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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7106865" data-attributes="member: 42582">Referring back to the OP:My interest is in who shapes "outcomes", and thereby gets to establish the stuff of the shared fiction."Mutability of Backstory" is not an end in itself. A GM who leaves everything unresolved in his/her mind until the moment of crunch, and then makes up stuff that s/he thinks will be "good for the story", or "fun", or consistent with what s/he believes the trajectory of things to be, is shaping outcomes.If the GM is doing the same thing to narrate consequences when checks fail, or to frame in such a way as to put pressure on the dramatic needs established by the players, that's (for me) a completely different thing.I don't agree with this. Let's think about a different context: I want to buy someone a gift, and want to buy something that that person will enjoy. It would be artificial at best to describe that as me buying something that is important to me, based on what I think is important to the recipient of the gift. It is me buying something that that person will like. And there are all sorts of ways of learning what someone likes: implicit cues (eg the shelf full of military history books) and overt ones ("I really like reading about military history!").Likewise in "story now" RPGing: the players are sending all sorts of signals, overlty and implicitly, that tell the GM what is important. The GM isn't guessing. Think again of [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION]'s example of the brother's hat. This is not something that is important to the GM. This is something that the player, through a particular PC build choice, has signalled as important.I'm still missing something.The player has, in his/her build and play of the PC, put the issue of family/parentage etc into play. (As in my BW game, the player of the mage PC, by writing in a balrog-possessed brother, has put family stuff into play.) So at some stage the GM is going to challenge that - "going where the action is", pushing the players (via their PCs) to fight for what they believe, etc.The GM might introduce a NPC with the thought that that NPC is propitious for making a claim about parentage. But I'm missing the bit about "steering". The GM is doing that because the player put the whole matter into play. It is the player driving and the GM responding, isn't it?The issue of "making things up on the spot" is orthogonal. Gygax's DMG includes a system for random determination; and surely every GM of a dungeon crawl has on some occasion had to make up some detail that wasn't written down in advance ("What colour is the ceiling?" "What is the height of the table?" etc).The contrast that I am drawing betweeen RPGing in accordance with the "standard narrativistic model" and by way of "GM's secret backstory" - which is a contrast that came into discussion in this thread solely because I drew it! - is about the basis on which the GM establishes fiction, and the role it plays in the resolution of action declaration.When I tell my GM that I (as in, my PC) am looking around the homestead, and call for a Homestead-wise check, if I succeed that GM has to tell me more stuff that fits my intent (which is to learn what happened to the homesteaders, etc). If I fail, then the GM has to narrate something that defeats or is contrary to my intent.I don't know what the GM would have narrated had my check failed, but I know what I would have done in his place: either I would have narrated evidence that these homesteaders were heathens, thereby defeating my assumption that the whole premise of the situation is that they are innocent victims of orcish raiders, and putting my Faithfulness and Fanatical Devotion under pressure; or I would have narrated evidence that members of my own order, the Knights of the Iron Tower, had been involved in perpretration of the raids - which would have rather brutally put pressure directly on my being Sworn to the Order as well as my Fanatical Devotion.The GM's narration is not to be guided by what is in notes (be they literal or notional, or randomly generated by rolling on a "raided homestead" table). The GM's narration is to be guided by the dictates of intent and task: success means my intent is realised; failure means that it is not.And in making the check I'm not learning "secret backstory". I'm not exploring the setting (to use Ron Edwards's phrase). I'm generating narration from the GM, with the content of that narration being modulated to success or failure in the sort of manner I've just described.I'm not sure what you mean by "would it be allowed"? As in, is there a rule agaist repeated action declarations?Action resolution in BW is governed by Let it Ride (Gold, p 32):One of the most important aspects of ability tests in game play in Burning Wheel is the Let It Ride rule: A player shall test once against an obstacle and shall not roll again until conditions legitimately and drastically change. Neither GM nor player can call for a retest unless those conditions change. Successes from the initial roll count for all applicable situations in play. . . . If a player failed a test or generated no successes, the result stands. If he was hot and got seven successes, those stand for the duration.But the ultimate reason for being cautious in action declaration in BW is that the consequences of failure are undesirable. [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] upthread was concerned about players "Scavenging up" diamonds for their PCs, but didn't seem to be thinking through the implications of failing those checks.Cortex/MHRP doesn't have a rule like Let it Ride, and it also takes a different approach to failure (the GM has to spend a resource for failure to redound upon the acting character), but all action declaration is governed by the established fictional positioning. So if a PC has searched around for secret doors and failed, it is probably not going to make sense to try again in the same spot.The bottom-line consideration in Cortex/MHRP is that a single dice pool can only include one Asset, so there is no particular benefit to be gained from spending multiple turns, as play cycles through the action order, generating Secret Door assets.I feel that this has missed the point.I am not disputing that, in the CoS AP, the PCs can win or lose vs Strahd based on player action declarations.But that is not establishing a truth about the backstory. And learning whether or not the PCs win is not solving a mystery. "Can we beat this guy?" is not a mystery. Contrast, "Do we know where the Sunsword is that we need to beat this guy?" - that is a mystery.The point that I am making is that, contra [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION]'s contention, it is possible to have mysteries be central to the unfolding "story" of a game without the GM needing to know the answer in advance. Thus, in this particular example, the mystery - Is this the time of the Dusk War - is being investigated by the PCs. But the answer is not going to be given by the GM, as [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] asserted it must be.This is true only if you make very strong assumptions about what matters to the player from his/her point of view.If you assume that the player cares about nothing other than to learn the content of the fiction, then what you say is true. But if the player also cares what the content of the fiction is - as in, wishes it to be one thing rather than another - then the difference is radical. (This is the proactivity about an emotional thematic issue that Edwards refers to. He is not talking about a PC being proactive. He is talking about a player being proactive.)If the fiction is unknown but up to be authored, then the player can make action declarations that contribute to establishing it. If the fiction is already settled by the GM behind the scenes, then all the player can do is learn what it is. These are radically different things.</blockquote>

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