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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9673988" data-attributes="member: 42582">Here is what makes little sense to me:*The game is not GM-centred / GM-driven; and yet, It is supposed to make sense to talk about the players in that game having their PCs *bypass something that has no existence except as an idea in the mind of the GM.I don't see how both those propositions can be true of the same episode of RPGing.OK, this seems to be a description of GM-centred play. Particularly in choosing to use the word "bypass" rather than simply "do not engage with" or even "avoid".And relatedly: there is a contrast between the "bypass" terminology, and the way you (and some other posters) talk about it, and how Gygax talks about classic dungeon-crawl play. Gygax talks about the players avoiding traps and tricks, choosing which parts of the dungeon to explore, etc. But he does not talk about "bypassing encounters", in part because there is no expectation that any particular bit of the dungeon will be any more salient than any other bit.Again, this seems to me to be a description of GM-centred play.That is pretty crucial to GMing some sorts of RPGs.For instance, Apocalypse World says this (on pp 108, 143):DO NOT pre-plan a storyline, and I’m not [mucking] around . . . Prep circumstances, pressures, developing NPC actions, not (and again, I’m not [mucking] around here) NOT future scenes you intend to lead the PCs to.Here's a thing that happened in my TB2e game:And then, some time later in the real world, a somewhat similar thing happened in my BW game:In both these excerpts of play, you can see me as GM narrating stuff - Fea-bella's scream, and other noises, echoing through the tunnels to be heard by the other PCs at the entrance to the caverns; Serap coming to the door of Thoth's establishment - but with no fixed idea as to what exactly it betokens. I settled on the location of Fea-bella's body as part of narrating the compromise in the other players' Flee conflict. I invented details of Lady Mina's house, and the presence of Father Simon and his role in sending Serap to Thoth, once Thoth's player had decided to accept Serap's invitation.And in both accounts a failed used of magic causes a sinister shadow thing to go scuttling off into the darkness. In neither case, when I narrated this, did I know what it was, or what exactly its presence meant. Subsequent events in the TB2e game helped resolve, a bit, the implications of the shadow (first it possessed Krystal, and then a failed attempt by the PCs to remove it from her meant that it merged with Megloss). In the BW game nothing more has been established than that it is lurking outside Lady Mina's house, waiting for Thoth.This is what [USER=16586]@Campbell[/USER] was getting at, at least as I read him, when he posted this:</blockquote>

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