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Message: <blockquote data-quote="chaochou" data-source="post: 8937459" data-attributes="member: 99817">Yes! So your example started with 'Suppose the GM provides a context'. I think it's obvious that the process - and the participants - in this step of 'creating context' is a fundamental component of what gets called 'playstyle' and the experience of play.Here's a traditional (and well-regarded) example of one method of this 'creating context':"Adventurers from a foreign land find themselves in Barovia, a mysterious realm surrounded by deadly fog, and ruled by Strahd von Zarovich, a vampire and wizard.... a fortune teller named Madame Eva sets them on a dark course that takes them to many corners of Barovia, culminating with a vampire hunt in Castle Ravenloft."This tells us a few things. The players' characters must be adventurers. The characters are foreigners, so they are not allowed pre-established knowledge or connections to this place or its people - this establishes the GM as the gatekeeper of all information about the setting and situation. It is unequivocal about what the adventurers' task is. And it says, in broad terms, how the adventurers will accomplish this task.I'd contrast with how my group establishes new games. Since you mentioned Burning Wheel, I'll give an example of that. The conversation went a bit like this:Me: "How about a game set in a folklore-ish medieval England?"Player A: "Could be good, sort of fantasy Robin Hood?"Me: "Sure? Like corrupt officials and a greedy and overbearing local lord?"Player B: "That works if we're going to be a sort of resistance movement or fugitives."Player C: " We might start out just normal folk who become fugitives."Me: "Oh, so we could create a remote woodland village with you as some of the common folk and have some tax collectors arrive, and see what develops."Player A: "Can I run the local mill?"Me: "Maybe the harvest has been really poor this year."Player A: "Right! So I'm struggling and we've been out poaching in the deep woods."Player B: "In that case I'd be the woodsman and hunter who knows those lands - maybe I'm helping you out because I'm hoping to marry your daughter."Player C: "It would be great to have a minor landowner, but my lands were seized and I've been sheltering in this village with the local priest."To  be clear, that's a sanitised and precis version of half an hour or hour of knocking ideas about, but I think the points of difference in this version of 'establishing context' are obvious. The characters aren't 'adventurers'. The themes and content of the game have been established by the players. The game doesn't assume homogenous goals amongst the player characters - one is struggling for money, one wants a wife, both have been poaching, one has an ongoing conflict around their lands and a relationship with the church. And the characters are not strangers in their own adventure - their deeds and actions are rooted within a community they implicitly know and understand something about.It's an interesting question! How does one stop a player asking? Does the GM say 'You're not allowed to ask that."It would seem to me that classic dungeon crawling assumes players will ask clarifying questions with the aim of getting their conception of the situation to match the GMs ever more closely, until they feel confident to pursue a course of action.</blockquote>

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