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The post is about how latent scenes are established, and how latent scenes become "activated"/"triggered" and hence actual episodes of play. Player-driven map-and-key is one way of doing this (see eg Gygax's PHB). GM-driven map-and-key is one way of doing this (see eg a number of the...

The OP does not say what you say that it says:

I agree with you about being forward facing, so the players don't have to guess the stakes. When the skill system is leveraged in the manner of a 4e D&D skill challenge, it also tends to be the players who set the "local" stakes for those checks. Or at least influence them significantly, in...

The version of this I'm most familiar with is the 4e skill challenge. Just thinking it through, the challenge consists of: *A threat to be overcome, or an overall goal - in my experience, in a complex challenge (eg 10 or 12 successes required), this can itself evolve as the challenge unfolds...

I know the rules/procedures for AW fronts better than DW fronts. But I think they're fairly similar, so I'll take the risk of talking about them generally. Pull me up if you think this is an error! The GM is expressly told that a front is not a scene, or series of scenes, to frame PCs into. The...

A lot of thinking and discussion about the play of RPGs seems to default to an assumption of map-and-key play. Here is what I mean by map-and-key: * The GM prepares a map; * The GM keys the map - that is, there are notes about what is to be found, or what is happening, at various...

Yes, I know. That was my point.

What you call a "mental map" some of us just call memory. But suppose that he had never travelled in Moria, but had read a description (much like the one found in the novel). Then by learning what chamber he was in, he learned a way out. Furthermore, you seem to contradict yourself: "He didn't...

But is your assertion that this action declaration can't be resolved in MHRP. Why not? What are the character's Milestones? What is the effect die that is intended to flow from the action declaration you're imagining?

Because I don't know what RPG you have in mind, I don't really know how to respond. But in MHRP, for instance, if Character A conjectures X and Character B conjectures the conflicting Y then the upshot is an opposed roll. Obviously the experts conjecture is more likely to be true: the epistemic...

Because? I've only read a bit of the early Hulk comics, but neither Bruce Banner nor Hulk is particularly passive as a character. Both have pretty strong (though conflicting) drives.

I posted the PC sheet upthread. Here it is again: Even for someone not familiar with the details of the MHRP system, I would think that its fairly easy to work out what this PC is about!

OK? Depending on further details, I'm not sure what is stopping you playing that character. Or maybe with those further details, it will turn out that the character is too passive to be a good fit for a MHRP or variant game.

This is getting increasingly bizarre. I told you what the Cunning specialty covers: I don't remember anyone at my trouble finding this hard to grasp.

Here's an example of author stance play in MHRP/Cortex+ Fantasy Hack: The player of the berserker wants to earn XP, and so declares the impulsive action (thus earning 1 XP) and thus prompts an ally to rebuke him for his violence (thus earning 3 XP). The player was not inhabiting his character...

I still don't know what you mean by "author stance" or "actor stance" as you are not using them in the only sense I'm familiar with. "Trad" RPGing is replete with author stance play - the players know the GM has placed obstacles and opportunities into the fiction, and so motivate their PCs to...

In any RPG, the fiction is likely to contain interesting and salient things. Otherwise play would be very boring! As I've already posted, the accuracy of knowledge, conjectures etc is not independent of a person's expertise. Any player with half a brain can see that dice model correlations which...

My "counter argument" is that your description of an "incentive structure" is not borne out in play. If your play is yielding degenerate incentive structures, I infer that your GM is not very good at framing scenes and establishing consequences.

OK. My post wasn't addressed to you.