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<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8666645" data-attributes="member: 42582">Not disagreeing, just elaborating:The ability of the player to shape what the fiction is about follows from the rules/principles that restrict hard moves. That is to say, if the player asserts &quot;I look for X&quot; or &quot;I wonder about X&quot; or &quot;I do X&quot;, then provided that X is (in some loose sense) viable within the scope of the genre, the already established shared fiction, etc, the GM can't just say &quot;sorry, no X today&quot;.Vaguely related: I did a search for old posts and discovered that my earliest post on these boards setting out a &quot;no failure offscreen&quot; approach - which is to say, no hard moves in virtue of the GM making decisions about the fiction purely in their own imagination - were made a little over 10 years ago:Back in that discussion, the poster to whomI made that second reply seemed to find it hard to imagine certain possibilities in RPGing: they repeatedly used notions like &quot;significant to the plot of the campaign&quot; (referring to locations and to events); and they repeatedly assumed that the play of the game must generate information relating to time and distance/geography/situation which would then, of necessity, interact with the GM's secret offscreen knowledge to dictate events (eg that one of the planned, plot-significant events had occurred while the PCs were somewhere else doing something else).The same poster was also producing &quot;quantum ogres&quot; (or, in their case, a &quot;quantum trap&quot;) as if pointing to degenerate examples of Gygaxian play is a knock-down counterexample to the possibility of &quot;story now&quot; play.I think many of these conversations have not changed much in the intervening 10 years! It can still sometimes seem quite hard to have discussions in which certain premises are recognised as contingent, as relevant to some approaches to RPGing (obviously Gygaxian play depends on the GM holding fast to prior prep) but not others.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 8666645, member: 42582"] Not disagreeing, just elaborating: The ability of the player to shape what the fiction is about follows from the rules/principles that restrict hard moves. That is to say, if the player asserts "I look for X" or "I wonder about X" or "I do X", then provided that X is (in some loose sense) [i]viable[/i] within the scope of the genre, the already established shared fiction, etc, the GM can't just say "sorry, no X today". Vaguely related: I did a search for old posts and discovered that my earliest post on these boards setting out a "no failure offscreen" approach - which is to say, no hard moves in virtue of the GM making decisions about the fiction purely in their own imagination - were made a little over 10 years ago: Back in that discussion, the poster to whomI made that second reply seemed to find it hard to imagine certain possibilities in RPGing: they repeatedly used notions like "significant to the plot of the campaign" (referring to locations and to events); and they repeatedly assumed that the play of the game [i]must[/i] generate information relating to time and distance/geography/situation which would then, of necessity, interact with the GM's secret offscreen knowledge to dictate events (eg that one of the planned, plot-significant events had occurred while the PCs were somewhere else doing something else). The same poster was also producing "quantum ogres" (or, in their case, a "quantum trap") as if pointing to degenerate examples of Gygaxian play is a knock-down counterexample to the possibility of "story now" play. I think many of these conversations have not changed much in the intervening 10 years! It can still sometimes seem quite hard to have discussions in which certain premises are recognised as contingent, as relevant to some approaches to RPGing (obviously Gygaxian play depends on the GM holding fast to prior prep) but not others. [/QUOTE]

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