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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Manbearcat" data-source="post: 8135738" data-attributes="member: 6696971">I've been trying to think how to address this (no one thinks a gamestate evolves and a fiction emerges exclusively of its own volition) without going through all of the various aspects of very explicit and integrated System Agenda, GMing Principles and Techniques, Conversation/Play Structure, PC Build Components, Resolution Mechanics, Reward Cycles, and Feedback Loops in these games.  How about this.  I'm assuming most people have played Pictionary.  When you sit down to play Pictionary, there are codified constraints on how you can "pantomime through drawing" (no prearranged cipher- eg draw an ear for "sounds like", can't use letters or numbers or hashes for letters like hangman, no noises, and other things as well along these lines).The GM is the Pictionary drawer.  They're (1) constrained by these rules and (2) constrained by the content on the cards that they're going to try to telegraph to the players by drawing and (3) constrained by the premise and the results of play (they don't get to go Calvinball and change any of these 3 things).  Now there are (4) an innumerable ways that any individual (2) can be made manifest on the sketchboard.  That (4) there?  THAT is what the GM does in these kinds of games.  That is their contribution.  They take their (4) (creative energy, genre aptitude, and general cognitive horsepower and industry), which is (1) constrained by the rules, (2) constrained by the thematic content that has been signalled to them (by the players through their PCs), and (3) constrained by the game's premise and the results of play...and they apply that (4) continuously where the play loop calls for it (and no more...they don't draw for the other team or provide the answer to their own drawing).  Through this process, the gamestate evolves organically until the game is done.</blockquote>

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