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Message: <blockquote data-quote="SabreCat" data-source="post: 4717143" data-attributes="member: 76245">Ah. OK. The Battleship/Stratego example as illustrative of "playing a role" is helpful, I think. So the player and character need to have access to very similar sets of information for it to count as "playing a role" by your definition/preference. I guess I have a few questions, to see if I can come to understand this by another step or two: First: regarding "things about which information exists." (I think this is the less pertinent question, but it does interest me.) To what extent is the pre-existence of the information even important? In Battleship, if I were a horrible cheat and/or had poor impulse control, I could grab the game board, spin it around, and see the whole layout of those ships I'd been searching for. They're objectively verifiable. But in the GMed RPG scenario, there's not necessarily anything of the sort, and indeed there certainly isn't in all those cases where the GM improvises instead of reading/revealing from maps or notes. If there were a hypothetical GM who could improvise everything of his gameworld without preplanning... would revealing that be a disappointment to a player who prefers the exploration style? Second: Isn't it true that players already know more, and have control over more, than their characters do? Can't players already partition off some portion of their knowledge for the character's use, and leave other portions for their own? (I know my character has 3 hit points left, and thus has a 50% chance of falling unconscious from a 1d4 dagger blow. The character knows he's reeling from his wounds and doesn't have much fight left in him, but nowhere near that level of detail.) In what way do you feel that GMless/collaborative storytelling play prevents a player from doing this in a similar fashion with world information and narrative authority?</blockquote>

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