I think you can absolutely both have an inhabitation of the character and subconsciously author at the same time. Like, I can imagine myself in character walking into a bar, and start describing what my character is seeing without any sense of "trying to author". The sensory impression is simply there in my head, just like the sensory impression from my current surroundings (this laptop screen, right now).
You can also have inhabitation of character and
consciously author. I mean, here's an example:
To give an example from a few years ago. Game is 13th Age set in Greyhawk. My character is an elven princeling playboy and is in conversation with the ghost of a local NPC lord. We'd established the two characters knew each other and had been friends, but had parted on bad terms when they last met. Beyond that there were no details. The conversation became a blazing row between the two characters over the details of the grievance that were made up on the spot. It was an intense, emotional and very immersive scene. What would have broken up the immersion was going back out of character to the GM and determining these details out of character, before repeating them in character, but I've done that on both sides of the screen and it's always felt to me a bit like reading from a script.
What was required was that both I and the GM trusted each other not to drastically mischaracterise each other's character and to accept that some details of the character could be defined by the other participant. But by making up details on the spot (or if we were to be a little more formal, plausibly extrapolating them from already established fiction) we had one of the most immersive RP experiences I've ever had.
I forget the precise details, but this argument involved the treatment of at least two previously unspecified NPCs, at least one location that didn't yet appear on a map and IIRC, a local tradition. All "made up on the spot" - nothing that violated established fiction, all plausibly extrapolated from existing fiction. The tradition and location had no relationship to the PC, as did at least one of the NPCs - is this still fine?
In this case, it was a grievance against my character from the NPC. I'd agree that collaboration was needed, and we did, just during the course of play rather than outside it.
<snip>
it was the NPC's sister, another noble lady, an orchard in the NPC's lands and a firefly festival in a village on the NPC's land. The grievance (as we-as-real-people discovered together) was around courtly woo-ing, accusations of unfaithfulness, wounded honour and so on, all very chaste and Arthurian. In no way did my PC have a hand in the creation of the orchard or the festival, but they would have been familiar with them due to visiting the location before. Now, all this could have been created before hand, it just happened that it hadn't been.
In the first of these quotes,
@Gimby refers to
plausibly extrapolating details from the already established fiction. I don't want to project my own experience onto Gimby, but "already established fiction" can in my experience include not only geography and timelines, but also personalities, emotions, mood, implicit trajectories of threat and promise, etc.
The "reading from a script" remark is also very apt, at least for me. To elaborate a bit: in arguments or conversations like the one that Gimby describes, it is natural that the participants will make reference to places, people and events - that's what happens when individuals talk to one another. But the actual content of the established fiction, in RPG play, is pretty thin. So either the game participants who are playing the conversing characters have to make things up, or else - if everything has to come from one authoritative source (the GM) - then they have to pause, seek information/permission, and then return to their conversation reciting the stuff that the authority provided them with.
The issue with "reality warping powers" is two-fold from my personal perspective:
1. You are applying the standards and play methodology of an unrelated style of play to one where those standards and methods are not in effect. No reality is being warped because there is no game world or objective reality to be explored (or even an illusion of one). There is just shared fiction that has been established and undefined setting. We're just defining things that have not previously been defined.
2. It's usually used in a way that presumes a desire for content authority (or more likely an expectation to have the GM use their content authority in certain ways) is something that will be used to the player's character's advantage to achieve aims rather than to setup compelling situations. It's assumed that players cannot be trusted within AW style prompts where the GM temporarily cedes their content authority in a targeted way.
Yeah, I made your point (1) upthread, when I posted that it makes no sense to say that the play of (say) MHRP is wrong from the perspective of (say) conventional D&D play.
Your (2) seems to me closely related to my posts upthread about "solving the mystery" or otherwise "beating the module". In that sort of play, the parameters for a win need to be (at least broadly) pre-set: it's inherent to the whole enterprise that there is an "external" standard of player success. But not everyone is playing in that fashion!
I personally also think that methods that work for "solve the mystery" or "beat the module" sometimes get extended to other aspects of, or approaches to, play in ways that don't seem to make much sense. Eg I have read accounts of play where (i) the GM has prepared a "plot"/adventure for the players to play their PCs through, but (ii) the GM "hides" that plot, or makes it a mystery to be discovered. To me, it seems to make more sense just to present it plainly to the players.
I've posted the following actual play example before on these boards:
Thurgon and Aramina travelled north-west along the Ulek side of the Jewel River. The GM wanted to cut through a few days, bugt I insisted on playing out the first evening - Thurgon and Aramina debated what their destination should be (Aramina - being learned in Great Masters-wise, believes that the abandoned tower of Evard the Black lay somewhere in the forest on the north side of the river, and wants to check it out). Thurgon persuaded her that they could not do such a thing unless (i) she fixed his breastplate, and (ii) they found some information in the abandoned fortresses of his order which would indicate that the tower was, at least, superficially safe to seek out (eg not an orc fortress a la Angmar/Dol Guldur).
Evard was a character whose existence, and whose tower's existence, as part of the shared fiction was established by a successful Great Masters-wise check made for Thurgon's offsider Aramina, the cynical sorcerer who for some as-yet unestablished reason hangs out with him.
To me it is more immersive for me, as a player, to have Aramina remember the location of Evard's tower, than to have the GM tell me what I (as Aramina) remember.
And it seems to me obvious that
knowing where an interesting place is doesn't break the game.
What I dislike is the player creating fiction which is not closely related to the PCs history. Going back to the rune case:
-if the runes were made by the PC, I think the player defining is ok.
-if the runes were made by the PCs father in a language the two can understand, the player defining them is ok
-if the runes were made by the PCs ancestors four generations ago, it's a bit sketchy but I'd be ok with it.
-if the runes were made by other distant members of the PCs culture, I prefer DM control
-if the runes were made by a culture unrelated to the PC in a region the PC and her ancestors never encountered, then I find player control to break immersion. This holds even if the PC has a memory--"I remember a contact told me this culture created runes as maps".
In the runes case, you don't know whether any of these is true. For instance, you don't know whether or not the character's guess/conjecture was prompted by some subconscious recognition of the runes. (I don't know either, as I don't recall enough of the details of the game, and what we said when the roll succeeded, and what was possible and what was ruled out.)
And of course making a roll against the Doom Pool to step back/eliminate a complication (in this case, a Lost in the Dungeon complication) doesn't break the game either. Rather, that's exactly how the game works.
