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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Campbell" data-source="post: 7063933" data-attributes="member: 16586">I never really responded to  [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] about transparency up thread. I will do so now. I think transparency of GM decision making during the moment of play can be somewhat tricky for my interests. I want to ensure that players have enough information in order to make meaningful decisions, but I also want to maintain focus on the fiction. Sometimes full transparency in the moment of play can pull players away from the fiction and make playing their characters with integrity more difficult. I do want player facing mechanics to be transparent though and keep a meta channel open, but mostly for clarifying fiction and maintaining emotional safety.The key principles I am thinking about here from an MC's perspective are Make your move, but misdirect and Make your move, but do not speak its name. The agenda item I am thinking of is Make the Apocalypse World Seem Real.I also think that intent based resolution can be somewhat tricky. We want players to have a good handle on the possible consequences for their actions, but the weakness of intent based resolution for my purposes is that sometimes it can be a little too on the nose and interfere with the experience of playing in the fiction. It's possible to constrain intent to the immediate fictional situation, but that requires a strong amount of discipline from the GM and other players. Blades in the Dark has some strong tooling that absolutely allows for a conversation about stakes while keeping it strongly in the fiction. Rather than having direct intent based resolution, Blades frames all actions in terms of position (risk-level) and effect level. The idea is that once a player makes an action declaration, the GM tells them what the position and effect are. The player then can change their action declaration. We get to clarify the fiction before the roll so players have a good idea of the impact of their decisions.There's also the fact that perception and knowledge checks are extremely problematic for my interests. It is difficult to introduce meaningful complications for failure and often takes the place of actual clarifying the fiction. They also are not usually resulting from actual action declarations. It can be difficult to determine what is actually going on in the fiction. They also tend to get in the way of saying what honesty demands sometimes. I prefer for GMs to simply tell players what they know and see based on fictional positioning.One of the reasons I have been so adamant about laying out various GMing approaches and the distinctions I see between them is because I feel we often deal with very broad assumptions that fail to cover the diversity of play. If you are coming from a position of ignorance it can be very easy to put traditional games in one box and indie games in another. This goes for the GMing techniques described in their texts as well. They look at Fate, Marvel Heroic, Burning Wheel, and Apocalypse World and assume these games must be all played and run in the same way. These are very different games with very different procedures and GMing principles. I also feel that the war gaming approach embraced by the OSR often is forgotten. I sometimes feel like I do a disservice by using such broad categories. There is a lot of nuance I am leaving on the table here.</blockquote>

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