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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7977623" data-attributes="member: 42582">To build on what Ovinomancer has said here:The key "metaphysical" constituents in the play of a RPG are not states of affairs (such as the widget is in the hope chest). A typical RPG is a series of framing narrations (from the GM) followed by action declarations (from the players, for their PCs) and the resolution of those. So the key "metaphysical" constituents are events - such as we look in the captain's trunk and find nothing or we look in the daughter's hope chest and find the widget.The best treatment of this in the context of GM advice I know of is the one from Vincent Baker's Apocalypse World that I already quoted in part upthread (pp 110-11 of AW rulebook):Make your move, but misdirect. Of course the real reason why you choose a move [= introduce some new fiction by way of narration] exists in the real world. Somebody has her character go someplace new, somebody misses a roll, somebody hits a roll that calls for you to answer, everybody’s looking to you to say something, so you choose a move to make. Real-world reasons. However, misdirect: pretend that you’re making your move for reasons entirely within the game’s fiction instead. Maybe your move is to separate them, for instance; never say “you missed your roll, so you two get separated.” Instead, maybe say “you try to grab his gun” — this was the PC’s move — “but he kicks you down. While they’re stomping on you, they drag Damson away.” The effect’s the same, they’re separated, but you’ve cannily misrepresented the cause. Make like it’s the game’s fiction that chooses your move for you, and so correspondingly always choose a move that the game’s fiction makes possible.Baker gives another example of this later on (pp 152-53):Marie the brainer goes looking for Isle, to visit grief upon her, and finds her eating canned peaches on the roof of the car shed with her brother Mill and her lover Plover (all NPCs). “I read the situation,” her player says. . . . She rolls+sharp and hits with a 7–9, so she gets to ask me one question from that move’s list. “Which of my enemies is the biggest threat?” she says. “Plover,” I say. “No doubt. He’s out of his armor, but he has a little gun in his boot and he’s a hard ****er. Mill’s just 12 and he’s not a violent kid. Isle’s tougher, but not like Plover.” (See me misdirect! I just chose one capriciously, then pointed to fictional details as though they’d made the decision. We’ve never even seen Mill onscreen before, I just now made up that he’s 12 and not violent.)The GM's job in AW is to establish events as guided by the game's mechanics - in this case, the event in question is Marie noticing who is the biggest threat -  but in such a way as to generate an experience of (fictional) states of affairs - in this case, that Plover is armed and hard.Of course it's possible to GM a RPG by answering the question what events occur by working from a pre-established list of states of affairs - any Gygaxian dungeon works like this - but that's a choice of GMing technique, not dictated by anything about the subject matter of the fiction (eg that it involves looking for widgets rather than talking to guards).</blockquote>

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