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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7585015" data-attributes="member: 42582">Let's go back to <a href="http://" target="_blank">Ron Edwards</a>:* In Actor stance, a person determines a character's decisions and actions using only knowledge and perceptions that the character would have. * In Author stance, a person determines a character's decisions and actions based on the real person's priorities, then retroactively "motivates" the character to perform them. (Without that second, retroactive step, this is fairly called Pawn stance.) . . . The communicative and demonstrative aspects of "acting" are not involved in Actor Stance at all, which only means that the player is utilizing the character's knowledge and priorities to determine what the character does.The contrast between actor and author stance is the contrast between two methods of deciding what a character does.The player can decide based on his/her priorities: this is author stance (assuming that an appropriate motivation is also imputed to the chracter), or otherwise pawn stance.Or the player can decide based on his/her reasoning from the character's established mental states: this is actor stance.The timing of the establishment of character mental states is quite central to stance. Author stance means establishing a mental state as part of the process of action declaration - that's what retroactively motivating refers to.Actor stance doesn't depend on motivations never being authored (as you say, that would be impossible). It depends on motivations being established prior to action declarations, so that they can inform those action declarations. That's why - to repeat a point I've made several times upthread - many of the RPGs published in the immediate post-D&D era (I've pointed to RQ and C&S as two prominent examples) included setting frameworks, and the integration of PC generation into the setting, which would establish the character motivations necessary for actor stance.</blockquote>

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