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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8995122" data-attributes="member: 42582">You're missing an unstated premies in [USER=48965]@Imaro[/USER]'s question: [USER=29398]@Lanefan[/USER] often makes similar remarks that rest on a similar unstated premise.The premise is this: that it is important that the imagined stuff the players engage with is the product of someone else's imagination.This is also, as best I can tell, what [USER=7025508]@Crimson Longinus[/USER] and [USER=6801845]@Oofta[/USER] mean by an "objective fictional reality" (which of course read literally is somewhere between waffle and oxymoron).Because it's the product of someone else's imagination, a player can learn about it by asking that other person to tell them what they're imagining!Whereas something that is the product of one's own imagination is not an object of discovery.Now even good storytelling games (eg like A Penny For My Thoughts) have techniques to mediate between just making up one's own stuff, and engaging with or integrating the stuff that others imagine. And once we get to RPGs like (say) DW or BW, there are very sophisticated design features that exploit the asymmetric participant roles to achieve this sort of mediation and integration. Most posts from [USER=6801845]@Oofta[/USER] and @Lanefant don't acknowledge those design features, and the associated techniques, and so just presume that if the player gets to exercise imagination then the player is just making it all up - but that's simply a result, as best I can tell, of not having any or any real familiarity with the games in question.But the previous paragraph doesn't alter the basic point, that there is an unstated premise about where the imagined stuff should come from.My experience is that if you bring this premise to the surface by describing it as "an objective fictional reality" you will be praised, and if you bring it to the surface as "learning what someone else has imagined" or "learning what someone else has written down about what they imagined, perhaps in note form" you will be criticised. But the different descriptions are all referring to the same thing.If you thing that discovering what someone else has imagined is fundamental to being a RPG player, then you will naturally think that the GM should have a LOT of control!</blockquote>

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