Celebrim
Legend
The problem arises when others want to judge what is legitimate to say next.
So, let me ask about that. Hitherto I've been discussing this problem as if we had a standard RPG play cycle with a single secret keeper and fortune in the middle play loops.
But the above quoted sentence suggests that your play cycle is non-standard in one or more ways.
So let me give you my technical language so that we can hopefully bridge this communication gap.
Fiction: This is the imagined setting and everything in it.
Fictional Positioning: This is the current state of the fiction.
Proposition: This is something a player says that represents an action in the game by their character. The player proposes that the character tries to do something, like for example, "I want to climb the wall".
Fortune: This is the test specified by the rules to determine whether or not the player's character can perform the action that is proposed. The outcome of the fortune specifies whether the proposition succeeds or fails.
Fortune Testing: This is usually random thing you do like throw a dice or draw a card that is the core of the fortune step that handles the uncertainty of doubtful propositions. Note that in the case of a proposition that isn't doubtful, because the rules say it's trivially easy, fortune is often not tested and we go straight to Adjudication. We still did the fortune though, as table had to agree at the fortune step that the odds of success (or failure) were 100%.
Adjudication: This is the result of the fortune as narrated by some participant in the game, usually the GM.
Secret Keeper: This is the participant of the game responsible for knowing all the fiction's hidden information, again usually the GM. Note that some RPGs attempt to eliminate secret information from the game to one extent or the other, usually so that more than one participant can participate in Adjudication.
Proposition Cycle: Normally play in an RPG consists of a cycle of Proposition->Fortune->Adjudication that updates the fictional positioning incrementally. This is however not the only possibility. There are Fortune->Adjudication->Proposition cycles and Proposition->Adjudication->Fortune cycles in some RPGs. If it's not immediately obvious how those odd seeming cycles work, I can explain.
Stakes: These are the possible outcomes of a fortune: what happens if you succeed or fail. These are often hidden in standard RPGs because only the secret keeper has enough information about the fictional positioning to know the consequences of a proposition, but can be explicit (and in some cases must be) in non-standard proposition cyles.
Rules: This is everything that goes into the fortune phase of the proposition cycle that determines what the fortune is and whether after the fortune is tested the proposition succeeded and to what degree. This term includes both rules as written as well as the rulings and house rules that the table has come to apply to the situation. Think of the difference as being similar to the difference between legislated law and judicial precedent or common law. It's all still rules.
Processes of Play: This is the catch all term for everything happening at the table goes into determining the proposition cycle, including the rules and things that aren't covered by the rules. It turns out that these non-rule issues are absolutely as impactful on how the fiction is produced as the rules are. Modern games often pay attention to that by strongly specifying the processes of play that tables should use, where older games are often silent on processes of play and leave them up to individual tables, sometimes because they just assume the processes of play are so obvious that everyone is using the same ones. The processes of play are determined by things like "how we think about the game" or "how we prepare to play the game" or "what are we trying to achieve by playing the game" even more so than the rules. You can think of them as the conscious or unconscious implementations of your "Principles". It's what we are actually doing when we play that concretely describes the game in the way rules alone don't.
Proposition Filter: This is one of the more important aspects of the processes of play, and that is everything that goes into deciding whether a proposition is valid. Propositions have to pass a proposition filter before they go into the Fortune phase and are Adjudicated. For example, the earlier proposition "I climb the wall." may fail a proposition filter for being too vague to determine exactly what the character is doing in the fiction, in which case the GM will reject the proposition and ask for clarification, "Which wall? The wall is 50' wide: where on the wall do you climb? What do you climb with?, etc." An example of where tables with the same rules may widely differ is that at some tables, "I try to fast talk the guard" may be a legitimate proposition and at others it certainly wouldn't be.
Call: This is an attempt by the player to learn something about the fictional positioning without the character taking an action. This is usually in the form of a question, and basically represents the player attempting to make sure he understands the fictional positioning. You can think about it as the player character within the fiction observing it. For example, "What color is the banner on the wall?" or "Is there dust on the floor?" At times a Call can actually change the fictional positioning by adding a feature to it the GM hadn't previously considered such as "Is there a paper clip in the drawer?" Previously even the GM might have had no idea that there was a paper clip in the desk drawer, but if that seems like a completely reasonable thing to find in a drawer then he could answer "Yes." In some game systems a player even has a right to make a call that asserts a truth about the fictional positioning by spending some narrative authority. This may be important to this discussion.
Narrative Authority: This is who at the table is allowed to Adjudicate at any given time. Usually, the GM in a game has full Narrative Authority, and players only have Narrative Authority through dispensation, and are thus normally only able to update the fiction by making Propositions.
Now given that, can you tell me what your proposition cycle looks like? And in particular, is your "Legitimate Intentions" intended to be a Principle that authorizes a Player (not the GM) to be able to amend the fiction through a call? That is to say does your process of play involve shared Narrative Authority?