Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8027624" data-attributes="member: 42582">No one disputes the rules are different. One difference is the degree of transparency.The player in AW knows that if s/he succeeds on the Go Aggro check, s/he is putting the GM to a choice. What does the player in 5e know? That "it wouldn't be unreasonable" to allow various checks? Or that the GM might make a decision unilaterally without framing checks?The character didn't change the ficiton. The character exists within the fiction and does not author it.The GM changed the fiction. S/he did so because s/he was prompted to by the player's action declaration.It may be that you have misunderstood what "misdirect" means. From AW pp 110-11, 153:Of course the real reason why you choose a move exists in the real world. Somebody has her character go someplace new, somebody misses a roll, somebody hits a roll that calls for you to answer, everybody’s looking to you to say something, so you choose a move to make. Real-world reasons. However, misdirect: pretend that you’re making your move for reasons entirely within the game’s fiction instead. Maybe your move is to separate them, for instance; never say “you missed your roll, so you two get separated.” Instead, maybe say “you try to grab his gun” - this was the PC’s move - “but he kicks you down. While they’re stomping on you, they drag Damson away.” The effect’s the same, they’re separated, but you’ve cannily misrepresented the cause. Make like it’s the game’s fiction that chooses your move for you, and so correspondingly always choose a move that the game’s fiction makes possible. . . . She rolls+sharp and hits with a 7–9, so she gets to ask me one question from that move’s list. “Which of my enemies is the biggest threat?” she says. “Plover,” I say. “No doubt. He’s out of his armor, but he has a little gun in his boot and he’s a hard f*****. Mill’s just 12 and he’s not a violent kid. Isle’s tougher, but not like Plover.” (See me misdirect! I just chose one capriciously, then pointed to fictional details as though they’d made the decision. We’ve never even seen Mill onscreen before, I just now made up that he’s 12 and not violent.)Misdirection is Vincent Baker's term for the MC (=GM) establishing fiction in response to the resolution of declared actions. The MC does not explain his/her real world reasoning. Rather, s/he establishes and narrates fiction that generates the outcome to which s/he has reasoned in the real world.This is part of what establishes transparency from the players' point of view: the player knows the fiction. There isn't secret or unrevealed fiction that the GM is nevertheless using to make resolution decisions (contrast what you and [USER=29398]@Lanefan[/USER] are advocatig for in this thread)This is wrong, and again suggests misunderstanding.Here are some examples of announced future badness (AW, pp 111, 116-18, 128):Maybe your move is to announce future badness, but for god sake never say the words “future badness.” Instead, say how this morning, filthy, stinking black smoke is rising from somewhere in the car yard, and I wonder what’s brewing over there? . . . “[A]nnounce future badness,” for instance, means think of something bad that’s probably going to happen in the future, and announce it. . . . The most important and versitile setup move is announce future badness. If you don’t have another move already at hand, announce future badness: “Someone’s in there, you hear them moving. What do you do?” “‘Oh, hey, Keeler, Ribs is looking for you.’ What do you do?” “She’s about to figure out where you are. What do you do?” “Dude you have a split second before that thing gets its teeth into your arm. What do you do?” “‘Hey boss, it’s cool, but I don’t think everybody’s happy. There’ve been more fights down in the stews, I think somebody’s maybe trying to move in on somebody else’s biz.’ What do you do?” “You hear a dog outside, sniffing and whining. ‘You found something, boy?’ What do you do?” . . . The MC move for pushing is announce future badness. “Wilson, you’re down collecting the day’s water from the well and do you feel like reading a charged situation? Something seems off this morning.” “Keeler, Dog Head does what you say, but, it’s like, he keeps looking at you for a minute after you give him the order. What do you do?” “Bran, while you’re working, just for a few seconds all your lights dim and the constant low hum of your workspace? You hear it just start to slow. Everything kicks back in after just a second or two and you can keep working. What do you do?”The badness is threatened. The GM doesn't need to know what it is - we can see this in the examples, where eg the GM may not have decided yet why Bran's workshop lights dim, or why Ribs is looking for Keeler. The players may react to prevent the badness, or allow it to mature. That's their prerogative.The clearest analogue in standard D&D play of announcing future badness is the GM narrating what the PCs see when they open a door.I have bolded some key phrases.The past and the present are descriptions of the fiction. I am consistently trying to talk about the real world. (This is slightly ironic in the context of your remarks about AW on misdirection, given that you seem to be misdirected in your analysis of RPG play by treating properties of the fiction as if they're properties of play.)Your choice to give different sorts of labels to acts of authorship doesn't seem relevant to the point I am making - that point is that, in both cases, action declaration leads to new fiction being narrated (dead orc, Crown found in box). What I'm intrerested in is who has the capacity to establish that new fiction? You do not appear to be contesting my conclusion in that respect. When you say that "there'd by agency" all you mean is that there would be action declarations that provoke the GM to narrate new stuff. The players wouldn't be establishing the contet of the ficiton.What they would be doing is figuring out stuff that the GM has made decisions about. Which is what I called, upthread, RPGing-as-puzzle-solving.But why, when I talk about player agency in respect of the content of the shared fictin, do you read my words through your peferred terminology?When I read your paragraphs quoted just above, what I read is that you prefer a game in which there are large swathes of the fiction in respect of which players do not exercise agency over its content.</blockquote>

Verification