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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8570720" data-attributes="member: 42582">Thanks! I think it's both (i) inevitable and (ii) socially healthy that player decisions be informed in the various ways you describe.As I've been thinking of it so far in this thread, by metagame/OOC knowledge-based decisions I've been meaning player decisions about what their PCs do - or action declarations for short.So you saying "How can we focus this scene on Bartleby?" isn't in itself an action declaration, so isn't an instance of what I've got in mind. But you deciding that your PC does <this thing that tends to sideline them in the scene>, so that Bartleby can step up, would count as an instance of what I have in mind.Normally when GMing I don't have to think about this spotlight thing much, as it tends to happen either organically (the players sort themselves out) or via rules processes (D&D combat, for instance, is turn-based) or because I deliberately frame a scene or present a question which puts a particular player and their PC in the spotlight ("OK, so while X is doing such-and-such, what are you doing?"). But in my last session it came up in an unexpected way. I was GMing Torchbearer, the first session with my usual group. And Torchbearer is like D&D in leaning very heavily into party play. But unlike D&D it doesn't have as tight a turn structure; and furthermore, for various reasons to do with how its player-side resource system (which is party-based) interacts with its PC advancement system (which is individual, unlike 4e D&D which is the main version of D&D I've GMed for over a decade now), it is very sensitive to which player declares an action (and that's not the same thing as which PCs take part in an action - being a helper is different from being the PC whose player makes the roll).I didn't fully notice it during play, but one of the players raised it after the session: the decisions made by one of the players that tended to put his PC at the centre of action declarations really shaped how things unfolded for the whole table. And not all those unfoldings were happy ones from the point of view of those other PCs and the cost-benefit impact on their PCs!That player needed to be letting more metagame considerations feed back into how he declares actions for his PC!</blockquote>

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