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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9459545" data-attributes="member: 42582">These passages attribute an authority to the GM that may be true in some RPGs and at some tables, but is not true in general of RPGing.For instance, in Apocalypse World (as per the rulebook, p 109):The players’ job is to say what their characters say and undertake to do, first and exclusively; to say what their characters think, feel and remember, also exclusively; and to answer your questions about their characters’ lives and surroundings.There is no "rule zero" that permits the GM to start telling a player what their character says or thinks or feels or remembers or undertakes to do. And the GM doesn't have responsibility for deciding what becomes part of the shared fiction.As far as editing is concerned more generally, in RPGing there is - at least in my experience - very little editing. There are few takebacks. Action declarations and resolutions are followed through on, with the results they produce being incorporated into the shared fiction, not filtered through some further decision-making process. GM narration is given impromptu, with little re-drafting or starting again to get it "right".This is why - if the goal of RPGing is to have exciting and thematic fiction (it isn't always) with genuine coauthorship (which isn't always the case - see eg many post-DL modules for D&D) - the rules become important. <a href="http://lumpley.com/index.php/anyway/thread/389" target="_blank">They need to reliably prompt the participants to say exciting and thematic stuff</a>:If you want awesome stuff to happen in your game, you don't need rules to model the characters doing awesome things, you need rules to provoke the players to say awesome things. That's the real cause and effect at work: things happen because someone says they do. If you want cool things to happen, get someone to say something cool. . . If your rules model a character's doing cool things, and in so doing they get the players to say cool things, that's great. I have nothing against modeling the cool things characters do as such. Just, if your rules model a character's doing cool things, but the player using them still says dull things, that's not so great.Well, <a href="http://lumpley.com/index.php/anyway/thread/360" target="_blank">as a great designer of, and thinker about, RPGs once said</a> (I've omitted the footnotes),if all your formal rules do is structure your group's ongoing agreement about what happens in the game, they are a) interchangeable with any other rpg rules out there, and b) probably a waste of your attention. Live negotiation and honest collaboration are almost certainly better. . . . As far as I'm concerned, the purpose of an rpg's rules is to create the unwelcome and the unwanted in the game's fiction. The reason to play by rules is because you want the unwelcome and the unwanted - you want things that no vigorous creative agreement would ever create. And it's not that you want one person's wanted, welcome vision to win out over another's - that's weak sauce. No, what you want are outcomes that upset every single person at the table. You want things that if you hadn't agreed to abide by the rules' results, you would reject. If you don't want that - and I believe you when you say you don't! - then live negotiation and honest collaboration are a) just as good as, and b) a lot more flexible and robust than, whatever formal rules you'd use otherwise. The challenge facing rpg designers is to create outcomes that every single person at the table would reject, yet are compelling enough that nobody actually does so. If your game isn't doing that, like I say it's interchangeable with the most rudimentary functional game design, and probably not as fun as good freeform.That's putting the point pretty strongly, but does set out a clear contrast between a RPG and improv/freeform.</blockquote>

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