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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7107765" data-attributes="member: 42582">But the GM didn't preconceive the theamtic focus upon family/parenthood - the player is the one who initiated that.And the GM isn't even deciding who is the father - play will do that.All the GM is doing is putting into play claim that this NPC is the PC's father.I don't see how this is supposed to be the GM shaping the fiction to a pre-conceived outcome. We don't even know what the outcome is yet, so how do we know it's going to match any pre-conception?I want to approach this through a concrete example, that I've talked about a fair bit upthread, to see if I can understand what you are getting at.In the OP game, I introduced the renegade elf NPC obliquely at first - the PCs arrive at the foot of the Abor-Alz, where they are expecting to find a pool to drink from following their crossing of the Bright Desert, but the pool has been fouled. Investigation reveals that the fouling was by an elf. In metagame terms, this is all narration of consequences for failure - intitially I describe the fouled waterhole, and as the players describe their PCs looking around I tell them that the signs all indicate an elf. (Mechanically, this is "saying 'yes'", and thereby introducing more narration around the consequence which also establishes framing for the unfolding situation.)When, later on, the check to find the mace fails, the player (in character, I think, but also predicting my GMing) says something like "I bet that elf has it!"Is this an instance of what you mean by "the GM shaping the fiction"? That by introducing the elven NPC, I shape the fiction so that, downstream, the elf can be a nemesis in further ways?I didn't make any such claim. In any D&D game the players have the causal power to determine whether or not their PCs win a fight! (Unless the GM is completely ignoring action declarations and the action resolution mechanics - which in most circumstances is going to be a pretty pathological case.)I was talking about the causal power to make things true or false in the backstory - ie causal power of the players that does not correlate with causal power of the PCs (ie the PC did not cause any vessel to be present or absent from the room; the PCs cannot cause it to be or not be the prophesied time of the Dusk War; the PC didn't cause the elf to have taken the mace, nor cause his brother to have made black arrows; etc). And I was contrasting this with learning what is in the GM's notes (be those literal notes, or GM determinations of the fiction reached ex tempore by way of random tables, extrapolation or some other means).I don't think so. Upthread I've posted in a bit of detail about developing my approach to RPGing c 30 years ago, running AD&D. And then GMing RM for nearly 20 years. I've explained what features of those systems are conducive (eg it's not a coincidence that the AD&D was OA - which establishes strong thematic backgrounds for PCs, and gives them strong connections to the setting, very different from what eg [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] has described upthread as typical of PCs on his game - and then an all thief game - the same things that make thieves hard to fit into classic dungeon play create strong hooks for a more "story now" approach).I also mentioned some of the obstacles that those systems present. Just to mention one again, the way they handle resouce tracking and consumption (which in RM also extends to the healing rules) is an issue, because it drags attention away from dranatic situations and instead foregrounds record-keeping and minutiae.An interesting feature of BW is that, like RM, it has a brutal injury system with long recovery times, but it manages to integrate this into the "story now" framework - mostly through the advancement system, which (i) makes time a resource (via training rules, not unblike those in RQ) but also (ii) creates incentives to act at less than full strength (eg if injured), and hence establishes inherent stakes and allows for meaningful GM framing to establish further stakes in the trade-off between recovery and acting now."Story now"/"narratavistic" RPGing is not about mechanics. It's first-and-foremost about how content is introduced into the fiction, and how action declaration is adjudicated. But particular mechanics can help or hinder.</blockquote>

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