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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Gorgon Zee" data-source="post: 8994792" data-attributes="member: 75787">It should be pointed out that there is a trivial way for a GM to arrive at an outcome they want, and yet not rely on Illusionism. You simply tell the players that you intend to arrive at a certain outcome regardless. There can then be no more illusion because you have deliberately destroyed the illusion.This may sound like a technical solution that no GM would actually use, but it's actually not a terrible plan in many situations. It tells the players that there's a certain direction or shape to the game, and that the GM has set a "fixed point" that, since they are now aware of, they have more  options to work with than if they had been unaware. In fact, for many genres I might argue that setting a known outcome increases overall player agency.Let me take a couple of examples. Over the last weekend I had the opportunity to play in a 7 Seas game with John Wick as the GM. We started out with a scene where we were chasing and fighting a certain opponent. We then jumped back in time 3 days to the search for the creature. So the GM has let us know that a certain outcome will happen. Because of that we, as players can decide not to do things that are pointless, irrelevant or stupid. We (players, not characters) have extra knowledge that means that our decisions are goin to be more effective than if we did not know them. Without that knowledge, many actions would have resulted in the same boring failure states. With the knowledge, we made choices that were always impactful.As a second example, I am running the Great Pendragon Campaign.  In 45 years Arthur will fight in his last fight, lose and die, ending the campaign.  I could use illusionism and keep Arthur alive by GM fiat for the next 45 years, but by telling the players there is a fixed point, they have better agency. They might still decide to oppose and try and destroy Arthur, but they know they will fail so that if they choose to do so, they do so within framework that is know and accepted by all parties.Two examples that I hope are helpful. To me, I'm of the school that says that poetry is better when it is constrained by rules as the requirement to obey the constraint requires the author to be more imaginative. Similarly, to me, setting constraints on player's agency brings out better roleplaying. I realize that there's a situationist - narrativist split in the way people approach "future states". The situationist tends to reject a known outcome unless there's an in-game reason of it (prophecy, time-travel, etc.) For a simulationist, if they want to ensure a certain future state, they have to use illusion as they are supposed to be clockwork designers -- the moment a design is set in motion, their job is to follow the mechanism's progress without interference. But if you and your group leans to narration, setting future states by either GMs or players is a neither unusual, hard to implement, nor requires any form of deception. It's just something you do to ensure that fun happens and you don't miss it because a random dice roll deprived you of it.</blockquote>

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