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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9672774" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Yes, exactly this, this is what I mean when I say the world is inside the GM's black box unless-and-until the GM chooses to inform the players about it, under this approach, as I have understood it.Informed decisions depend on already having a ton of GM work done. Anything that doesn't already have a ton of GM work done will necessarily be less detailed, and almost always on-the-fly improvised to a pretty heavy degree. That degree of improvisation is extremely difficult (I would argue nearly impossible in most cases) to separate from the GM defining what is possible as they go--at which point, they've made a menu of options, they just did so extemporaneously rather than in advance. That still places such an enormous amount of control over both what can be interacted with, and what players can ever be informed about. It's extraordinarily difficult to attempt to do things you literally don't know are possible. I don't mean that in the sense of "you can try ANYTHING!", I mean it in the sense of it is outright hard to think of things where you just flat-out don't have information about them. Even very creative people easily miss that sort of stuff--which means both the things the GM does speak about and the things they DON'T speak about have enormous influence over what the players can or will do. I've seen many, many, many times over people--both here and elsewhere--talk about how it is, for example, the PCs' fault for not asking the one-eyed man at the tavern about what monsters might lie ahead. Yet, for me, that would completely go over my head. I would understand that one-eyed man as simply demonstrative of the flavor of the world (e.g. "injuries are common here, take care!" or "you'll need to be a real badass to not end up like this guy!") Had I not had people explicitly tell me that the sight of a one-eyed man (or whatever else) at the tavern is very specifically a player-knowledge check, I simply would never consider it, and would then feel pretty cheated by suffering the consequences of not doing a thing I literally would not have known to do.Which, again, is why I talk so much about the GM having enormous control over both the inputs into decisions (what exists at all; of what exists, what the PCs can observe; of what the PCs observe, what they truly get informed about; of what they get informed about, what among those things is actually possible to do/use/interact with/benefit from/etc.) and the results that come from those decisions (consequences, ripple effects, opportunity costs, reputation, etc.) I'm just...not really sure how I can make informed choices (not perfectly informed, but sufficiently informed) in such an environment, and in the absence of informed choice, I don't really think it's possible to have meaningful agency. Insufficiently informed choices don't support meaningful agency--but in order to inform choice, the GM must do much more work to build the world, thereby nailing down options. I'm not saying it's an insoluble dilemma, the tension between "enough prep that players choices are sufficiently informed to be meaningful" and "enough openness that players truly have freedom to choose regardless of GM desire/effort/interest/bias/etc." But it is a tension; to inform, the GM must know; to know, the GM must define; to define, the GM must necessarily fix parts of the world, lock them in place. But to pursue player freedom, the GM must avoid fixing as many things as they can; to fix as few things as possible, the GM must leave things undefined; by leaving things undefined, the GM cannot know what they are in advance; but the GM cannot inform the players of something they themselves don't know, because GM knowledge IS the world, there is nothing of the world BUT what the GM knows of it.I am, however, generally trying to hold my peace right now, to give robertsconley time to reply, so I'll leave that there--I suspect there will be a response to these thoughts, directly or indirectly.</blockquote>

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