A Question Of Agency?

[pemerton]

Here's why the concept of a shared fiction that is separate from a GM's conception of the setting is important to me : the stuff that has been established in the shared fiction has been accepted as true. It has teeth. It is binding.

Even if a GM treats what is in their prep as true it is not true for the whole group until it is revealed as true because it is not binding. The GM can simply change it on a whim. They might choose not to. It's true in the same way.

Would you accept, as an exception to your second paragraph, the notes, maps and keys prepared by a GM for running a "skilled play" dungeon crawl?

 

[pemerton]

I've caught up on this thread and have written a series of replies in this long post.

Yeah, I don't get the arguments that there's a functional difference between declaring you're looking for food, succeeding at a check, and finding food and saying you're looking for an ally, making the check, and finding the ally. Both are supported in the fiction -- the food is in a forest not otherwise hostile to the presence of food, and the ally is in an area established to be likely to contain such old allies and that is not hostile to their presence. Literally the only difference in play here is presumption of who has what say. Even then, it works no matter the presumption -- if GM Bob thinks there's food in the forest to find, then GM Bob can think there's allies in the area to find. It's an entirely specious argument that relies on an assumption that food in the forest is an easier ask than finding an ally.

Right. I think I've made this exact post multiple times now! So has @hawkeyefan.

Characters fictional actions either cause something to happen in the fiction or they don't.

There are 3 cases.
1. Characters action is the cause of something that happens in the fiction such that the character could say "my action caused this" and have it be true within the fiction.
2. Characters action is the cause of something that happens in the fiction such that the character would say "my action did not cause this" and have it be true within the fiction.
3. Characters action did not cause something to happen in the fiction in any way.

There is a clear difference between 1 and 2 and it's not simply about preference.

It's about topic or subject-matter. Which I have posted many times now.

Your (1) is a story about a person doing something. Your (3) is a story about a person being aware of something they didn't cause. I don't understand what your (2) is supposed to be because you assert both (i) that the character causes something to happen and (ii) that the character can truly deny that the character caused that thing to happen. It seems contradictory or incoherent, except perhaps in a very 4th-wall breaking scenario like some approaches to Over the Edge.

Character actions that cause something to happen in the fiction but that the character could say in the fiction "my action did not cause this" hamper role playing

There are no such actions. At least not in any RPG I've ever played. (Again, I flag Over the Edge as - appropriately - a possible edge case here, but I've never played it.)

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WIth the person you've authored him as coming to you. With the foraging/food you are authoring you are going to it...

What if my Foraging action is to set snares, which rabbits then come to? I've never seen a D&D rulebook (or any other RPG rulebook) that suggests that setting snares should be resolved differently from foraging for berries.

(I'm reading through the thread as I'm writing this omnibus post. And so I see that @Hriston has made the same point as I just made now.)

The food existed before my check. It's just a matter of if I was able to locate it.

Evard's tower existed before Aramina remembered it. If it hadn't, she couldn't have learned about it and hence remembered it!

Rufus was on his way to collect wine before Thurgon and Aramina encountered him. That was how they were able to meet him when and where they did!

Also, the bolded sentence in your post is confused. Because the existence of the food is an imaginary state of affairs. It is an element of the shared fiction. Whereas the check is not part of the shared fiction. It's a real thing that happens in the real world. So is the introduction into the shared fiction of the element food exists and has been foraged by the PC. And that element was not introduced into the shared fiction until after the check is made. Introducing that element into the shared fiction is part of the process of resolving the declared action.

This point can be driven home by considering the possible options the GM has in narrating a failed check to find food. S/he could say "It seems to be a good place to find rabbits, but there just aren't any about today." Or s/he could say "You snare a rabbit, but as you try to take it out it slips out of your hands and runs injured into the bushes." Or if s/he wants to do some foreshadowing, s/he could say "When you return to your snare, you see that something has already eaten the rabbit you caught. Judging by the frenzied tearing of the rabbit skin, whatever took your rabbit seems big and fierce."

Each of these establishes something about what happened in the past relative to the temporal location of the PC at the moment s/he has the narrated experience. But, obviously enough, in the real world none of them will be narrated at a time earlier than when it is narrated!

If a specific NPC has been in one place, there needs to be reason/explanation for them to be in a different one, now. That's a matter of taste and preference, though; I don't think I'm saying you're wrong, exactly--just limning a difference.

On Monday I was in the eastern suburbs. Once or twice in the intervening days I've been in the city. Today I was at the supermarket. I spent Christmas Day at my mother-in-law's place. Etc.

In the first few chapters of LotR we learn about Gandalf having been in The Shire and in Gondor (reading the Scroll of Isildur). Later we learn that around the same time as is covered in those chapters he was at Isengard, at Bree, at Weathertop, and some other places too.

I believe that I am the only person so far in this thread to give actual play examples of either BW's Circles being used, or of a MHRP/Cortex+ Heroic specialty being used to generate a contact.

In the latter case, the PCs were in the steading of a Giant Chieftain and the NPC with whom a rapport was established was a Giant Shaman who took a similar view of the portents as did the PCs.

In the former case, Thurgon and Aramina met Friedrich (twice) as he poled his raft along the river; and met Rufus as he was driving his wagon near the outskirts of his estate, going to collect wine.

So I don't really understand what you are responding to in @Aebir-Toril's post. The fiction has no causality and no temporal integrity independent of what is narrated. Gandalf was not plucked from somewhere else by JRRT to be at the Shire for Bilbo's party. He is exactly where JRRT has written him to be.

My rolling of a Circles check which then establishes that, in the fiction, Thurgon and Aramina encounter Friedrich so he can help them travel downriver does not pluck Friedrich from his "real" location. He has no "real" location. He's a component of a story. It has been established that, some days ago, he was poling his raft upstream. Now it is established that, some days after that, he is poling back downstream. Why? I don't think I know - as best I recall Thurgon didn't ask and so the GM didn't tell, although now that my mind turns to it maybe there was some discussion of him having followed the path of a band of Orcs. But in any event, as far as the behaviour of river rafters goes, it doesn't seem all that idiosyncratic.

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Food, game animals, etc all exist as part of the fictional world whether they are enumerated or not. They are part of the meidieval fantasy setting. If one goes looking for food then one goes to where the food/game are (the forest in this case), they then spend time searching for them, or actively go set up a hunting blind in an opportune location. Either way the person's skill impacts whether they can find and bring home food/game and whether they can do it in a timely manner.

I'll go out on a limb and say that a fictional friend also already exists in the setting even if he's not been enumerated. The difference is that having him show up at your location for a chance encounter doesn't involve you really doing anything. I mean there's not anything in the fiction you are actually doing that's causing that to happen. There is with foraging.

Now if it's not a chance encounter. Say you were sending letters or other communications and that caused your friend to come help you... well that's another matter entirely. As I said, I'm focused on the chance encounter aspect of "look for friends" - and the objection isn't about randomness there, it's about the lack of a coherent fictional action. I mean, if the mechanic dropped the pretense of being an in fiction action I wouldn't be making this objection to it. But it is and I've been assured that "looking for your friend" is a fictional action a character can take, even in the context of a chance friend encounter (despite no one having a clue what such an action actually looks like).

When a character forages in say 5e, it's typically being done in a large expanse of wilderness. Because 5e as written doesn't have rolls occur unless there is uncertainty, then the only way a player rolls is if the DM determines there's a chance he could forage something to eat which would imply that some source of food is in his vicinity. If there's no source of food in his vicinity (or no source he would be capable of discovering) then he doesn't even get a roll. So by the time there is a roll in 5e it's already defacto established that food is in the vicinity.

<snip>

the DM could say, well actually this forest is desolate and barren. Are you sure you would try to forage in such a place?

<snip>

But yes, part of medieval fantasy is that a typical forest will have food you can forage. So yes, it's perfectly acceptable for players to imagine that in the absence of any further description about the forest.

<snip>

Evard's tower is a very specific fantasy element. A river having a bridge is pretty hit and miss. So quite different things.

You objected to my characterisation of your position as "that generica like rabbits are no big deal and can be narrated or presupposed freely by all participants (perhaps subject to some overarching GM veto power), whereas towers and bridges and brothers which are a big deal are the exclusive province of the GM" and yet that's almost exactly what you say in the above two quotes.

And on the matter of actions performed by characters:

Remembering stories of Evard's tower is a definite action. It's not that easy to describe - the best account I know of memory remains William James's Principles of Psychology. But as someone who has had amnesia, I can tell you that you'll know if you can't do it!

Looking out for one's friend in the hope of coming across them is also a real state of affairs. Frodo is in that state, vis-a-vis Gandalf, for many of the chapters in the first Book of LotR. At various times in my life I have walked through school yards and university grounds and office buildings and city streets in that state.

I was assured that in fact the character was looking for the ally in the fiction and that it wasn't just a player hoping for aid.

Characters can also hope. They have inner lives. The mental states they form - recollections, hopes, looking out for things - are as much part of their fields of action as swinging swords.

It's true that typical D&D play pays almost no attention to these elements of the character, but that's just an idiosyncratic feature of such play.

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Another thought:
Making a pie and making a casserole are mechanically the same process.
1. Gather ingredients
2. Follow recipe
3. Enjoy pie/casserole

"So how can you say you like pies but not casseroles - it's the same mechanical process!"

Because the mechanical process being the same, especially at the high level, doesn't mean everything about the processes are the same, and especially not the end results.

I'm not puzzled as to what you do and don't like. Your preferences don't seem particularly unique.

But if someone said the reason they like pie but not casserole is because one is produced via cooking but the other is not, I would be curious. (Cf if someone explained that's why they like mangoes and not casserole.)

That is not a feature of all RPGing or all RPGs. For instance, a check made to establish what it is that a PC recollects has the same real-world causal structure as a check made to establish whether a PC defeats an Orc in combat. But the causal processes in the fiction are different in each case. Hence there is no mapping of the sort I described in the previous paragraph. Hence games which feature both sorts of checks are not simulationist in Edwards' sense.

Would have saved us alot of time if you would have led with this

I am very confident that if I had led with an explanation that referenced Ron Edwards you would have rejected it. Especially given that you "liked" this post:

I have never found GNS useful

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But the point of contention I keep talking about is how the real world processes and the fictional processes and elements exist in relation to one another.

When I say the problem and differences include the fictional part and you say "but that's not what I want to talk about" - that's not helpful.

In fact, I even question the wisdom of trying to focus solely on a high level zoomed out view of only the mechanical processes in relation to the real world. Issues being:
1. You are too zoomed out. Even dissimilar mechanical processes can sound the same when you zoom out enough.
2. The relationship of such processes to the fictional world also matters. You aren't viewing the process from all perspectives. You are only focused on the real world perspective and not the fictional one.
3. Even very similar mechanical processes with different ingredients can yield to very different products, (ex: producing Coke vs producing Sprite) - no matter how similar the mechanical processes involved are the end result is different

So far as far as I can tell the only person who has successfully articulated the bolded relationship, in this thread, is me. Not doing my own original work, mind you, but drawing on an 18-year old and very well known essay by Ron Edwards.

I'll restate the relationship: it is a mapping of the causal process of resolution onto the authorship of the imagined causal processes of the fiction. Of the RPGs I know, the one that comes closest to instantiating this relationship is RuneQuest. As I've said, D&D doesn't because combat resolution doesn't conform to it. Neither does foraging, in D&D or probably in most RQ games - the causal process of resolving a foraging check will very often establish shared fiction about the state of the forest etc which does not correspond to the imagined causal process of the character looking for berries and setting snares for rabbits.

The more that the fiction is authored in advance, the more moments of resolution can attain this state. This is why games like RQ, Rolemaster and the like have all sorts of shorthand notation for marking up areas of wilderness in the GM's key, to then feed into foraging checks to minimise the amount of fortune-in-the-middle resolution required. (The only version of D&D I know that tries to approximate this is the Wilderness Survival Guide for late 1st ed AD&D.)

When we come to the topic of participant agency, whoever gets to do that pre-authoring is clearly exercising a great deal of it. There is nothing about the mapping relationship that requires it to be the GM who does that pre-authoring, but in practice that seems to be the norm. It is certainly what you are advocating for.

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TL,DR:

I'm in a forest with no otherwise special qualities. The presence of food is included in the presence of the forest. The introduction of the forest is enough to also establish in the shared fiction the existence of food in it.

Thurgon is travelling through the land of Greyhawk, on the border of Ulek and the Pomarj, along the old border forts and ruined homesteads. The introduction of those things is enough to establish the presence of wizard's towers, and of former knights of the Order of the Iron Tower now living as itinerants or hermits.

I wouldn't be interested in playing a FRPG where the participants took a different view. That would seem like a very boring game.

 

[Campbell]

Would you accept, as an exception to your second paragraph, the notes, maps and keys prepared by a GM for running a "skilled play" dungeon crawl?

As a fan of that style I would say that the GM is constrained by their notes, but it is not part of the shared fiction until established in play.

A big part of skilled play is finding a way to safely bring what is in the GM's prep into the shared fiction.

 

[prabe]

So I don't really understand what you are responding to in @Aebir-Toril's post. The fiction has no causality and no temporal integrity independent of what is narrated. Gandalf was not plucked from somewhere else by JRRT to be at the Shire for Bilbo's party. He is exactly where JRRT has written him to be.

I think I was getting at the idea that if an NPC is established in the fiction as being at one specific place (as in, a city) then if that NPC is going to show up at a different specific place (as in, another city, more than a hundred miles away) there needs to be thought as to why and how that NPC got there. I mean, around the table it's because of action-resolution mechanics, but things need to make some amount of narrative sense, as well.

As I said to @Aebir-Toril I think if I'm navigating in a fiction, I'm going to have a preference for it having a degree of self-consistency; I'm going to want effects to (at least usually) have a discernible cause, and I'm going to want actions to have reasonably predictable effects; I'm going to want to be able to use the past to understand the present, and the present to (kinda) predict the future. This might mean I want the fiction to have internal causalities, and more temporal integrity than you seem to think necessary.

 

[pemerton]

As a fan of that style I would say that the GM is constrained by their notes, but it is not part of the shared fiction until established in play.

A big part of skilled play is finding a way to safely bring what is in the GM's prep into the shared fiction.

So there is some sort of "intermediate" state between part of the shared fiction and able to change on a whim.

I'm not personally a big fan of that style, in the sense that I suck at it both as player and GM, but I believe I'm reasonably familiar with it. I would say that the GM's notes enter that state after play starts.

There are (as always) interesting corner cases. In practice, the GM probably prepares the first level first and fleshes out later levels later. How free is the GM in doing this latter task? Eg is it fair game, after a detection spell has been used, to introduce a lower level room that would have been within the scope of the spell? Is it enough to note that the room is lead-lined and so wouldn't have been covered by the spell even though within range?

I imagine the OSR community has useful discussions about this. In the old materials I think it's surprisingly hard to find good, clear-headed discussion of what is fair for the GM and what is not. Gygax's own discussion of it is so heavily grounded in the idiosyncrasies of his own game that it can be hard to generalise his advice.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Isn't the game real and played in the real world? Isn't the fictional food being introduced to the fiction and not the game?

Or is this just a bad case of "game" referring to far to many different things?

No, it’s a case of you misunderstanding.

The game is what the players are playing, right? And that game consists of establishing a shared fiction, right? This is done through players declaring actions for their characters in the game, and through the GM establishing scenes and building on what the players put forth.

So when someone makes a post that says the reason that something happens at the game level it means they are talking about functions of the game. Rolling dice to decide an outcome would be one of those things.

At the story level....meaning the reason something happens according to the characters in the fiction, the reason is entirely different.

The reasons for these things do not need to....and very often won’t...match.

Is that an OWL joke

The fictional PC's.

You said “I’m in a forest” so I wasn’t sure if you meant your PC, or something else. We’re talkkng about the game and the fiction as two different things, related, yes, but distinct. It helps if you post as if you get that and don’t talk about yourself as if you are a PC in a forest.

HUH? The forest has food in it whether the characters find it or not. The survival (forage) check doesn't determine whether there is food around, it determines whether the character finds said food. (I realize this is different in some games)

If the check fails, it determines that they don’t find food, yes. Whether that’s because of lack of skill or lack of the presence of food is undetermined.

Repeating yourself doesn't make your argument better.

I’m not looking to improve my stance. I’m repeating it because you expressed doubt about what is clearly true.

Depends on your perspective. A fictional earth that's exactly the same as ours very much functions exactly as the real world does from the fictional perspective.

A fictional Earth doesn’t function.

You said until it's introduced it can be changed, implying that it cannot be changed after it's introduced. I was showing that it could be. Not particularly relevant other than to say you were incorrect on that one. A bit pedantic on my part perhaps. Then again including that part initially was probably a bit pedantic on your part as well.

No, I didn’t imply that. You inferred it.

My point about how it can be changed or discarded prior to being introduced was to explain why something that has yet to be established doesn't yet exist in the fiction of the game. It is not yet binding, as @Campbell is saying.

That fact matters to what I was saying. The fact that an element of the fiction, once introduced, can be changed does not matter to what I was saying.

 

[pemerton]

As I said to @Aebir-Toril I think if I'm navigating in a fiction, I'm going to have a preference for it having a degree of self-consistency; I'm going to want effects to (at least usually) have a discernible cause, and I'm going to want actions to have reasonably predictable effects; I'm going to want to be able to use the past to understand the present, and the present to (kinda) predict the future. This might mean I want the fiction to have internal causalities, and more temporal integrity than you seem to think necessary.

I believe that outside of deliberately surreal approaches to RPGing - eg Toon, perhaps Paranoia, some approaches to Over the Edge, maybe some approaches to Cthulhu Dreamlands - these preferences seem pretty ubiquitous.

I think you are misunderstanding what @Aebir-Toril means by "internal causality" and "temporal integrity". In the world, as a general rule and putting to one side the sorts of events that mostly happen in particle accelerators, an event cannot precede its cause. If a thing is in one place, it cannot also be in another. And where I or anybody/anything else is today is an effect of causes that took place yesterday.

Fiction is not the same. JRRT can - and did - write a story about a Hobbit from the Shire before he had decided on the history of the Shire. It's true that, in the story, the shire has a history. But until JRRT actually wrote it, that history did not exist as a piece of fiction. No one in the real world knew what it was. Presumably Bilbo and his friends knew at least some of it, but given that their imaginary knowledge had never actually been imagined or written down by anyone, it did not exist as a piece of fiction any more than did the history that I am supposing they had knowledge of.

A similar point: presumably Sherlock Holmes is wearing socks when he solves the mystery of the Hound of the Baskervilles. But does anyone in the real world know what colour those socks were? I believe that Conan Doyle never wrote that down (if I'm wrong, then let's instead make it the exact number of stitches in the waistband of his trousers). It is not an established piece of fiction, and yet the absence of any discussion of Holmes' blisters or sore feet certainly allows us to infer that he was wearing some sort of hosiery.

It is in this sense that a work of fiction does not exhibit causality or temporal integrity in the way that the real world does. We can create new elements, and elide others, without having to be concerned that we haven't written down all the prior, in-fiction causes and necessary conditions of the events that we narrate. If it were otherwise, then no one could tell a story without starting at the very beginning. Yet almost no stories so begin.

I think I was getting at the idea that if an NPC is established in the fiction as being at one specific place (as in, a city) then if that NPC is going to show up at a different specific place (as in, another city, more than a hundred miles away) there needs to be thought as to why and how that NPC got there. I mean, around the table it's because of action-resolution mechanics, but things need to make some amount of narrative sense, as well.

This just seems to be a restatement, for this special case, of the general principle that prior established fiction constrains new fiction.

I understand that this principle is important to you. But again, I don't think you are very unusual or unique in that regard.

From your repeated insistence on this principle which seems to me quite uncontroversial, plus some of your remarks about your GMing of Fate, I infer that you have found yourself in a RPGing situation where either you felt yourself obliged to flout this principle, or other participants were flouting this principle. If I'm correct, that sounds like it would have been an unsatisfactory experience. In fact it sounds a bit dysfunctional.

But that's not a problem I've ever had. Nor can I ever recall having been concerned that there was a risk of such a problem. Upthread some posters have said that they don't see mechanics as a solution to GM trust issues. I would say, here, that I don't see constraining player agency (by eg having no Circles or contacts mechanics) as a very satisfactory solution to a more fundamental problem of some participants not caring about the integrity of the shared fiction.

 

[Ovinomancer]

HUH? The forest has food in it whether the characters find it or not. The survival (forage) check doesn't determine whether there is food around, it determines whether the character finds said food. (I realize this is different in some games)

I'll try this one last time with this snipped quote: the ally Thurgon found exists whether Thurgon found him or not. The existence was established by dint of the character's build choices, and the location of play. The play was in an area where there were likely to be allies for Thurgon to find, just like a forest is a likely place to find food. The rest is largely the same -- the character was successful in finding food/allies. Mechanically, the question of "do you find food/allies" is the same -- both are established as likely in the area, and within the possibility of the character finding them. The check determines if the character finds the food/ally or not. It's really that simple.

 

[prabe]

I think you are misunderstanding what @Aebir-Toril means by "internal causality" and "temporal integrity". In the world, as a general rule and putting to one side the sorts of events that mostly happen in particle accelerators, an event cannot precede its cause. If a thing is in one place, it cannot also be in another. And where I or anybody/anything else is today is an effect of causes that took place yesterday.

Fiction is not the same. JRRT can - and did - write a story about a Hobbit from the Shire before he had decided on the history of the Shire. It's true that, in the story, the shire has a history. But until JRRT actually wrote it, that history did not exist as a piece of fiction. No one in the real world knew what it was. Presumably Bilbo and his friends knew at least some of it, but given that their imaginary knowledge had never actually been imagined or written down by anyone, it did not exist as a piece of fiction any more than did the history that I am supposing they had knowledge of.

I think (and I think I've said) that comparing TRPG play to authored fiction--which I mean to include media like TV and film, as well as novels and short stories--is ... unhelpful. The players around the table are simultaneously creating the fiction and experiencing it. Writing fiction, at least for me, is not an experience particularly like reading it. Playing a TRPG is ... kinda both and neither, IME, with a strong whiff of gestalt from all the minds around the table, almost like playing in a band.

Regarding the Shire, I suspect it has a history because Tolkien wrote a story about a Hobbit from it, looking at it from outside that story. So, the causality in the real world might be kinda backward to whatever fictional causality might exist. As in, in the fiction, the hobbits are thus because the Shire is like so; in the real world, the Shire is written to be like so because it would make the hobbits thus. I'm worried I'm being unclear here.

A similar point: presumably Sherlock Holmes is wearing socks when he solves the mystery of the Hound of the Baskervilles. But does anyone in the real world know what colour those socks were? I believe that Conan Doyle never wrote that down (if I'm wrong, then let's instead make it the exact number of stitches in the waistband of his trousers). It is not an established piece of fiction, and yet the absence of any discussion of Holmes' blisters or sore feet certainly allows us to infer that he was wearing some sort of hosiery.

Sure. It's like almost no one narrates restroom trips in fiction. There are things that are presumed to happen or exist that aren't considered to be worth talking about (or might be considered unmentionable).

It is in this sense that a work of fiction does not exhibit causality or temporal integrity in the way that the real world does. We can create new elements, and elide others, without having to be concerned that we haven't written down all the prior, in-fiction causes and necessary conditions of the events that we narrate. If it were otherwise, then no one could tell a story without starting at the very beginning. Yet almost no stories so begin.

Yes. Beginnings, like endings, are in many ways arbitrary. You can never go back so far that you can't go back further. This is part of why techniques like flashbacks and in medias res exist in fiction, though they're not really congruent to how we experience the real world.

This just seems to be a restatement, for this special case, of the general principle that prior established fiction constrains new fiction.

I understand that this principle is important to you. But again, I don't think you are very unusual or unique in that regard.

Yeah. I might be unusual in how important it is to me, but I agree I'm probably not unique or an outlier.

From your repeated insistence on this principle which seems to me quite uncontroversial, plus some of your remarks about your GMing of Fate, I infer that you have found yourself in a RPGing situation where either you felt yourself obliged to flout this principle, or other participants were flouting this principle. If I'm correct, that sounds like it would have been an unsatisfactory experience. In fact it sounds a bit dysfunctional.

I think many of us with strong preferences about TRPG play--and especially GMing--have had our preferences shaped by some sort of bad experience/s.

But that's not a problem I've ever had. Nor can I ever recall having been concerned that there was a risk of such a problem. Upthread some posters have said that they don't see mechanics as a solution to GM trust issues. I would say, here, that I don't see constraining player agency (by eg having no Circles or contacts mechanics) as a very satisfactory solution to a more fundamental problem of some participants not caring about the integrity of the shared fiction.

I agree that game mechanics aren't going to help if the participants don't care about the integrity of the shared fiction, and/or the mutual enjoyment of everyone around the table. I think there's perhaps a reciprocal that if all the participants care about integrity of the shared fiction and mutual enjoyment, then they might be able to make any old set of mechanics work.

 

[pemerton]

This may look superficially like The Forge's Pawn, Actor, and Director Stance makeup. But, unlike that essay, I'm not attributing a cognitive relationship. Its literally a question of "when looking down at the Game Board, which Game Piece do you pick up to do this thing?" There is fundamentally no need for a cognitive shift (eg from Actor to Director) when "Reading a Sitch" in AW above vs what happens in 5e. You can inhabit both Actor and Director simultaneously, one or the other, or neither (Pawn). Some players may claim that they are incapable of habitation/immersion with one or the other (and others may claim amplification of habitation/immersion)...but that is entirely beside the point to "which Game Piece do you pick up to do this thing?"

On this, I think we agree.

A lot of discussion of stance approaches it as if stance were a psychological (or, as you say, cognitive) state. But clearly its not: it's possible to engage in director-stance play (eg by making a Wises check or Circles check in BW) without entering any psychological state different from any other time when one says what one's PC is doing.

Stance is, rather, a type of "logical" relationship or "authorial" relationship between player and shared fiction. It's not possible to simultaneously be in Actor and Author stance, simply because as defined they are contraries, but it's quite possible to be in Actor and Director stance (as you say) and probably also Author and Director stance.

You might remember my example of the paladin who was turned into a toad and then turned back, by the Raven Queen, as my example of simultaneous Actor and Director stance from the epic "dissociated mechanics" thread.

THINK OF CHARACTER, SITUATION, AND SETTING AS GAME PIECES

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So I have this Character. They're here, now, in this space along with other objects (Setting). Now there is a problem where I want something (through my Character) but the relationship of objects (including my Character) in this space conspires to deny me it (my ability to make this what play is about is Protagonist Agency...my ability to advocate for that desire will manifest in Tactical or Strategic Agency). This is Situation.

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Lets contrast "Read a Sitch (or Discern Realities in DW)" in AW from a Passive Perception check in 5e.

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My initial orientation here is through the Character Game Piece. I'm here and now in relation to all of these objects in this space and I'm in a situation.

I roll dice.

Any result of 7+ and my Game Piece is now either/or/both Situation or Setting (because of the structure of the move, the agenda of play, and the ethos that binds/informs GMing). Through this I'm expressing one or more of Protagonism, Tactical, Strategic agency by generating/directing/focusing content (and/or ensuring other content doesn't manifest).

I've cut out the discussion of AW failure, and also of 5e - I'm not sure where exactly you want that latter example to go.

If I succeed at reading a charged situation, then - as a player - I am able to oblige the GM to narrate some new fiction. As you say, that will enrich/develop the setting, the situation, or perhaps both. (I'm not sure if that can be the case for any single question, but I might get 3 of them!)

I certainly think that is a type of participant - in this case, player - agency. As I've already posted, I see it as being a certain cleverly-structured form of making suggestions to the GM which the GM is not free to disregard. My use of the concept "making/taking suggestions" comes from this post by Ron Edwards:

I'll expand those authorities I talked about into a list, with a key addition and with the order changed for greater clarity:

Content authority - over what we're calling back-story, e.g. whether Sam is a KGB mole, or which NPC is boinking whom

Plot authority - over crux-points in the knowledge base at the table - now is the time for a revelation! - typically, revealing content, although notice it can apply to player-characters' material as well as GM material - and look out, because within this authority lies the remarkable pitfall of wanting (for instances) revelations and reactions to apply precisely to players as they do to characters

Situational authority - over who's there, what's going on - scene framing would be the most relevant and obvious technique-example, or phrases like "That's when I show up!" from a player

Narrational authority - how it happens, what happens - I'm suggesting here that this is best understood as a feature of resolution (including the entirety of IIEE), and not to mistake it for describing what the castle looks like, for instance; I also suggest it's far more shared in application than most role-players realize . . .

I'm suggesting that you look at it from the total opposite viewpoint - that these four things are separate, they will always be separate . . .

Do they have causal relationships among one another? Of course. The easiest version is top-down reductionist: because content is consulted, a plot authority decision is made, and then a situational authority decision/presentation must be made, and finally narrational authority must be exercised. I assume that for you, this is the most easy and familiar construction, and you're used to conducting them (or at least constructing them, idealistically speaking) as a single causal sequence in this order, with one person in charge - it's a "thing," perhaps the thing you call GMing.

As a side note, other causal relationships exist, putting the authorities into a different order (to preserve the top-to-bottom causation, for clarity). For example, you can reverse them entirely, and remarkably it is very easy, although it's harder to catch oneself doing it because memory typically rewrites the act into the more familiar sequence I described above. We'll have to work on this idea later, because, for instance, Kickers and Bangs in Sorcerer rearrange the sequence far more drastically, putting situational authority at the top/starting position. Please don't get distracted by this paragraph. It's intended to be a distant signpost to future discussion.

The real point, not the side-point, is that any one of these authorities can be shared across the individuals playing without violating the other authorities. . . .

Well, let's look at this [ie another poster's bad RPG experience] again. Actually, I think it has nothing at all to do with distributed authority, but rather with the group members' shared trust that situational authority is going to get exerted for maximal enjoyment among everyone. If, for example, we are playing a game in which I, alone, have full situational authority, and if everyone is confident that I will use that authority to get to stuff they want (for example, taking suggestions), then all is well. Or if we are playing a game in which we do "next person to the left frames each scene," and if that confidence is just as shared, around the table, that each of us will get to the stuff that others want (again, suggestions are accepted), then all is well.

It's not the distributed or not-distributed aspect of situational authority you're concerned with, it's your trust at the table, as a group, that your situations in the SIS [ie shared imaginary space, or shared fiction] are worth anyone's time. Bluntly, you guys ought to work on that.
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It seems to me that, if the GM is obliged to take suggestions, then even though the GM has formal authority over (say) situation, the players clearly have a great deal of agency. Edwards also gets at this in an earlier post in the same thread:

GM: "All right, you guys see the lamps of Apple Town up ahead. You've arrived."

Player: "I spend a Story Token. My uncle lives here! We go to his cottage."

In games with such mechanics (or, in fact, games without such mechanics but in which such suggestions are welcome as suggestions), the GM pretty much has to be ready for some footwork, once in a while. If his prep, for instance, includes the assumption that no one in this town knows any of the PCs, well, he might have to think a bit.

But on the other hand, and presuming that the group is fully aware of these mechanics or these suggestions, it's really not as prep-destroying as you might think. The GM might have been wondering how the hell to get these guys into the conflicts of the town, and the uncle will be a much better entry into an informational scene than the random encounter with a talkative pickpocket the GM had been planning. Or maybe he can make the big villain of the scenario into the uncle! Perfectly fine and more fun to GM, frankly.
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The shift from suggestions being welcome to being obliged to have regard to suggestions is real, but in many ways I think a matter of degree.

Now to return to your post - whether I would agree that being able to make suggestions in this way counts as manipulating the situation and/or setting as a game piece I'm not sure. What payoff am I getting from going along with you here?