example be trying to evoke a certain genre - in 7th Sea for example it cost build points to have character flaws but you gain XP for whenever they cause your character trouble. The actual implementation of this was fairly ropey, but the point was to encourage players to take...

Depending on the household, certainly. The cook may well not be involved in serving the food at all, that may well be the job of other servants.

I mean, you are asking him to coin new jargon here rather than using well understood terms from outside of the hobby - given the general tenor against academic terms and desire for casual communication, that seems counterproductive.

As an aside on the crumbling cliff thing - why would we narrate such a thing in the first place? We know it's to provide a narrative reason to explain the mechanical failure on the check, but we've got a wide suite of reasons why to could be. We could narrate that the climber's grip gave out...