Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7075410" data-attributes="member: 42582">Intent is a very complex thing.In the famous example from Davidson, I (i) move by finger, (ii) flick the lightswitch, (iii) illuminate the room, (iv) startle the burglar.(i), (ii), (iii) and (iv) are the same action, under different descriptions. Under some descriptions (eg (ii), (iii)) I intend the action. I may not even advert to the action under (i) - it's "instinctual". And I did not intend (iv) - it's inadvertent.Linguistic intention is also complex: I say to you, "Don't be late for the tram", intending to caution you not to be late for the train. Also intending to utter "Don't be later for the train", but producing the malapropism (by way of "a slip of the tongue", we might say) instead - which I also, in some sense, intended (as in: whatever a "slip of the tongue" might be, it wasn't an involuntary action). If your interest in what I've said is in my capacity as an adviser, you will disregard my malapropism (assuming that you recognise it) and hasten to the train; if your interest in what I've said includes disobedience or ridiculing me (eg you're my teen-aged child), then you will take me at my word and feign confusion, or cheerfully miss the train, or whatever.In law, this is the problem of "scrivener's error" or "drafting errors". There are different theories of what a court is doing when it corrects such errors (some hold that this is fidelity to what was said, because they identify what was said with some but not other intentions; others think this is a change to what was said in order to conform with some other intention that was not literally communicated by the words).A player making an action declaration intends all sorts of things (differentiated by different descriptions), and the action also probably falls under unintended and/or unthought of descriptions too. There is the intention to play the game; the intention to depict the PC in a certain way (eg as brave); the intention to establish a certain fictional fact about the PC (eg the PC is charging the baddies); the intention to establish various intentions for the PC; etc. If the PC is 1st level and the baddies have 3 HD each, then charging to certain death may also be a true description of the action, but not necessarily one under which it was intended!Some of these elements of action declaration are perhaps best treated as "scrivener's errors": the GM clarifies with the player that the player thought the baddies were kobolds when in fact they're bugbears (maybe the player was away from the table when the full description of the scene was given). Takebacks are bad for momentum, of course, but sometimes anything else would be unfair.Sometimes there is at least one of the players' intentions that corresponds to a mental state in the PC - the player intends his/her PC to be brave; the PC intends to be brave. But not always. If the player says, "I think that my cleric friend, who is devoted to healing the oppressed, might visit this jail - I make a Circles check!" there is no intention at all on the part of the PC. The PC's mental state, rather, is one of hope. But the player has many intentions - to have the cleric visit the prison; to engender an opportunity for his PC to escape from prison; to score a Circles check and therefore improve the PC's Circles rating; etc. The player's intention that the cleric visit the prison is an intention that has the content of the shared fiction as its object. The player's intention that an opportunity for escape be engendered isn't quite this, but - at least in BW play - is the most important for narrating failure. Because it states an achievement or a goal for the PC. Even though the PC does not, him-/herself, have any intention that corresponds to that. (Just a hope.)If the check fails, I see my job as GM being both to dash the PC's hope, and to respond in a way that takes the player's intention vis-a-vis PC goal/achievement seriously - ie to present a failure consequence that shows that I noticed that the player had that intention, and I cared about it, but now the game rules require me to introduce some additional material into the shared fiction as a result of which the player's intention is not going to come to fruition, at least as things presently stand. That's how we make PCs (and thereby players) fight for what they believe.For the reasons I've just given, I'm not sure I can embrace this distinction. Sometimes advocating for your character means forming an intention that something good happen to your character, even though that it is not something that your character him-/herself could intend (eg because it depends on the choices of an NPC, as in my example; as in some examples of acquiring goods; as in some examples of searching, where the PC can hope but not intend to find something whose presence in the location is not under his/her control).Those are the intentions that, in these circumstances, drive the game. Because if the action that is declared as a result of that intention - eg the Circle check, the Scavenging check - succeeds, the content of the fiction changes in the way the player wanted (thereby delivering what the PC hoped for). If the check fails, then the intention still drives the game, because the GM, in narrating failure, is obliged to honour the player's intention even in the denial of its realisation.This is why, in framing a check in BW, sometimes we spend some time working out exactly what it is that the player intends the check to achieve, if successful. The idea that the player would say "I look for an inn" but the GM wouldn't know why is completely foreign to this style of play.</blockquote>

Verification