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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Manbearcat" data-source="post: 6438167" data-attributes="member: 6696971">Going back to this that I posted upthread, I'm going to try to get a little more traction out of it in a different way: Again, that is pretty standard exposition for me as a scene-opener.  So what procedurally comes next?  1 - The players consider the (a) stakes of this conflict, (b) their immediate goals, (c) the relevant scene elements, (d) their suite of abilities and how these four facets play into their considerations for the actions they immediately wish to declare.2 - If any of a, b, or c is unclear to them, or of too low resolution for them to feel comfortably declaring an action, a conversation is engaged between myself and the players to clarify or more fully flesh out the situation presented to them.3 - Lets talk about (c) as its the most immediately relevant portion of the present topic.  In real life, I'm inhabiting my own mind.  Through that presence of mind, I am immediately aware of several layers of sensory information.  Further, I'm immediately ensconced in whatever psychological and emotional states that the situation either invests within me or I invest in the situation.  Through that combination of presence of mind, sensory awareness and calculation, and emotional/psychological fallout, I am immediately orienting myself and making permutations about whatever course of action (benign or other) that I might take.  I then act.  No questions are asked.  There is no sensory proxy that they must correspond with to ensure the details that they should orient themselves toward and feel this way or that way about.  There is autonomous experience, and from it there is certitude and immediate bio-feedback.  So that is first person, in real life.  That process is one of the things I consider when I'm GMing.  Life is swift and all of that stuff happening in your mind is immediate...a blurring pace of mental collage.  I want my players to sense.  I want them to feel.  I want them to orient, permutate and extrapolate.  And I want it to be quick, both for the sake of the game's pulse and our collective pulse at the table.So with that said, one of the other advantages of having the default be "saying yes" to intuitive, plausible scene elements proposed by players is to ensure a higher likelihood of maintaining PC habitation, rather than a jarring experience of 20 questions (with the answer being very much up in the air) with your sensory proxy (the GM).  This seems intuitive to me given the pace, autonomy of human experience processing, the certitude and bio-feedback that comes with it.  Assuming good faith on behalf of the players (and a simple credibility test of whether a proposal is plausible or not is simple in the extreme), it would seem that player proposals for tightening up the scene's resolution (in-filling details that weren't canvassed at initial GM exposition when framing the scene) should be propositions that are intuitive for them (eg - make sense from an "inhabiting the PC's PoV").  They're seeing it in their mind and just affirming it.  However, it seems that some see the applied principle above ("say yes...or roll the dice") as a gateway for bad faith metagaming as the default mode of players' play.  So then we need to initiate the nuclear precautionary principle option of implementing play procedures whereby the sensory proxy (GM) veto hangs over the head of each and every player proposal of a scene element...right down to the utterly mundane "beard on NPC001's face" and "boxes/crates/barrels (etc) in an alley".  How in the world is that not "jarring" to players?  I can't imagine playing under such a scenario and ever feel like I'm inhabiting my PC.</blockquote>

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