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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7583689" data-attributes="member: 42582">Nonsense. Pawn stance is a variation of author stance. Both involve a player determining a character's choice/action by reference to the player's real-world priorities. In author stance, there is a second step also, of retroactively imputing a motive to the character to explain the choice/action. The main example provided in this thread has been given by [MENTION=6785785]hawkeyefan[/MENTION]: the player determines that the character chooses to attack the troll with fire because the player knows that trolls are vulnerable to fire (on it's own, this would be pawn stance) and attributes a motivation to the character, namely, "Uncle Elmo told me once that only fire can kill a troll!" (with that second step, we have author stance in the strict sense).I didn't quote and reply to the following part of your earlier post, because it is wrong and hence a needless distraction:I mean, you can define "pawn stance" however you like, but I'm using it as Ron Edwards does. Edwards makes no reference to "personal knowledge". He refers to a "real person's priorities". Nor does he make any reference to "without a reason in the game". He is talking about the method whereby a player chooses what a character does, not what fiction accompanies or is created by that choice. Obviously if a PC chooses to do X rather than Y, then there exists, in the game, a reason for that (unless the PC is insane). But that fact about the fiction is irrelevant to the question that Edwards is concerned with, which is how is a player making decisions about the play of the game.So that means that you think that it is not necessary for a PC to have relatively richly established knowledge and motivations in order to make play decisions in actor stance? So can you explain how this works? How do shallow/thin PC knowledge and motivations support actor stance?But that's not relevant to the question I asked, which was about how richly establisheda character's knowledge and motivations have to be.If a character has no background, and the campaign is just starting so the player has no knowledge acuqired via the play of the game, how do you envisage this working?Imagine, for instance, a group starting out a campaign with B2 keep on the Borderlands. The players generate their PCs using the rules found in Moldvay Basic or Gygax's PHB. The referee reads the players the opening text about them arriving at the Keep, etc. How does a player decide what his/her PC does?In my personal experience, at most D&D tables the players have their PCs "look for the adventure" rather than (say) ask about trading opportunities or look for potential spouses for their PCs. And this is because they are making decisions for their PCs motivated by real-world priorities (in this case, playing a D&D module). That decision might be lampshaded by an attribution to the character of a desire to become rich through adventuring (which takes it from pawn to author stance) but I don't possibly see how it could be actor stance in the scenario I've described.I don't know what happens in your game. But of the two actual play examples you provided, one seemed to involve making choices in actor stance (eg deciding to sacrifice the "witch" to ally with the NPCs who had kidnapped your PC's family) while another seemed mostly to involve making choices in pawn or perhaps author stance (the decision to chase the orcs who raided the village) followed by a decision which may have been actor stance or pawn stance (the decision not to rest so as to save the children: you referred to player shock, but it wasn't clear the extent to which that was in character as opposed to real world).</blockquote>

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