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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ovinomancer" data-source="post: 8153162" data-attributes="member: 16814">No myth is not fertile ground for Illusionism -- it literally prevents it because the GM has no preplanned outcomes they need to Force onto players in a hidden way!  No Myth explicitly means this.As for why the arguments I made no longer apply, it's simply because your, like I was, are looking at the single moment in play where the GM narrates either scene framing and/or failure states.  However, these things aren't isolated -- they are embedded in the larger context which is player driven, not GM driven.  The mistake made here is keeping the same ideas that the GM has the only authority over the setting and outcomes -- this is no longer true.  Nor is the GM solely responsible for the obstacles faced.  While this appears true, the actual truth is that the when the GM frames an obstacle it's a direct reaction to a player declaration.  If you frame things that aren't part of the player declarations, it's obvious you've done so and a clear violation of the ethos and rules of the game!One of the other things I see you might have gotten wrong are the guidelines of the game.  If you're still in D&D mode, guidelines are pieces of advice that GM is intended to ignore when they don't suit the GM.  They're literally more suggestions than rules.  This is not so in Blades -- these guidelines are how you are supposed to play the game at all times!  Breaching a guideline intentionally is moving into bad faith play.  These guidelines are actual rules of play.  There's often a good bit of leeway in how you might use them, but you are to keep within them during play, not ignore them when convenient.As for framing, of course it affects player behavior -- this is trivially obvious.  However, the framing of the portrait in that case was a minor detail -- the focus was entirely on the guard.  That minor detail became important not because I was making it so in describing it, but because a player had a goal that they thought they could turn that detail into.  If it hadn't been described, that player would have looked for something else to do the same thing to because, as we discussed later after the session, they saw an opportunity in raiding Lord Scurlock's abandoned manor house as a chance to lift something that would aid them in their effort to get back into the University's good graces.  If I had described a small statue, that would have been it.  Had I not described something, the player would have asked after something, thus making it relevant and prompting me to narrate that something.  I get that you're trying to say that placing the portrait drove the player to investigate it, so therefore it was the same as a GM driven game where the GM has pre-planned the portrait, but the fundamental difference here is that it was the player that wanted something and so latched onto the flavor description -- there was no plan by me that portraits in the manor were anything at all.  Heck, if the player just wanted to take it for coin, it would have gone in a completely different direction!</blockquote>

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