NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6797519" data-attributes="member: 42582">It's not the players who search and do or don't find the mace - it's the PCs.The reason I emphasise that distinction is because it relates to the other distinction I've been making - between the ingame consistency or "reality" of the gameworld, and the real-world activity of authoring the gameworld. Within the gameworld - from the ingame perspective -  it is not "Schroedinger's mace". It was never there, as it had been taken from the ruins by the dark elf.But at the table, the authorship is in response to the check.This also illustrates an aspect of "fail forward" that has been discussed upthread, that what is at stake is not just (or even primarily) whether or not the PCs succeed in their task, but whether things turn out as they wanted.This difference from "fail forward" highlights what, to me, is key - that "fail forward" is a technique that is intended to drive dramatic and narrative momentum without GM pre-authorship. (At least as it has been systematised in those games which make a point of calling it out as a technique.)Once the GM knows what the answer is to the location of the mace in advance, and that is taken as fixed regardless of the dynamics of play when (if at all) the search actually occurs, then the focus of play has moved away from dramatic momentum to something else. (Eg exploring the GM's world/mystery/etc).In the discussion of the trapdoor begun by [MENTION=23935]Nagol[/MENTION] upthread, the possibility of a jailer turning up to taunt (and perhaps free) the trapped PC was discussed. If that jailer is authored by the GM not in advance, but because it is a useful element of the fiction for maintaining narrative momentum, then the logic is no different from "fail forward" as illustrated in the example of the mace.But whereas in some approaches to GMing needing to introduce the jailer post hoc is seen as a failing that, ideally at least, would be avoided, in "fail forward" games that sort of approach is made integral to the running of the game.Too far in respect of . . . ?</blockquote>

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