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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8154367" data-attributes="member: 42582">I have never GMed Blades in the Dark. Nor have I read the rules. My knowledge of it is based on (i) others posting about it, and (ii) its resemblance in certain respects to Apocalypse World and Dungeon World.That said, I am pretty confident that a GM of BitD is expected to have regard to the motivations that players establish for their PCs. I think [USER=16814]@Ovinomancer[/USER] was doing that in the actual play report he posted (about the haunted house and the painting). But the GM is not expected to nudge the game in certain direction, and doesn't really have the resources to do so. I'm not sure about preplanned cool elements - there is a pre-established setting (Duskvol) and so I imagine that does at least suggest some cool elements. But I don't think they're meant to be secret from the players.Most importantly, in the context of a discussion of participant agency in RPGing, I don't think the GM is entitled to declare that a declared action fails by reference to the GM's unilateral conception of the fictional situation. If the GM isn't going to say "yes" then I think the action has to get put to the test (which is what we see in [USER=16814]@Ovinomancer[/USER]'s game: the PC attunes to the painting to try to work out if/how it is enchanted).What all this suggests to me is that (i) you are not very interested in character-driven or character-focused RPGing, and (ii) you much prefer what I call "RPGing as puzzle-solving" or "RPGing as learning what is in the GM's notes".What establishes the meaningfulness of the choice made by the player in Ovinomancer's game is that the PC, as played by the character, is prepared to take a risk to find a magical item that will improve his relationship with the university. We now learn something about this character, his drives, and what he thinks is worth taking a chance on. That is (broadly speaking) theme. The fact that it involves soul-sucking is probably closer to trope than theme, thought that's not a bright-line boundary and I'd of course be happy to hear what Ovinomancer thinks about that.The idea that choosing to stake your soul on finding something to improve your standing with the university is not meaningful and is mere flavour is - to me - a very strange one. I wasn't in Ovinomancer's game but to me that sounds like part of a cool situation leading to interesting stuff down the track. In my BW game where I'm a player, my PC Thurgon is prepared to stake his life to defend his honour, and to restore (what he sees as) the honour of his family and their estate. This is why encountering his brother Rufus as he did, and why his failure to rouse Rufus to action, mattered. It's not mere flavour - that's the game!The point of the random number generation in BitD (and AW, and BW, and - I would say - 4e D&D) is not to deliver theme. That's built-in and guaranteed by the rules for PC gen, for establishing the consequences of action declarations, and for framing scenes. The point of the dice is to manage pacing and related story dynamics. In a good story the protagonists get what they want some of the time, and they fail some of the time. Sometimes the chances they take pay off; sometimes those chances are overreach and redound upon them. In these RPGs, that is determined by the dice rolls. Part of the skill of designing these games is to make sure the maths works to produce reliable peaks and troughs of success and failure and complication. (We can also distinguish the games along those lines: 4e D&D produces more success than failure and so - especially when this combines with its tropes - tends towards the gonzo; whereas BW produces a pretty high rate of failure for a RPG and this is part of what makes it a demanding experience on the participants - players because their PCs are suffering and GMs because they're obliged to drive home those failures.)There is nothing in my BW game, or in Ovinomancer's BitD game, that is remotely comparable to the GM having prepared a haunted house mystery where the job of the players is to manoeuvre their PCs, via "I walk towards the . . ." or "I closely inspect the . . ." action declarations, into fictional circumstances where the GM then tells them pre-authored fiction which the players gradually piece together to solve the mystery.I did post upthread about a recent scenario I ran that was exactly as I've just described:That was fun enough, but involved very little player agency in respect of the shared fiction. It was more interactive than solving a crossword puzzle or solving The Eleventh Hour, but at its core was not a radically different intellectual exercise.</blockquote>

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