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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6807087" data-attributes="member: 42582">This is not true.First, Gandalf didn't discover a "pre-authored" truth. Putting to one side JRRT's conceit that divine creation of the world is akin to authorship, Gandalf was not living in a book. He was living in a world like ours. He discovered a truth, but it was not an "authored" truth.The analogue to this in an RPG is, as a player playing one's PC, learning a new fact about the gameworld.Let's stick with the LotR example. Gandalf's player declares in character "I believe this is the One Ring - what else would explain the Dark Lord's increasing interest in the Wilds west of the Misty Mountains? If I'm right, it won't grow hot in the fire, and Black Speech runes will appear when it's hot," and then says "I throw the ring into the fire!"In BW, this would be resolved as a Rings-wise check, with an augment from Dark Lord-wise or some similar knowledge skill reflecting the conjectured link between the identity of the ring and the movements of evil forces.When the check is made and resolved - if successful, the ring is the One and behaves as predicted, if not then it is not the One and the GM narrates something else appropriate ("fail forward") - the players, in character, learn something new about the gameworld. They didn't choose it - the dice did that. It was not under the players' control.It's true that Gandalf's skill in ring lore made him more likely to be right than would otherwise be the case, but that is entirely appropriate - when a person skilled in ring lore sincerely conjectures that a particular ring is the One, it should be more likely that s/he is right than when an unskilled person does so. In this respect the non-pre-authorship approach deftly solves the problem of how to reflect knowledge skills in play other than by playing 20 questions with the GM. (I think [MENTION=27160]Balesir[/MENTION] already made this point upthread.)What is under the player's control is forcing a determination of a particular issue. By declaring that the ring is thrown into the fire, Gandalf's player forces the table to address the question of whether this ring is the One, and forces the generation of some answer within the fiction. But forcing things to be authored is not the same as authoring them.To give a parallel example: the key for a classic D&D dungeon might have one room labelled as the orcs' barracks, with a notation that 30% of the time the orcs are sleeping and so make no noise, but 70% of the time are carousing and so can be heard via listening at the door, with a +10% bonus to the chance of success. A player, by declaring that his/her PC listens at the door, forces the GM to roll the % dice and find out whether the orcs are sleeping or carousing. But no one back in 1977 ever thought that this meant the player was authoring the gameworld and hence not learning a truth beyond the PC's control.What I am arguing against is one particular contention, namely, that GM pre-authorship is a necessary condition of an objective, consistent, etc gameworld (different posters use slightly different terminology) which the players, as their characters, learn about rather than create.That claim is not true. And it is an attempt to present what ispurely an aesthetic preference (for pre-authorship) as if it rested on a fundamental truth about the metaphysics of fictions and their creation.</blockquote>

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