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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5586050" data-attributes="member: 42582">When I said "the GM is not going to 'gotcha' the player", I glossed it with a reference to my discussion upthread of the considerations that I think are relevant to working out the downstream consequences of the dwarf PC in my game having led his former-tormentors-now-followers to an unhappy squashing-by-behemoth. What I am talking about here, and what that gloss was meant to indicate, is the relevance, for a narrativist/thematically-driven playstyle, of parameters on the determination of consequences other than "what would naturally flow". (Where "naturally" might be understood as "naturally, given ingame causality and logic" or "naturally, given the genre" - not that these need be mutually exclusive ways of reasoning.)Glossing the gloss: I'm not sure, in a simulationist game, how a GM would decide whether or not one of the squashed NPCs, despite being a former tormentor, had also been responsible for saving the lives of the PC's family. Perhaps a die roll would be used to do the job. Or maybe it would be deemed so improbable that the possibility is disregarded.In the sort of game I play, though, I will make that decision based on my best attempt to drive the game forward without negating or invalidating the player's engagements and decisions to date - which includes, in this case, a consideration of how fair or appropriate it is to turn something that the player treated in a rather light-hearted or humorous fashion into something much heavier and more serious.This is what I take Laws to be talking about (in a quote I reproduced way upthread) when he talks about challenging the PCs so that the players will in turn challenge you. It is also part of what I take to be in the mind of the author of the blog I quoted a few posts up when he talks about experience helping a GM determine consequences - because if I stuff this up, then instead of choices producing consequences producing choices etc, I'll risk getting player withdrawal and turtling instead.I'm not sure I follow this. Are you saying that you don't think I have identified a relevant difference between simulationist and narrativist play styles? Or that you don't/wouldn't enjoy narrativist play? Or that narrativist play is mistaken or misguided in some fashion? Or something else?</blockquote>

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