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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8647812" data-attributes="member: 42582">I would add: in classic dungeon-type approaches (and any analogues - eg exploring an abandoned starship in Traveller which might be a de facto dungeon) the GM can, by an act of discipline, stick to their prep. I think this is a real thing. It has pay-off - it helps support the tangibility, and the process of revelation of a coherent fiction - and it also makes puzzle-solving possible, on top of the discovery that you refer to in the post I've quoted. (At a certain level of abstraction, it's no different from other games where the same person both writes the (hidden) puzzle and adjudicates the solving of it - hangman and Mastermind are the two I think of straight away.)I don't think you are going to disagree with my preceding paragraph.Here's another thing I would add. I don't expect you to disagree with it either. It flows from your remark, in the same post I've quoted from, thatMy thing I'm adding: We can't talk sensibly about RPGing if we don't acknowledge (i) that the "tangible setting" approach, and the particular GM role it depends on, is only one way of playing, and (ii) that (as Baker puts it) the "tangible setting" gives the GM privileged authorship in respect of the shared fiction.But it seems that nearly every attempt to acknowledge (i) and (ii) is met by hostility from advocates of the "tangible setting" approach. In the past, I have summarised what you say - about information moving from hidden game state to known game state - as the players playing to learn the content of the GM's notes. This is precisely what is going on, and the history of RPGing practice is replete with tangible illustrations of the point: players making maps of places described to them by the GM; players making notes about NPCs, factions, events etc described to them by the GM; players making records of foes defeated, where those foes were described by the GM; etc; and in all those cases that material not being dictated by the players, nor the result of a GM's soft or hard move in the AW sense, but being generated by the GM using their "privileged authorship" to decide the contents of the "black box" that is then revealed to the players.But to say it, and to note it as only one way of RPGing, seems to be regarded almost as heretical.</blockquote>

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