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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7057574" data-attributes="member: 42582">An error that arises from treating something as being an instance of a type that it is not.For instance, anthropomorphic explanations (say, explaining gravitational forces as "The two masses want to move towards one another) involve category errors. People (and other animals) have wants, as a result of which they move towards one another; but masses per se do not. The concept of desire has no work to do in explaining planetary motion, or why the apple (supposedly) fell on Newton's head.Asking what colour the taste of an apple is (if asked literally and not by way of metaphor) is a category error, as colour pertains to visible sensation, not taste sensation.And describing something as neither true nor false in the fiction at a certain time within the fiction (eg the time when the PC looks for the mace) because at that time in the real world the answer hasn't been authored yet is a category error, as it attributes a property of the real world (is the moment at which a piece of fiction is authored) to the fictional world - whereas, in the fictional world, events arent authored at all, but arise through the (fictional, imagined) causal processes that govern the gameworld (eg people become evil because of poor parenting, or exposure to maddening radiation in temples of Tharizdun, or whatever other causal process operates in a given setting).But isn't magic item identification by trial and error almost the textbook example of a puzzle (not for the PCs, but for the players). Eg:Player: I pull on the boots. GM: Your steps feel somewhat lighter. Player: OK, they're either Boots of Levitation or Boots of Striding and Springing. I try to jump over the treasure chest!I think the resemblance to 20 questions - a classic puzzle-solving game - is pretty evident.So much depend on what the "already there" refers to. Is it the 12 deities imprisoned beneath the ruins of Castle Greyhawk, which Robilar unleashed? That's absolutely a player imposing his will on the fiction.Is the "already there" a whole series of "character arcs" for NPCs, towns and regions, etc, that the GM has mapped out? Then to me it seems like the player is primarily contributing some colour to a pre-determined series of events.This is why I will pilfer situations from modules - set-ups that are just waiting for the players (via their PCs) to "set them in motion" - but am not interested in a module's prescripted sequence of events and metaplot.Maybe, maybe not. As is often the case, a lot turns on details.If stuff happened that matters to the game, in the sense of engaging or involving stuff that is core to the PCs (and hence their players), then the situation might continue to be important. It would inform framing; inform the narration of consequences for failure. But none of that requires the GM to give the town its own "character arc"!Here's an example of play (from my main 4e game) that shows how I handled the return of the PCs to the underdark, and the lands of the duergar and the drow after killing Lolth and sealing the Abyss; I've put it in sblocks for length.:[sblock][/sblock]But the world can "unfold" - contributing the occasional bit of colour, perhaps appearing in some framing - without contradicting the players' achievements or negating the significance of their choices (including their choice of "this mission" as the thing that they care about).Until you tell me how the surprise relates to the outcomes of play, I can't tell you whether or not I would regard it as railroading. Which goes back to the example of the assassination of the Marquis.If this undoes an apparent victory by the players, then in my view it is railroading, because it's the GM overriding the result(s) of the players' declared and resolved actions, in order to shape the shared fiction in some particular direction.But if it doesn't, then maybe it's just framing.With the vampire example, though, I find it hard (not impossible, but hard) to imagine very many cases where the revelation that the sponsor/mentor is really a vampire (an evil undead) would be mere framing. Mostly I would expect the players (and their PCs) to be invested in their sponsor/mentor, and hence would feel that this is a turning of the tables which would be fine as a consequence of some appropriate failure, but objectionable (at my table) as a mere framing device.How does a player get to narrate that a NPC vampire is admiring his reflection in a mirror?I've answered this, and you even quoted my answer:That seems pretty clear to me.Also, the GM hasn't actually "done anything" off-screen. The GM tells the players the townsfolk look miserable and sullen. If the players (and their PCs) ignore this, then nothing of any consequence has happened either on-screen or off. If a PC asks "Lo, good burghers - what troubles you?" and they reply "The baron hath raised our taxes", then the backstory is established but it's still not the case that the GM did anything off-screen. The baron did (raised taxes). The GM didn't.Just as it is often helpful to distinguish the player from the PC, so it is equally useful not to confuse the actions of the GM (eg saying something at the table) with the actions of NPCs and other inhabitants of the gameworld. The GM's action exert real causal power in the real world; the actions of NPCs have imaginary causal power in an imaginary world. When we're talking about playing the game, we're mostly interested in the former sorts of actions, I think.Well, first, as a side point, I can assure you that it was not a problem at all, either big or small.Second, there was no previous interaction with the brother in play: only as part of the backstory of two of the PCs (the brother PC had not seen him since his possession; the wizard-assassin PC had been tutored by him subsequent to his possession, and had had some bad experiences in the course of that, leading to her resolution to kill him, flay him and send his soul to . . . [a bad place]).Third, to the extent that the brother PC's memories of and affection for his brother were invalidated, that's the whole point! That's what makes it a failure. (And that's why I find the notion that "fail forward" means "no real failure" or nothing more than "success with complication" completely misses the point.) As I posted in reply to [MENTION=16814]Ovinomancer[/MENTION] (post 314):The PC has chosen to return (for the first time in 14 years) to the site where he last saw his brother; the tower they had to abandon when it was assaulted by orcs; the place where, in trying to fight off those orcs, the brother tried to summon a mighty storm of magical lightning and instead opened up a conduit to hell and was possessed by a balrog. Having returned, the PC hopes to find the item he was working on, seeking to enchant, when the orcs attacked. That is not a low stakes situation. It's a high stakes one. The player chose to put all this to the test; and failed.If the player wanted to remain safe with his PC's nostalgic memories of his brother, he shouldn't have tried to reclaim his past legacies. But he took the risk. That's the point of the game! (The motto for Burning Wheel is "Fight for what you believe!" The player (and PC) believed that by recovering the lost mace, he could advance his attempt to redeem his brother. But he lost the fight. That's what happens when you fail a check.)Fourth, I don't know what inconsistencies you are talking about. I'm not aware of any, and have not posted about any in this thread. (Because there were none.)I've already <a href="http://quoted Paul Czege" target="_blank">quoted Paul Czege</a> twice in thread; maybe third time's the charm: I frame the character into the middle of conflicts I think will push and pull in ways that are interesting to me and to the player. I keep NPC personalities somewhat unfixed in my mind, allowing me to retroactively justify their behaviors in support of this.Managing backstory and maintaining the consistency of the fiction is of course an important GM function. (Though not a sole GM function: players can remember backstory too, and point out that some new element someone wants to introduce would conflict with the established fiction.) But you don't need to write everything in advance to maintain consistency (as the example of Charles Dickens and his two endings to Great Expectations illustrates).It's no sort of success. The PC (and player) want to redeem the brother. The mace is envisaged as some sort of means to that end (I can't remember the details anymore). Instead, evidence that the brother may be irredeemable is found. That is failure.(If the goal of play was to solve the mystery of the brother, then learning stuff about him would be a success. But that was not the goal. And up until the moment of revelation, there was no "mystery of the brother" - the PCs who had any opinion of the brother at all both assumed that he had been corrupted by possession.Again, for emphasis: solving puzzles is not a very big aspect of play at my table.)Thinking in terms of clues is taking things back to a puzzle game. But I'm not mostly playing for puzzles.Great Expectations has a puzzle element ("Who is Pip's benefactor?") but the main point of the story isn't to guess the answer to the puzzle. It has a second puzzle, too - what is Estella's real relationship to Pip - and Dickens wrote two answers to that one!In the real world, solving real mysteries, one of the ways that clues work is that there is an actual answer to the question, and the clues are somehow caused by that reality (or perhaps have a cause in common with it). In a fiction, though, it is all authored. Whatever clues are provided are done so as a device by the author; they have no autonomy or independent connection to the fictional situation. So, was the now-decapitated mage's tutoring of his younger brother an act of kindness, or a prelude to some epic moment of exploitation? It can be read either way. That's the nature of clues in fiction.As to "possibilities for roleplay now lost"; well, possibilities for roleplay were certainly created, and plenty of roleplaying was happening before the discovery also - we weren't just sitting around not knowing what to do with ourselves at the table! - and so I'm not really seeing any cost here.You keep saying this. But I have NO IDEA what you are basing it on. What inconsistency do you think you've spotted?Maintaining consistency is not all that hard, because most things that happen are consistent with most other things. The peasants being unhappy can be the result of anything from a raise in taxes to the despoiling of a local shrine to a saint. The baron's refusal to allow mirrors in his house could be because he's a vampire, or because he regards them as symbols of the sun god (whom he hates) or because they remind him of his late wife, who loved make-up. (I think it's worth keeping in mind that no one actually understands all the causal processes that explain the events that happen in the real world. So there's certainly no need, in order to run a game in a fictional world, to understand or manage all its causal processes.)I've read a lot of posters over the year who posit that running a player-driven game will produce inconsistency, but it's not actually something I've experienced. (I explained upthread to [MENTION=16586]Campbell[/MENTION] what some of the actual challenges are: in Burning Wheel, framing (and I would say this can be a challenge in 4e also); in MHRP, adjudicating consequences (and in 4e this can be an issue for skill challenges, but is not an issue for combat resolution).)</blockquote>

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