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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Manbearcat" data-source="post: 6325578" data-attributes="member: 6696971">Thanks for the post.  What you depict below is very akin to the formalized advice/process for creating and handling the evolution of fronts in Dungeon World.  What you've described is very familiar to me.  It is, as you put it, pretty much in the middle.  I've run games on both ends of the spectrum and areas in between.  My current GMing best practices does push play towards low resolution setting backstory at the outset ("lots of blanks") and just enough calibrated PC backstory such that all of those setting blanks can be filled in during play (by our play) and the trajectory of the "story" is established alongside it through deft GMing (provoking players' thematic material that they have embedded within their characters) and player investment in the conflicts to be resolved. I've found over the years that if I demand myself to be spontaneous and improvisational, I will deliver the goods and enjoy the experience more than if I prepped meticulously.  Further, I've found that if I leave enough spaces/blanks for my players to fill, and demand the same level of creativity, they will deliver the goods coherently (from a genre perspective and an internal consistency perspective).  In contrast, I've found that as the shared imaginary space is contracted (due to less blanks/higher resolution setting/rigid adherence to established canon), operant conditioning takes hold and players constantly look to me to vet their creative impulses.  That is not what I want from me, not what I want from them, and not what I want out of our play.  I know you (and others) have had reservations about an abstraction: player agency infringement correlation.  There is, of course, a natural arrestment of the causal logic chain for real life actors as information is lost.  However, RPG players naturally function in a low resolution environment where sensory and spatial information is fundamentally retarded with respect to real life.  Regardless of how well the GM conveys "the dynamics on the ground", there will be an inescapable perspective dissonance from player to GM and from player to player.   Each player must assimilate what the GM has conveyed, what other players have conveyed, the context for that information, along with the required in-fill of their own, unique perception bias.  Understanding that reality, playing with tools that zoom out a bit in response to that (broad descriptor resources and conflict resolution), heady GMing/attentive playing, and synchronicity on genre conceits has served to protect against any player agency infringement because of abstraction.The above also applies to the exchange that Sadras[/mention and  pemerton are having.</blockquote>

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