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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8028225" data-attributes="member: 42582">I'm not dismissive of it. I'm trying to talk about who gets to create it. I am noting that different approaches to RPGing give different participants more or less authority, or agency in that respect. If the player has his/her PC go aggro - that is, threaten someone - and rolls 10+, then the participant who controls the threatened character has to make a choice, either to suck up the threat or to relent.That is how the player controls the decision.Likewise, and as we've already seen in this thread with the example of Marie discovering that Plover is the real threat, a sucessfull roll to read a charged situation allows the player to require the MC to answer a particular question.In the 5e example, the player does not get to force the GM to tell them eg what's the biggest threat here (apparently the guards). Nor to force the burgomaster to either relent or be set back (in the OP the burgomaster id not relent and was not set back in any fashion).  The difference seems pretty evident to me.This is what makes me think you are not familiar with the rules of AW. Because you are not describing the Burgomaster sucking it up. From AW p 193:If the target forces the character’s hand and sucks it up, that means that the character inflicts harm upon the target as normal, determined by her weapon and her subject’s armor. At this point, the player can’t decide not to inflict harm, it’s gone too far for that.Calling for your guards isn't sucking it up.From p 194, here is an example of "barricading in" on a 7-9:Keeler’s hidden in a little nest outside Dremmer’s compound, she’s been watching the compound courtyard through the scope of her rifle. When I say that this guy Balls sits down in there with his lunch, “there he is,” her player says. They have history. “I blow his brains out.” She hits the roll with a 9, so I get to choose. I choose to have him barricade himself securely in: “no brains, but he leaves his lunch and scrambles into the compound, squeaking. He won’t be coming out again any time soon.” I make a note to myself, on my front sheet for Dremmer’s gang, that Balls is taking himself off active duty. I think that we might never see him again.In the OP example the burgomaster does not retreat or fall back. Rather, he brings pain down on the players (in the form of the guards). That is not an example of a 7-9 on go aggro.If the burgomaster, in the face of the insult, runs from the players into his secret chamber and surrounds himself by guards - like US Presidents do with their secret service agents in all those films about attacks on the White House - that would be an example of barricading himself in. But the OP manifestly did not do that.What do you mean by "meta"?In Classic D&D (OD&D, B/X, Gygax's AD&D) the question of whether or not there are monsters behind the door, or down the corridor, can depend on the roll of a wandering monster die. That's how those games work - some fiction is authored in advance, some fiction is authored on the spot in accordance with the mechanics. Appendix C of Gygax's DMG has charts not only for wandering monsters but for random wilderness encounters which can include monsters in their lairs, ruins, castles, etc. None of those things, in the fiction, comes into being because the PCs encounter them. But they are authored, at the table, on the spot and in the moment of play.In AW, likewise, or in Burning Wheel, or Maelstrom Storytelling, or Cortex+ Heroic, some fiction is authored in advance - eg in AW PCs have gear lists and relationships and there is at least some local geography established and probably some prominent adversarial NPCs also - and some fiction is authored on the spot in accordance with the mechanics.That's how a RPG works. There is, and never has been, any requirement that all elements of the fiction which have, in the fiction, a causal origin prior to current events must be authored in advance of the current moment of play. Frankly everything here suggests a radical failure to understand how to play a game like AW or BW or Cortex+ Heroic or any game that does not depend on discovering the content of the GM's notes.I posted an actual play example upthread. Here it is again:In structural resolution terms, this is strictly parallel to the box and the Crown. And the point, absolutely, is to find the mace. But that didn't happen. Instead the PC learned unwelcome truths about his brother.Why would a player in an AW game hae his/her PC look for traps? Because - as his/her PC - s/he wants to know what is going on around her. What the threats are. What the opportunities are. The point of play, in AW, isn't to beat the GM's scenario. The is no "GM's scenario". The point is to inhabit a character in a shared fiction.As a player in AW (or BW, or in a lighter game like Cortex+ Heroic or 4e D&D) you know that the GM will be throwing adversity at you. That's his/her job. If you want your PC to be safe then you don't play the game! But if you're playing, there's going to be adversity. It's not as if you can protect your PC from adversity by never looking for it!Vincent Baker is crystal clear what he means by "misdirection". He means overlaying real-world authorship decisions with in-fiction explanation. Perhaps you don't like his word choice, for whatever reason. That doesn't make his explanation any less crystal clear.You seem to have confused two MC principles. Never speak your moves name is one of them. That is an instruction to narrate fiction (eg, from p 111, "Maybe your move is to separate them, but you should never just say that. Instead, say how Foster’s thugs drags one of them off, and Foster invites the other to eat lunch with her.") Misdirect is an instruction to  narrate fiction that establishes in-fiction causation and connections. I already quoted this text from pp 110-11: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. . . . 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.There is no muddling of connections between cause and effect. Everyone at the table knows that the cause of the GM saying stuff is that something happened in the real world. Just like, in the OP, the players know that the reason the GM describes the burgomaster being angry is because a player described his/her PC as insulting the burgomaster. The point is that the GM is directed not to talk about those things. Rather, the GM is directed to narrate fiction that illustrates causal and similar (eg constitutive) connections. So, eg, in the example of play when Marie learns who is the biggest threat the GM establishes that Mill is 12 and no threat.I have no idea what you see as non-transparent here. Quite the contrary: the player now knows that Mill is 12 and no threat. And that Plover is a threat. The fiction is not secret from the players. This is a fundamental difference between games like AW, BW, Cortex+ heroic, Prince Valiant, etc - games which in some other respects are quite different - and RPGing-as-puzzle-solving.I'm not dismissive of it. I'm trying to talk about who gets to create it. I am noting that different approaches to RPGing give different participants more or less authority, or agency in that respect. As [USER=16814]@Ovinomancer[/USER] has already explained, the first paragraph of this is just flat-out wrong.The second paragraph is ironic, given your repeated complaints about the use of the word "misdirect". Because you seem to have been successfully misdirected!Fiction can change as a result of a player's decision without the player changing the fiction. In the post of mine you quoted I even gave an example: the GM changed the fiction because prompted to be a decision made by the player.As far as the character's action is concerned, that doesn't change the fiction. The character's action was to insult the burgomaster. The effect of that was to anger the burgomaster. Unless you're playing a RPG with 4th-wall/meta aspects to is fiction (Over the Edge is an example), character's can't change the fiction because they exist within it, they don't operate upon it.It is my opinion that all decent RPGing instructional text is written having regard to that basic fact. It tells real people what things they should do or say in the real world. It doesn't pretend that imaginary things are having real causal impact.in the fiction, yes, characters are trying to work things out. In the fiction, they typically don't create the answers to those questions.This resembles the real world, where - when I eg pan for gold in a creek - I didn't make it true or false that there is gold in the creek bed.But I am not talking about causation in the fiction, ie imagind causation, which in most RPGs correlates pretty straightforwardly with causation as it occurs in the real world.I am talking about causation in the real world. Or, in other words, how fiction is created.As I replied to [USER=16586]@Campbell[/USER] already upthread, in a game like BW where the question of whether or not the Crown is in the box is answered by resolving the declaration I look in the box for the Crown, this does not require the player to think outside of his/her PC. And when you say "as a GM I find it easier if the facts of the world (such as whether the Crown of Revel is in the box) are in my head as opposed to yet-undertermined" what you are saying is that you prefer GM over player agency in respect of those sorts of elements of the fiction.Maybe, maybe not. No one in this thread has posted actual play examples that would bear on this.</blockquote>

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