D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

[Enrahim]

Going per example...

"Cook screaming" runs most afoul of "Make a move that follows" and, to a limited but very important extent, "Be a fan of the characters." The former is at issue because a single failed lockpicking is...pretty far away from an instantaneous "everything goes loud" moment, to speak colloquially. If that were the case, heist-like situations become essentially forbidden outside of nearly-perfect infiltration, which...isn't very fun. There could, certainly, be times where this isn't true--consider an "Ocean's 11" or "Mission: Impossible" type heist, where a lot of things need to succeed and several of them going wrong could break the plan completely--but those are pretty extreme cases where a high-profile, high-risk heist is the known and intentional focus. Breaking into Château d'Ys doesn't seem like that kind of heist. The "cook screaming" result conflicts with the "Be a fan of the characters" in the limited sense that what these characters are about, at least for this adventure, is heisting--to completely nix heisting and instead replace it with violent, destructive burglary is kinda denying that opportunity.

(As an aside, I want to stress that "Be a fan of the characters" DOES NOT mean "coddle the characters", nor does it mean "ensure only good things happen to the characters". When you're a fan of a character in a TV show, you want to see all sides of them--their struggles in the face of meaningful adversity, meaning sometimes they will genuinely fail, and other times they'll succeed, and sometimes they'll think they failed but they really/ultimately succeeded...and vice-versa. The description I quoted previously makes this explicit, but I wanted to address that formally here and now, to cut certain flawed understandings off at the pass, so to speak.)

"Guards arriving at the scene" is functionally equivalent to the previous, though believe it or not it might still be workable if it is of a lesser severity than it seems you're implying. That is, the implication is "there are guards EVERYWHERE, it's impossible to continue using stealth", but that seems so ludicrously extreme I don't really take it very seriously. A much more plausible option would be that, say, Lilia spends so much time trying to pick a lock beyond her skills, a guard or two on patrol come to this door to enter the house (perhaps to get some food?)--which invites Lilia to respond somehow. Alternatively, assuming Lilia isn't alone, maybe she alone gets "captured" and taken inside. Now the other PCs need to find a different way in, and rescue or at least regroup with Lilia. More or less, this has the same issue of not really being "Make a move that follows", because the failure to pick a single lock does not seem like it should lead to the total failure of the stealth mission in this context. Again, in an ultra-high-stakes heist, a single failure might actually do that, but this isn't that kind of thing.

I don't see how the social-manipulation thing is a problem at all. I see it as a perfectly valid avenue. Heisters often need to make use of social manipulation. This is especially a good choice if Lilia herself is great at the B&E side of things, but not all that good at being a "face"--that's very close to one of the GM moves, "Show a downside to their class, race, or equipment"; in this case, the downside of being an expert in (say) poisons, traps, locks, and stealth, is that you aren't good at actually working with people, but now you need to do something risky in order to get through this. The stealth has not been broken, and indeed it may even be enhanced if Lilia is exceptionally clever and charming, but the stakes have been raised--now she's in a "live fire" situation, so to speak, and further mistakes will come with nastier costs, while new success will almost surely create new opportunities.

If I may, why would you think this particular thing is a serious issue? It doesn't seem to be one to me, so I'm confused why you would lump it into the same category as the "screaming cook" example. It doesn't seem like "railroading" at all, and instead as elaborating the heist in a new, but very plausible, direction.

And then for the "rush to get medical treatment", that...actually seems pretty good to me too, if and only if it is reasonable to assume that the Mistress of Château d'Ys is the kind of person who would use deadly-poisonous traps on a door that, presumably, servants are expected to be using. That is, such a trap would have a pretty high risk of causing fatalities amongst the staff, unless treatment is available nearby. If the Mistress is a cruel and heartless woman who only employs those with unshakable loyalty and professionalism, then perhaps such a trap is warranted; but if she is known as a compassionate employer and generally upstanding person, it would be a pretty major break, making a move that doesn't follow, to describe such a trap. Even if it might sound fun and exciting to introduce such a trap, both "Make a move that follows" and "Begin and end with the fiction" contradict such cavalier actions.

More or less, if this is a reasonable and warranted development, it adds a ticking clock in a different direction. If Lilia is acting alone, now she has a priority even higher than staying stealthy--namely, staying alive. If she isn't acting alone, her comrades have tough choices to make, which likewise ratchets up tension without breaking the fundamental premise. Such a trap would be extremely plausible in a tomb, for example, and I'm pretty sure I've seen at least one tomb-robbing movie where such a thing has in fact happened!

Finally, nothing should be "unilaterally changing"--ever. The rules specify what both sides are contributing. It's not "unilaterally changing" things for the GM to frame a scene. Instead, the GM is, as the text above indicates, making moves in order to prompt player response. I didn't quote the rules for that, but here they are:

When to Make a Move​

You make a move:​

• When everyone looks to you to find out what happens
• When the players give you a golden opportunity
• When they roll a 6-

Generally when the players are just looking at you to find out what happens you make a soft move, otherwise you make a hard move.​

Hence, the GM is making this move, not unilaterally, but because the rules of the game specifically tell them to do so. In this case, specifically because the player rolled a fail (6-, aka "6 or less") and thus the rules tell the GM to make a hard move (or, as I have mentioned, a soft move if that makes more sense). As I have said many times, the GM is bound by rules just as the players are; their rules tend (emphasis, tend) to be more open-ended and (somewhat) fewer in number, of course, but that doesn't suddenly mean the GM should ignore them if they become inconvenient. Very nearly all the time (as in, with seven-plus years of GM experience under my belt and ~3-4 years of previous player experience, I've never seen this pattern break), if a GM rule is inconvenient, it's because you're trying to do something unwise!

I really appreciate this! It really helps me try to structure my own thinking.

I think this made me make a huge realization. I was thinking back to when I myself are happily introducing complications as a GM. I found that the main situation this is happening is when framing a scene. Now an important detail: When I run trad games, I generally hand the players the power to end the scene. Also most of the time they get to indicate where the new scene is, and sometimes what it should be about based on where they are going and why they are going there. This way it feels very explicitly that the players ask me to at this point in time, fill a scene with these parameters with something interesting. So I come up with some complicated situation they can interact with.

So while this is most of the time, there is an important exception: If doing a dungeon crawl I do roll for random encounters and if that come up, I will introduce a complication without the players explicitely asking for it. But I realised that I have never run a dungeon crawl with random encounters without the players having asked for that kind of experience - and in that sense implicitely asked me to introduce complications on semi regular intervals as that is understood to be part of this particular kind of gaming experience. Indeed they want the possibility of random things to happen to spice up the crawl.

And then I realise this is the case also for games that codify fail forward. If a player signs up for such a game with a propper understanding of the rules, they have implicitely asked for the GM to come up with some serious complication. Indeed this is something they want.

And this is what clicked for me now. Before I was looking at it as sort of an out of size punishment for rolling low where the GM was forced to take the game in a different direction than the players want. With this other mindset a different direction is exactly what the players want and signed up for.

And this is also where I think a lot of the hostility in this thread come from. It was presented as something trad GMs are not considering. That when they narrate their task failures in D&D they should seriously consider spicing things up a bit. The thing is, in for instance D&D failure narration is quite well defined. People signing up for it expect failure to only indicate task failure, and that the DM is neutral when determining any fallout, keeping it as grounded and to the point as possible. And importantly: this process is a black box (partly for effectivity reasons).

That mean that if the DM just so happened to start spicing things up with fail forward as part of this blackbox, we would have a situation where the GM start introducing complications without permission or expressed desire from the players. And I think this go strongly against the ethos all the trad GMs in this thread is having. It is this phenomenom I think I was toying with in my head when I felt that there was something that smelt "railroady" about the entire thing.

And I think even those most deeply into the narrative camp can see and understand how introducing fail forward covertly into the black box part of the resolution tastes similarly of foul play as putting the unique ogre into the players path no matter where they try to go.

Thank you again for your very serious and long responses. That really helped motivate me to dig deep in myself, and this realisation really feels profound to me at least.

That leaves the question - what if trad try to introduce FF for their group to see if there could be consensus for trying it out? Me myself don't see any principle problem with it in "trad" in general. I still think it is fully incompatible with a game advertised as a living world. Me personally would not want to play with it in anything but one shots or short adventures, but that is due to my prefered pacing of a campaign (more contemplative and deliberate), not due to any more fundamental problems with the concept.

 

[Faolyn]

Well, I'm not entirely sure about that either. I mean, the most obvious and straightforward AW game is basically 'Mad Max', but it is far from the only possibility. I've not played a ton of AW to be able to say what is most common. OTOH DW and similar games, which are equally specific about milieu, definitely can turn out differently depending on group dynamics. I've really seen this with Stonetop, which is pretty close in a general way to AW and DW.

But I won't disagree that some random mix of players just showing up and making characters will probably end up describing the world as basically some variation of Mad Max. You got cars, babes, guns, etc. That still leaves a lot of room for character development!

It's not the character development I'm taking about. I'm talking about the game's base expectations. As I said, there's the psychic maelstrom, which is baked into the game via the playbooks via the Weird stat, as well as in various moves. You can't play AW without it, unless you rewrite the playbooks or make brand new ones. At best you can minimize it, or reskin Weird to be the "blind luck" stat. You could probably include things like zombies or an alien invasion that either was the cause or a result of the weirdness, but you couldn't have a "mundane" apocalypse (pandemic, climate change) or have something fantastical that people can't tap into easily (a "fae-pocalypse" where humans don't have inherent magic).

Which is fine, of course--nothing wrong at all with what's there--but it means that it's not setting-free. There's just no official setting, in the sense of there's no map or list of locations.

(Do the AW books tell you how to barf forth a psychic maelstrom apocalypse? That is, to take advantage on the inherent weirdness such a thing would cause. I honestly can't remember.)

 

[AlViking]

@AlViking

Not connected in the deterministic way some people might prefer and not connected in any way whatsoever are very different phenomenon. Like night and day. I get that if you prefer deterministic mechanics that difference may not matter to those making such statements, but it is essential to the description and fair treatment of a number of playstyles I enjoy playing and running. Conflate these two things is basically accusing people of running and playing nonsense games where the points are made up and the rules do not matter. This could not be further from the case.

You are free to like or not like whatever you want to. However, if you are going to speak on the implications of a given technique I'd ask you to at least consider what people who have been utilizing them for decades have to say instead of assuming our play is nonsense. You do not have to put down other styles of play to boost your own.

They are only connected in the narrative of the game. I don't take into consideration the character's goals as a referee, I only referee and respond to the actions they take or what they say. I am not putting down other systems by explaining why those systems do not work for me.

As always, I am explaining things from my perspective. We are not on a PbtA forum, I am not talking about what I would do if I were running a PbtA game. So a whole bunch of considerations you have for those games don't apply. But telling people that my logic flawed or that I don't know what I'm talking about? I'm sorry, it's not on me to learn in-depth other games. You're on a D&D subforum on a D&D General specific thread, the basis for discussion is D&D. I assume everyone here at least understands how D&D works and should in no way be shocked or feign ignorance of the system.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Yes--because I don't think you're right. This example is a case of "you fail and nothing happens". You failed and didn't get the license. Because you didn't achieve your goal, another plan that was already in motion and which required success failed.

How does this make the second plan failing not a consequence of the first?

In other words… why didn’t I go on the date?

That's different than--you failed and we don't want to be boring, so we'll come up with an additional complication of the missed date. In this case, the date would have been hinted at by interactions between you two so it was reasonable based on the fiction, but not made explicit as an independent event.

Forget the game for a minute. Just think about how consequences occur in real life. If you fail to do a thing in real life, do you really think the only consequence is that you fail to do the thing?

Isn’t that a very strange way to look at this in real life?

A brief thought. What if one type of game is based on pretending it's not a game?

That’s fine… it doesn’t change that we are in fact playing a game. Or that we’re aware that we’re playing a game.

If I have the wrong keys to my house and try to unlock the door the only consequence is that I don't open the door. Just like real life.

That’s not how real life works. It depends on so many other factors.

What if there’s a killer chasing you with a knife and you don’t have your keys? Nothing would happen?

Is it possible that the only thing that happens is you don’t open the door? I suppose. Though I think you’d still have to find another way in or call someone to bring you the keys or else hire a locksmith. Those would all be possible consequences of not having your keys.

There may be other consequences because of other things going on as well in game as well as in life but those are completely unconnected to not opening the door.

No they are not “unconnected” as I would typically expect the word to be used.

Maybe you have some other meaning for “unconnected” that you’re using? Because I can’t imagine how anyone would ever describe having to call their wife to come let them in the house as unconnected to the fact that they didn’t have their keys.

There’s a very clear connection.

This really shouldn't be that hard. The consequence of a failed action is that you failed doing what you were attempting.

I agree it shouldn’t be that hard.

The fact that you consider his reasoning flawed is telling him he is doing it wrong.

No, it’s not. He can play his game that way if he likes. He can do it any way he likes.

But if he says that he’s doing that because that’s how real life works, I can prove him wrong. Trivially.

If he says “I prefer it that way because it works for me” or similar, that’s fine.

But whatever he says, nothing I’ve said has been about how he does it in his game. It’s about the reason he claims he does it… because that has implications about the ways others do it.

If I can't open my front door, I can use the garage door remote, go to the neighbors and get the copy we gave them. If it's an emergency we have a foot tall stone gargoyle I could use to break the window. But all of those things are choices I can make after the fact, they're things I do subsequent to the failure but not caused by the failure.

They can also be described as consequences to not having your keys. I mean… later in the day when your spouse got home and said “why did you use the gargoyle to break the window?”, what reason would you give?

 

[Enrahim]

<snip>
So, I do see some pretty stark differences, and I see tells within how I hear people here speaking that make me think there will be significant material differences between games I run and ones you run. If you talked to me 30 years ago, I might have been doing and saying what you are now. I feel that my understanding and the range of play and enjoyment has expanded in those 30 years.
<snip>
But none of this, for me, is criticism except in the same sense that I would criticize a software developer who makes claims about some techniques they haven't mastered that I have.

Ok, I am absolutely certain that we play very differently. But I think that is due to other dimensions of preference than wish for player input. The issue of respecting player input is as you can imagine very close to my heart.

So if you can give me som guidance on how you envision trad is limiting me in this regard I really would like to hear! (This is no jest, I really want to learn. As a software developer, that is what we do right?)

To illustrate how seriously I take it, I got a game published in an rpg anthology that has as the key part of it distributing traditional GM responsibilities over all participants. This was in the mids of the forge craze. My main problem with what I have seen of modern takes on player input, is that it limits versatility of play. In particular it tend to be in direct conflict with the detail planning that is required for certain types of scenarios (like the "realistic" heist vs the "dramatic" heist of BitD).

 

[AlViking]

How does this make the second plan failing not a consequence of the first?

In other words… why didn’t I go on the date?

You didn't go on the date because you didn't choose other options. You could have met at the dance. You could have had someone give you a ride. Depending on where you live you could have taken a bus or an Uber. You could have apologized for assuming you'd have a license and rescheduled for later. There were any number of other things you could have done, just like when a character in my game can't unlock the door, there's always something else they can do. Include giving up on getting into the house. But as DM I don't care, what they do next is up to them.

Forget the game for a minute. Just think about how consequences occur in real life. If you fail to do a thing in real life, do you really think the only consequence is that you fail to do the thing?

Isn’t that a very strange way to look at this in real life?

Not really. I'm a referee when I'm running the game. I do not care about the goals of the characters, I'm only making calls that directly respond to the singular action taken. I never take into consideration downstream effects because that's not what I want from a sim based instead of narrative based game.

That’s fine… it doesn’t change that we are in fact playing a game. Or that we’re aware that we’re playing a game.




That’s not how real life works. It depends on so many other factors.

What if there’s a killer chasing you with a knife and you don’t have your keys? Nothing would happen?

Why do you always add in some other simultaneous event? What if there's not a killer chasing me with a knife? Are you regularly being chased by homicidal knife wielding maniacs?

Is it possible that the only thing that happens is you don’t open the door? I suppose. Though I think you’d still have to find another way in or call someone to bring you the keys or else hire a locksmith. Those would all be possible consequences of not having your keys.

Subsequent downstream decisions based on where I find myself. But I have a lot of options. I could ring the doorbell hoping someone's home. If it's my old apartment I could break in with my credit card (my not-yet-wife didn't believe that would work). I could sit on the front porch until my wife gets home. I could go to a movie knowing by the time I get done someone will be there. There are all sorts of possible options, things that I could choose after the failure to open the door.

In game I only judge the immediate result of an action. I'm not going to add a killer chasing the character with a knife because they failed to unlock the door.

No they are not “unconnected” as I would typically expect the word to be used.

Maybe you have some other meaning for “unconnected” that you’re using? Because I can’t imagine how anyone would ever describe having to call their wife to come let them in the house as unconnected to the fact that they didn’t have their keys.

There’s a very clear connection.



I agree it shouldn’t be that hard.



No, it’s not. He can play his game that way if he likes. He can do it any way he likes.

But if he says that he’s doing that because that’s how real life works, I can prove him wrong. Trivially.

If he says “I prefer it that way because it works for me” or similar, that’s fine.

But whatever he says, nothing I’ve said has been about how he does it in his game. It’s about the reason he claims he does it… because that has implications about the ways others do it.

You told him his reasoning is flawed because he doesn't do things like you do. It's absolutely telling him the way he does his game is inadequate. That's what flawed means.

They can also be described as consequences to not having your keys. I mean… later in the day when your spouse got home and said “why did you use the gargoyle to break the window?”, what reason would you give?

If I did break the window it would have been a simultaneous emergency, much like your knife wielding assassin. I'd tell her I broke the window to get away from the assassin who actually just turned out to be a guy in costume who was really apologetic, he was just trying to catch me because I had dropped my keys. That, or I wouldn't have any answer because the maniac used the broken window to get in the house and kill me.

 

[Faolyn]

Both. Why on earth wouldn't they work the same?

It's not? Have you never, when faced with a task you can't complete by one means, tried another?

You can't open the pickle jar by hand 'cause it's too tight, so you pull out an opening tool to help. Or you run the lid under hot water knowing metal expands faster than glass, in hopes it'll loosen up. Or you get someone with (you hope) a stronger grip to give it a try. Or you give up on the pickles and snack on some cookies instead. Etc.

And most - as in nearly all - of the time, the only consequence of failure on a given approach is that you don't get to eat any pickles right now. On what an RPG might call a critical fail, maybe you sprain your wrist or drop the jar, but that's pretty rare.

Well, exactly the same principle can apply in an RPG; to wit: if at first you don't succeed, try something different.

And just as in real life your failure to open the pickle jar has no causal relationship with, at the same coincidental moment, the cat bringing in yet another half-dead rabbit from outdoors that you have to clean up, the failure to do thing X in an RPG also shouldn't trigger causally-unrelated problems much more often than the rather rare frequency random chance would dictate.

Why? Because if these disconnected events keep happening all the time on failing to do something else unrelated, it starts looking fake real fast.

But there's also no negative consequences for not opening the jar other than not opening the jar. Which means that, in a game, there's really no point to call for a roll to open the jar. Just look at the character's Strength score and make a judgement call. It's only if something will happen that you need to call for a roll.

Also, "if you can't succeed with one method, try another" is still "nothing happens." It's puts the onus on the players to use a different method, rather than the GM.

 

[DinoInDisguise]

That’s fine… it doesn’t change that we are in fact playing a game. Or that we’re aware that we’re playing a game.

I feel like you missed the point of the question. You had said this;

Are you talking about how failure and consequences work in real life? Or are you describing how you prefer they work in an RPG?

To which Lanefan answered this;

Both. Why on earth wouldn't they work the same?

And you replied;

Because one is a game.

So my question was;

A brief thought. What if one type of game is based on pretending it's not a game?

And if we revisit Lanefan's retort; "Why on earth wouldn't they work the same?" And we revisit your answer to that "Because one is a game." Simply restating that it is a game, doesn't address the issue.

If the point of the game is to simulate reality or maintain immersion by acting as if it’s not a game, then Lanefan’s question stands. In that kind of play, it makes sense to expect things to work similarly to how they would in real life. That’s part of the premise. Simply replying with “but it’s a game” sidesteps that premise rather than engaging with it.

That's why I asked the question I did.

 

[AlViking]

But there's also no negative consequences for not opening the jar other than not opening the jar. Which means that, in a game, there's really no point to call for a roll to open the jar. Just look at the character's Strength score and make a judgement call. It's only if something will happen that you need to call for a roll.

Also, "if you can't succeed with one method, try another" is still "nothing happens." It's puts the onus on the players to use a different method, rather than the GM.

If opening the jar is uncertain, we use dice to determine if it can be opened. I do not care about consequences for opening or not opening the jar when I make the call for the roll, all I care about is that the player stated their character was opening the jar and that it would not open automatically. Putting the onus on the players to figure out what happens next is exactly what I want. That should be clear by now.

I realize it's not for you, that's fine. It's just a different approach.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

The setting being predefined vs established ad hoc seems besides the point. The GM is still in control of all the things the GM is typically in control of in a trad game, right? @pemerton seems to consider that GM-driven/centred in one game, but player-driven in another. I'm trying to reconcile what seems contradictory to me and I'm just not seeing a meaningful distinction in what's actually being communicated.

Yeah, I'm getting on my actual PC where I can type (ah, the joy of Model-M keyboards!), so lets see if I can be a bit more cogent:

You use the word 'owns' and I have kind of just accepted that, but I don't think we mean precisely the same thing by that. In trad play 'GM Ownership' is sort of an absolute thing. Like, the thing belongs to you, you can do anything you want with it, talk about it in any way you wish, etc. Any constraints which exist are going to be either A) self-imposed principles or techniques, or B) things you think you better do if you want to remain GM/keep the table happy.

This is not really the sort of 'ownership' that Harper is saying a GM in, say, Apocalypse World, has. The GM in that game, first of all, is not supposed to have, or hold onto, any specific notions about what the world is, how it works, etc. In a post I read a bit ago @AIViking talked about ways that he included players in the definition of the world, primary focus of the campaign, etc. Still, he talked about it in terms of mixing his ideas and existing setting materials with input they provided. That's not what happens in AW. In AW the GM has NO notions or concepts, no situations, no nothing, that they're holding onto as something that they will 'present', some thing that they 'own' that they will be putting into play.

Instead, the GM in AW is RESPONSIBLE for certain things. He doesn't own the setting in the sense that we talk about owning property or even rights in our modern capitalist liberal society. Instead he owns the RESPONSIBILITY TO HANDLE those things. This is a meaning of 'own' that is sadly often overlooked in our modern world. How he's supposed to handle them, his duties, are described in a good bit of detail in the AW rules (I'm familiar with 2e, I don't think the original was radically different, but 2e may be more clear in some areas).

So, I think that there's basically a subtle difference in terms of how we perceive owning parts of the game. I would say that, likewise, AW players own their characters in a similar sense. Given that they create the characters, there is maybe a somewhat more traditional sense to it, but in essence they're responsible for them. This figures heavily in the "don't be a weasel" thing that comes out a bit more explicitly in BitD, but is also inherent to AW. You need to step up and play with integrity. When my Stonetop 'rogue' character suddenly faced death, which the dice dictated and the GM faithfully presented, he 'got religion'. This is not something that happens in play where I own the character in the traditional sense (I guess it could, but that would be considered some fairly enlightened 'advanced' play). Now, I interpreted this conversion in the context of the character's existing personality and traits, so that colored things, but he was different after that. Yorath got tested and broke and was remade. I owned the responsibility, as the player, to do that with integrity (only others can say how well I did, I'm not bragging).

Coming back to this:

When people in this thread have talked about doing this sort of thing in a trad game, pemerton has considered it to be GM-driven/centred, but apparently player-driven in AW, or whatever games they've personally run. It really comes across as "that doesn't neatly conform to my specifics tastes, so it's GM-driven (read: bad), not player-driven (read: good)." Compare to @Campbell's more nuanced view of it as a spectrum.

Well, first, it is a spectrum. Or even maybe we could adopt something along the lines of current thinking in this area and say that play is not always focused on a single agenda in a GNS sense. In any case, there are subtle differences IMHO. As I said above, when I was reading AIViking's description of several campaigns, I understand that the players in those games had a lot of influence over how they played out. That might indicate use of techniques and adoption of an agenda for some elements of play that would have been identified as 'Narrativist' back in the old Forge days (I wasn't there, so others more knowledgeable there may disagree).

But, I think that the attitude towards the game elements, as exemplified above when I talked about ownership meaning different things, IS often something that holds consistently for a certain game. I read AIViking and I read a traditionalist stance on that. Where it is relaxed it is treated like a special case, "oh, I let the players do XYZ" or maybe "oh, the players told me that they wanted XYZ." There's still a sense of an owner who controls the thing, like it is property, or a right they have.

And this does lead to certain differences. Like @pemerton talks about GM-driven things, places where the GM has decided some element of fiction, usually through their setting/prep, and that dictates the possible outcomes, or presents as a set of options for the PCs, or where it shapes how the world responds to player action inputs in ways that are hidden from view.

And this is where we do see another pretty decent difference between what I usually label as Traditional and Narrativist play. A lot of the basic conception in Traditional play is for the players to make action declarations which obligate the GM to reveal elements of the setting, and it is often considered bad form for the players to know or act on information that wasn't diegetically arrived at (this often creates problems and conflicts with notions of skilled play, but that's another topic). Narrativist play doesn't really give this notion a lot of credence. Some Narrativist games may allow for a certain degree of GM holding of information, but in general this isn't a feature of such play.

When we played 1000 Arrows, there wasn't some secret plan that the GM held about what Oda Nobunaga, the NPC who was a principle driver of the political conflict in the game, where finding out that plan or thwarting it in an operational and tactical sense was the object of play. Nobunaga and his forces simply appear at points where it puts pressure on the PCs as a threat. You know this threat is likely to manifest, and our characters have to plan for it. But even if the GM had devised some kind of plan and all the associated stuff (NPCs, etc) around it, the players wouldn't be in the dark about it. This is because we're going to need to understand what the stakes are in our actions. If there's a plan, is whatever I do now going to thwart it, set it back, risk helping it? Beyond that, the game is ABOUT what my character (and the other characters) feel, their ethics, interests, and selfhood. Focusing on an intricate plan built on the GM side of the table doesn't do anything for that. The game becomes about the GM's plan. I could see where, if I had created a 'Ninja' type character and I was all about spying and slipping in and out and here and there, then maybe such a plan might exist as a kind of a thing for me to steal or learn. The GM might even devise some particulars of it at some point, but those particulars would VERY likely be something like it being revealed that one of my allies was a traitor or something like that.