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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8765335" data-attributes="member: 42582">This post is prompted by the following remark posted by [USER=16586]@Campbell[/USER] about a week ago, about the way in which RPG participants can make decisions about the shared fiction:When I run trad games (which is fairly often) I make these decisions primarily on my understanding of the setting/scenario, but that only works in my opinion when significant interaction design work is put into scenario and setting design. Players need means to find the facts on the ground and meaningful connections between setting elements to leverage. The environment doesn't have to be known, but I feel it should be meaningfully knowable and comprehensible. Part of that involves designing NPCs that can be meaningfully convinced and relied on as we all rely on people in our daily lives. . . . We all have those moments where we don't communicate as well as we can or we don't provide enough levers in the fiction for players to interact with. Basically sure we follow the internal causality of the setting and defined NPCs within it, but we also design all of that. The impact of those designs are something we are accountable for and strive to get better at.How can we design scenarios and settings to enable players to find the facts on the ground and to provide them with enough levers in the fiction to interact with? What sorts of scenario and setting will generate an internal causality that is meaningfully knowable and comprehensible?A lot of this is circumstance-dependent: both details of the fiction over time, and details of the shared experiences over time of the participants, will make a big difference. But I think some general suggestions might be possible.For example, just thinking about NPCs: I think it supports [USER=16586]@Campbell[/USER]'s desiderata if most NPCs are more-or-less faithful to the role they occupy in the setting. Corrupt, duplicitous, double-agent, etc NPCs are significant obstacles to players getting the sort of knowledge and leverage that [USER=16586]@Campbell[/USER] talks about.What other general suggestions can be made?</blockquote>

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