I am reading that passage quite differently. I agree that if it had indeed claimed that it would be ridiculous, and I think @The Firebird would agree as well. The key differences in my reading is that it isn't the actions by the player that matters less, but the actions of the characters and that it hence isn't the game that feels less substentiative, but rather the characters feel less substentiative. Would you find such a claim as ridiculous, as I don't?
Yes, I find that equally ridiculous. The characters in most of my narrativist games tend to be at least as substantive as any in my trad games. I mean, the game is much more about the characters... it wouldn't really work if they were not substantive.
Nice! I think this is good wisdom to share. For effectivity sake I tend skip it in cases where the failure mode seem obvious tough (which I find is most of the time in my games)
Oh I'm sure there are times where I fail to establish the stakes before the roll is made... usually, like you suggest, when the stakes are pretty obvious.
How do you discern between those citings being a criticism against FF as a whole, rather than a more narrow critisism against entering this failure mode?
In many posts in this thread, it's been flatly stated. It's not a warning or offered as an example of what not to do... it's cited as the reason not to use the method.
You are right. That doesn't happen, just as the magician isn't actually cut in two
It is all about making an experience where the players cannot actually tell the difference. If the players can accurately guess what was prepared, and what you improvised on the fly, there are still room for improvement!
This is one reasons the claim people here are sceptical to FF because of the need to improvise, rings hollow to me. What they are doing arguably require taking the art of improvisation to a way higher level than what is needed to just blurt out the first cool complication that come to mind.
I imagine this is a big part of things... I'm not trying to hide anything from the players in that sense. I'm not trying to make them think I've prepared all of this ahead of time. I don't mind if they know I am improvising.
There's no need for the illusion.
I think the mechanism at play here is that each individual are filling in an answer in their mental model of what is going on, but it is not of sufficient importance to negotiate into the shared fiction. With this process in mind it is an important requirement that there are some possible causal relationship that can be filled in. If no such option exists then the process crashes, and someone are likely to speak up.
Well, I think that the issue is that, for many trad players and GMs, the rolling of the dice is so tied to the task attempted that they see it as synonymous. They don't even differentiate it... they describe the character attempting to climb and the roll of the dice interchangeably... no differentiation between fiction and actual process. I think this tends to lead to confusion at times, and we should always try and differentiate fiction and real world practice.
This view is at the heart of why people are flipping out about a roll "causing" a cook to appear. Instead of looking at the roll as a prompt for the GM to narrate a cook on the scene as a complication. They view it as the character making the cook appear.
This is a failure to separate the real world event (the dice roll) and the in fiction event (a cook becoming aware of the break in). For them, when a player rolls dice, that IS the character attempting the action in the fiction.
Which is a perfectly fine way to play... but it doesn't have to be the case.
