And what happens if the player(s) ignore the GM "continuing the fiction otherwise"?
If the players do, the session grinds to a screeching halt and cannot continue as normal. If one player does, he is being brought to heel or removed from the game.
I mean, the GM is welcome to continue playing his/her own solo game, but that is no more RPGing than the players playing their own game.
Exactly, no doubt. But removing the GM has greater ramifications that removing a player out of a, say, standard 4-man party. So it's completely not equivalent.
From the pretty trivial point that RPGing depends upon a degree of group cohesion, nothing follows about how RPGing and GMing can and should be done.
It follows that rules-as-written are meaningless unless backed up by the sufficient will to stick to them. Which was my whole point to begin with. I am invalidating your "The rulebook does not say the GM has the authority to ignore the rules". Or to be precise: I am invalidating it to exactly the same degree that the players are willing to enforce that the GM plays by the rules-as-written. And that goes btw regardless of the game having a Rule 0 in its rulebook or not. Players might be able to force the GM to stick exactly to RAW, ignoring any license a Rule 0 in the rulebook might have given him otherwise.
Anyway, this is dragging on too long. I maintain: the standard model is that players declare intent and GM's determine the outcome of that.
If you disagree, that's fine; I can live with that.
An analogy: no one analyses how playing chess works by considering the possibility of a player who will tip over the board if s/he finds him-/herself losing.
If in a casual game an opponent touches a piece, it raises the question of if you're going to enforce that he has to move it or not. If you had agreed that the rule is in effect, he accidentally touches a piece, you insist he moves it but he refuses to - what are you going to do? Swallow it and move on or threaten to quit?
Anyway, I think this analogy is a dead end, let's not pursue it any further.
You seem to be assuming that there is some notion of playing an RPG which is indepenent of any particular system of rules, techniques, participant roles, etc; and so a group might just sit down and do that (whatever "that" exactly is), with the GM drawing upon rules or mechanics from time to time as s/he thinks worthwhile and consistent with player expectations. But that assumption is in my view untenable in general, and obviously so in the context of this thread which begins with a request for advice on how to approach the game to produce a non-GM-driven experienc.
I don't think I am the only one in thinking that there is such a notion:
"Rule Zero, also known as GM fiat, is the
common RPG rule that the GM has the ultimate say in all rules matters and can thus introduce new rules or exceptions to rules, or abolish old ones at their leisure. [...] It should be noted that while Rule Zero has decades of tradition behind it, it is
not universally accepted."
https://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/102507/what-is-rule-zero
Emphasis mine.
In your first post in this thread you said "I am confused by the discussion" and in your second post you quoted me discussing action declaration and said "Players don't declare actions, they declare intent." Maybe your assumption that everyone is talking about what you apparently think they should be talking about is one source of your confusion. The OP doesn't specify a system and makes no reference to "average" or "traditional" RPGs. My reply (post 13) to the OP which the OP accepted as offering the most useful response to his query did not reference what you call an "average RPG" - it referenced Burning Wheel and Dungeon World.
Of course it's open to you to stipulate that by "traditional RPG" you mean an RPG in which the GM has unilateral control over all changes in the shared fiction - but you may find that many posters don't find that a very compelling definition, nor a very interesting premise for a discussion about GMing techniques.
How is the OP relevant if we're not discussing the topic of the thread but are being side-tracked by a quite different question: do players declare actions or intent? (Or differently phrased: if a player declares that his PC is going to do X - is the PC
definitely going to do X or does the GM have the power to rule that specific, unusual circumstances prevent the character from even trying?) The post I replied to in the above specifically referenced AD&D, you responded to my reply by quoting from the PHB and DMG. So I feel very safe in claiming that the immediate context of my remarks was not Dungeon World.
No. You don't get to unilaterally specify what we are talking about.
I don't. But I do get to determine unilaterally if this conversation is a waste of my time.