NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Manbearcat" data-source="post: 9256173" data-attributes="member: 6696971">What we're talking about here is genre, theme, and premise-based constraint.  The general matters to be settled in play follow this.  The GM's situation-framing and consequence-framing follows this.  PC build and player action declaration follows this.  System inputs (hopefully) follow this.  Who has authority over that?  Is it system, is it the GM, is the players?  Is it a coalition of two of the three or all three in concert?I'm very much for heterogeneity here.  My Life With Master shouldn't be featuring Aliens inputs (for the GM or the PCs) upon play.  You can take that same ball and run in many different directions.  But we need to recognize that there are gameplay consequences (agency over content broadly and in-situ agency over the nature of protagonism and its movement through various states during play specifically) and social consequences in the form of trade-offs when we organize around one model (which constituent part has what amount of say over this stuff) vs another model.  That doesn't necessarily make one model good, bad, or better than another...but they don't produce the same experience of moment-to-moment and throughline of play (for any of the participants).An easy example is the Stonetop game I mentioned above.  If the orthodox position of the game/setting is "the line of Judges was broken and The Chronicle lost long ago"...but...the game produces an avenue of exception to this in the form of the Prophet background...a GM vetoing a player opting-into that PC build that isn't an inconsequential thing.  It very much has impact.  It becomes even more consequential if the default orientation of the system's (in this case Stonetop) position on GM authority doesn't grant the GM this veto authority.  It becomes even more consequential still if it promotes the inverse of that GM veto authority.  Right?</blockquote>

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