In a D&D game for my son's group, when one player had their character storm away from the party to go find a ring of invisibility (because another character wouldn't give them theirs) I had to come up on the fly with a set of rumors about such a thing and the history and characteristics of a guy who had one and might be a reasonable target for pilfering it from, the part of town he was in, the inn he stayed in, the personality of the inn keeper and what the hoard of guests would react like when certain failed attempts to get the cloak occurred, etc... (Since they were near a major metropolis it seemed reasonable that there would be rings/cloaks of invisibility around, and that one might be owned by someone who blabbed about it but have it be reasonably possible to get it away from). At another point I had set up rumors of a vampire and had some connections set with the other bad guys they'd run into. When the same player said they wanted to know if they could use the vampire to become immortal I came up with a priestess of Hecate and her temple and personality and motivations and how that might even work on the fly.
I don't understand how any of this is different from what
@Manbearcat,
@darkbard and
@Nephis have posted about their play experience with the Dwarven forge, except that their play was structured via a resolution process - Spout Lore - rather than via ex tempore GM discretion.
Why do you label their play as "quantum collapse" but not your own?
Thinking of my character looking for something useful (physically and/or in their memory) feels very different than me imagining a particular forge being in the area and then having my character remembering it being there.
In the play you've described, a player, as their PC, thinks of a particular thing - a ring of invisibility - being in the area and then you make up a whole lot of backstory about it.
The difference is that in your fiction the PC is ignorant of all that backstory - I assume they are a stranger to the area, otherwise their ignorance would make no sense - whereas in the DW game the PCs were not ignorant because one of them was a scholar who knew the history of the region.
If it's ok with me in play saying either "I wrack my memory for anything that might be helpful like a forge" or "I spend the day searching the countryside for signs of a village or ruins that might have something that can be used as a forge", then it feels like that part of my difficulty with the mechanic goes away.
Here is Nephis's actual play report:
One of the things I love about ancient maps and DW are those empty spaces that need to be filled in. This was simply one of those empty spaces, particularly in our particular game, filled with archaeological dig sites and glaciers, covering numerous possibilities. As
@darkbard mentioned already, this idea came up in discussion during the week between session, but it felt organic to me as a player and made sense for Maraqli as a character, having devoured books growing up and her brain already established as being filled with information, both useful and not. If I remember correctly I not only rolled well but I also made use of Maraqli’s “bag of books,” which gives a bonus similar to having skill points in any particular “knowledge” in D&D (4e, at least). So, the move was completely in character, felt organic, and I think it may have followed one of those “interesting rumors” along our journey (not the forge necessarily, but that dwarves once lived here .... I think).
So she was playing her character - the character (at least as best Nephis recalls) had heard rumours of Dwarves once living here; she was in a place filled with dig sites and glaciers; it was already established, as part of the fiction about th PC Maraqli, that she was a learned scholar carrying a bag of books.
I frankly don't see how this is different, in any substantive way, from what you describe as acceptable to you.
That doing any of the things in (1) results with great certainty in a particular hex (out of hundreds of a priori equally likely ones) having something particular like a forge, feels very different than having that hex or an adjacent the hex having something interesting/useful.
How far did the PCs in the DW game have to travel to get to the Forge they recalled?
How often in that DW campaign, when the PCs tried to recall useful things, did the roll come up 6- and something unhappy occur or be recalled instead?
In your own play example, would it make play better if, instead of an Invisibility ring, the local rumour concerned a ring of Flying? (I mean, what are the odds that the rumours pertain to that particular sort of magical item, of all the ones that might exist?) Would LotR be a more compelling story if Gandalf's recollections in Moria, of a useful path to the East Gate, was wrong? (I mean, what are the odds?)
I don't really understand what criteria you are applying here. It seems like you are treating your own play as a prior verisimilitude-preserving, while treating others' play as a priori verisimilitude-destroying. But I can't tell why.