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Message: <blockquote data-quote="CandyLaser" data-source="post: 9470939" data-attributes="member: 7029413">I don't want to be drawn into a long and pointless conversation, so I plan to reply to this and then exit the thread. Might change my mind, of course.Framing this as the GM "making things" that the players tell them to make is just wrong. Insofar as anything is being "made" here, it's being made by everyone, collaboratively, with each player (including the GM) having one or more areas in which they get the final word. Everyone provides input and ideas, and as GM, I have plenty of opportunities to exercise creativity. What's more, establishing that one player has the final word doesn't preclude other players pushing back on ideas they don't like. My group doesn't do that very often, because we've been playing together for over ten years and we are generally on the same page creatively, but it does happen. When it does, we act like reasonable people and figure out something that everyone can accept.Asking questions is, generally, a way of generating and eliciting ideas, but to be explicit: everyone, including the GM, can throw in ideas. I also don't know why you're obsessed with power relationships between the GM and the other players. It's a weird lens to use for talking about what I see as a collaborative activity, wherein my friends and I get to play a fun creative game together. But in this case, there are topics on which the GM gets the final word, so the notion that the GM has to do whatever the player says is mistaken.In fact, Fellowship is fairly up-front on who gets the final word on any particular question. Players get the final word about their characters and their cultures of origin. The game has a move called Command Lore. For everyone but the GM, that move looks like this:Formatting from the source. Fellowship is a bit odd in that the GM has a character of their own, the villain the PCs are attempting to stop, and as the Overlord, the GM gets to Command Lore as well. Here's what the Overlord playbook says:And a bit later:Bonds are a mechanical thing, not relevant here. The upshot is that the GM has the final word on most of the features of the world, but again, it's a collaborative process, so everyone can make proposals. In addition to Command Lore, PCs can ask questions of the GM as well, and when they do that, it's often done using a different move called Look Closely. Here's the text:Formatting from the source, again. I've left out the list of questions, as it's not relevant; what is relevant is that providing the final answers to these questions are explicitly left in the hands of the GM, but everyone is allowed to offer potential answers or build on what someone else has said.One crucial thing that's solely the GM's purview in Fellowship is the nature of the Overlord, the adversary threatening the players and the world at large. For our game, I came up with five or so potential Overlords before play even started and pitched them to the PCs to see which one(s) elicited most interest, but that's not required, and in the end we ended up going with the one I was most interested in anyway. The other players made their characters with the Overlord as the backdrop - they knew who they'd be fighting against and let that inform the character creation process.Your portrayal of what I described is inaccurate. I told the player that something important to the ogres was under threat. In game terms I was doing a GM move, what Fellowship calls a Cut - in this case, it was both "reveal an unwelcome truth" and "show signs of an approaching threat." This wasn't prompted by anything the player did or said; it was me, as the GM, dictating a truth about the world. The player told me what it was that was threatened. I took their answer and added to it, describing what the threat was in more detail. In this way we came up with a story collaboratively, with both of us contributing elements. I think in the case it was just me and one other player talking, but in other situations multiple players have chimed in with suggestions.I also take issue with the way you're describing the exchange as the player offering "a tiny seed." They provided a detailed and substantive answer to a question, which served as the foundation for me to add more on. The whole process is cooperative, with all parties involved coming up with ideas and weaving them into the rest of the narrative. I didn't create "whatever I wanted." Rather, I took the player's statement about what was under threat and added more to it, elaborating on the nature of the the threat. And if I didn't like what the player said, I could have asked for something else. I could have said "Hmmm, the Great Mother sounds cool, but I was thinking something more like a location or an important cultural artifact," or what-have-you, and then the player would have gone back to the drawing board. Or I could have said that, but then thrown in an idea of my own - "What do you think about a place where the nomadic ogre clans meet regularly?" That's the nature of collaboration.Creating stuff is done in play; it's part of the game. When you're coming up with stuff, you are playing the game.EDIT: fixed busted formatting.</blockquote>

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