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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7518940" data-attributes="member: 42582">Continuing in my persona as the man from 15 months ago:This was interesting, both in general and because I'm trying to get myself into the mindset to GM Dungeon World next year.I don't know BitD outside of this thread and a few other posts about it, so my thinking/question will be framed in (what I take to be) DW-ish terms. And also BW-ish terms.It seems to me that this issue of whether the description is "controlled", "risky" or "desperate" isn't just about the fiction the GM narrates (and whether s/he adds the lullaby, or the approaching hounds, as were flagged upthread); but also about what permissions s/he enjoys to introduce consequences of various degrees of severity.For instance, if the situation is controlled then the consequence of the lantern rolling out into the corridor - hence making things risky - seems permitted. But a consequence of the lantern setting fire to the building, hence riksing the life of the NPC the PCs are there to rescue, would seem excessive.Whereas if the situation is already established as risky, and then a roll is made that directs the GM to escalate, escalating to that sort of situation is more likely permissible.Upthread,  [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION] posted some back-and-forth from another thread, or a series of PMs, where  [MENTION=99817]chaochou[/MENTION] mentioned sometimes needing to take time, in AW, to establish the proper consequence; and I talked about having a similar experience from time to time when GMing BW (and I could say now that I've also had it once or twice GMing Prince Valiant, though in that game everything is a bit less gritty than in AW, BW, BitD, etc). I see this demand on the GM resulting from the fact that what is implicit in a situation is not always self-evident, and it can take real interpretive effort to bring out the appropriate thing. And it seems that part of what makes a thing appropriately implicit in the scene is precisely whether, at the table, we agree that the scene is controlled, risky or desperate.This post pushed my thoughts in a slightly different direction - not about what consequences are implicit in a situation, but rather what possibilities (for the protagonists) are implicit. Some (relatively) recent D&D threads, about how to adjudicate jumping in 5e, and the "problem" with 4e martial PCs being "supernatural, have reminded me that at some tables, at least, the conception of possibility can be very narrow if there is no explicit game move permitting whatever it is the player is hoping to have his/her PC do.Whereas I do my best to work with a permissive notion of possibility, and to use the game system rather than GM veto as the rationing device. This is where a fairly robust resolution system comes in handy - especially because if the resolution system is robust, then the game won't break just because the fiction changes in some dramatic or unexpected way!The actual example, of tapping into a psychic maelstrom to teleport to a location, reminded me of <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?319889-Doppelganger-mayhem-(with-a-long-lead-up)" target="_blank">a somewhat similar thing</a> that happened in my 4e game (improvised Arcana was the mechanical framework).(As a footnote to this: the more "sim" the system, the more the system itself will impose constraints on this sort of thing. Of the systems I'm currently GMing, I would regard BW and Classic Traveller as more towards that "sim" end of the spectrum, hence having fewer of these "open ended" moves within them.)I'm the long-time GM for my group, and I tend also to be the "setting guy" in virtue of being the one who has the shelf full of setting books from 30+ years of RPGing.So my approach to the issue that chaochou describes here is to proceed in three steps. First, we establish genre: eg default 4e; default BW lifepaths; Classic Traveller with its worlds and imperial navy and nobles et al; Dark Sun - swords and planet, psionics, sorcerer-kings, gladiatorial arenas; etc. (PC build rules are obviously important here.)Second, the players establish whatever it is they want to about PC backstory - eg (in BW) my 6 years as an arcane devotee were spent with my brother in our hilltop tower, accompanied by an awesome emailed photo of an old Indian hill fort in semi-arid country; or, in Classic Traveller having just rolled up a noble with gambling skill, a yacht, and a shortened second term due to a near-miss survival roll, I won a yacht gambling, but the previous owners beat the sh*t out of me in the carpark afterwords, and I've just come out of hospital - where another PC, with skill Medic-1, hapens to have been working; or, in 4e, I'm one of the surviving refugees of Entekash, a city that was sacked by humanoid  - hence why I hate goblins, orcs and the like, and why I'm going to restore civilisation to the world as a devotee of Erathis.Third, I will then take lead responsibility for locating these elements on the (pre-given) map, or fitting it into the bigger picture. So the wizard brothers' tower (now ruined, having been sacked by orcs as part of the backstory) is in the Abor-Alz on the GH map; Entekash was a city to the north of the mountains on the B11 inside cover map (ie off the map), and that whole area to the north has been rendered wild and unihabitable since its sacking - and yes, the patron looking to recruit your for your first adventure did know your uncle so-and-so the trader; the Marine patron we just rolled up on the patron encounter table knows the medic PC from his time in the navy, and she is interested to learn that he's been nursing the guy who won the yacht gambling, because the former owners were meant to be using it as part of her smuggling operation and now she'll need to recruit it's new owner!Sometimes there isn't a pre-established setting, and then the players can contribute as freely as I do: it was a player who decided that our starting world for Traveller (that I rolled up after they rolled their PCs) was a gas giant moon; and in our Cortex+ Heroic game, after the players voted for vikings over Japan (I'd designed pre-gens who could work as either) they esablished the backstory to kick things off (but that game doesn't involve a map any more complicated than "north, snow, glacier, mountains; south, fields, villages that need to be kept safe").And in our Prince Valiant game we worked out our starting location was the south of Britain because I was using a scenario from the Episode Book, and the NPC was Lady Joan of Kent, and the action was taking place fairly close to her castle. We use the map of Britain on the Pendragon inside cover, but - like the GH maps in our BW game - it's just a narrative prop. It doesn't actually play any role in action resolution.I don't know BitD well enough to know whether it lends itself to my 1-2-3 approach ie are the pre-authored backstory elements so obviously consonant with the genre that you can let the players set up their backstory and then just map that onto the labels/narrative props provided by the game? GH is good for this because it is such a generic-swords-and-sorcery-a-la-the-Hyborean-Age-with-added-elves-and-dwarves-and-orcs world; Glorantha (to pick a contrasting example) I would think not so much, as it has its own distinctive vision and details. BitD seems like its setting might be intermediate between these two examples.</blockquote>

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