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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7599427" data-attributes="member: 42582">I've honed in on these bits of your post because I think they might be the best place to start.I personally think the issue of telling - if that means explicitly stating as a precursor to the roll - is a bit of a red herring, because in RPG play, especially among participants who are used to playing together, there are many ways to convey information and establish expectations other than explicit telling.But I think reducing what is conveyed to [/I]consequences for an action are simply bad[/i] is not correct. And that's really what I see as the focus of the discussion. It's not irrelevant -  [MENTION=177]Umbran[/MENTION] canvassed, upthread, that a consequence of spilling might be good (eg if it stops the BBEG getting the fluid) and that's a possibility that is excluded in the context of my play example - but it's too simplistic. What's the nature of the badness? Who is implicated? What sorts of things might be required to effectively respond to it?I've played games in which the answers to those questions are known only to the GM, and the players can't act on them except by way of either (i) guesswork, or (ii) declaring actions that will get the GM to release the answers, or bits of them (which is the analysis/study I referred to in my OP). Whereas in my example, the player knows the parameters of the answers to those questions without having to guess and without having to engage in further action declarations. The player knows that the badness will pertain to something that the player has put forward as significant in the game (in virtue of his PC build) - the master/servant relationship, the propriety of butlering, or something in that neighbourhood. Given the master/servant relationships established in play - the PC's own, and that between the NPC butler and the NPC master, the latter of whom is ultimately in charge of the mysterious fluid - the player knows what elements of the shared fiction have to be focused on in order to uncover and possibly resolve or at least respond to the bad thing.One way to describe the approach, at a fairly high level of generalisation, is that by choosing to play a butler and then by following that up with a choice to help his butler friend do his duty by looking after the fluid, the player has placed a constraint on what I, as GM, am entitled to establish as consequences of failing in the context of that second choice. So the player knows the general parameters for consequences because he set them. So they can't be something known only to the GM!Once we step down from that high level of generalisation we can add another gloss: the GM is allowed to push the player on what it means to be a butler, and what counts as doing the right thing as a butler. And one way of doing that is through the narration of consequences. I regard this as just about the highest-risk aspect of the approach I'm describing: because if you don't push at all then the player may never feel challenged and things can be too "pat"; but if you push too hard or misjudge what the player will regard as fair provocation (as opposed to just overriding their concept) then the whole edifice can fall over, with unhappy consequences for trust and other feelings. That's why I regard the back-and-forth between player and GM as super-important, even among people who know one another (because we might know one another well, but have we ever discussed butlering before?). And that back-and-forth itself helps warm the player up for what might be coming downstream, as well as providing the GM with the stepping stones for more dramatic or hard-hitting consequences downstream, and so it both telegraphs and lays the ground for surprise - which might seem paradoxical, but hopefully I've succeeded in explaining why it's not.For some RPGers all of the above might seem obvious, and straightforward or even oversimplified.But my own experiences, both of play and of posting, make it clear to me that it's quite a different approach from that which many RPGers use. Just to give one example: I've read many posters saying that they design adventures before the players generate their PCs; whereas the approach I'm describing makes that literally impossible.</blockquote>

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