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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8166000" data-attributes="member: 82106">My impression is that [USER=5636]@estar[/USER] has a less fully developed, or less fully articulated, conception of GM agenda and principles. That is, I'm contrasting it with Dungeon World, where the game literally says (paraphrased a bit) "GM, you are a fan of the players, make them shine." Then it expounds techniques which do this. One of those is 'fiction first', which can be understood to include a lot of the constraints estar mentioned, that is the action draws from the fiction, and must follow consistently in concert with player's understanding of 'how the world works'. Another principle is always to 'up the ante' on the PCs. This is intended to help make them 'more awesome' but also to force them to move forward in the fiction at all times in some sense. So, in his game, the GM is kind of playing a sort of 'zookeeper' role, where there is an element of curating the setting and interactions of the PCs with it, but without the hard constraints outlined above (you are literally playing DW wrong if you violate the GM's agenda/principles although they not stated specifically like 'rules' per se). This is understandable, his style is organically grown out of the early Gygaxian D&D game structure, and actually seems to me to largely comply with the admonitions of 2e, vis-a-vis generating story structure (IE that the leading role here is in the hands of the GM, but that they should incorporate some direction informally from the players). I think, if you interpret 2e a certain way, you COULD see it as moving in a trajectory that could lead to DW, it is just not nearly there yet. However, IME most 2e play becomes pretty authoritarian at times, it is hard to escape from the lack of mechanical support for character advocacy and directly connecting players to generating story elements. So GMs tend to fall back onto rulings that simply push things in a direction they feel comfortable with/anticipated/or like. I think the gist of most of this thread is wrestling with that in the context of the thread starter. What dimensions of play process describe games with more or less player autonomy?</blockquote>

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