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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9504925" data-attributes="member: 42582">I don't agree with your notion.In pawn stance RPGing, of course there is a shared fiction that matters to resolution - eg "I open the chest" is a very typical action declaration in pawn stance dungeon crawl play, and it is not resolved via any sort of mechanic or algorithm, but rather by everyone collectively imagining the character in question putting their hands on the lid of the chest and lifting it open.But there is no need in pawn stance play to think about the character as a character. They are purely a game piece (hence pawn stance). The last time I played a session like this was a few years ago, when I GMed a session of White Plume Mountain using AD&D rules. It's not my personally favourite form of RPGing, but it is quite viable and fun enough.And it is roleplaying, in the sense that the players each adopt a role - defined, in AD&D, by race, class and alignment - which is the "vehicle" whereby they engage with the fiction and pursue the goal of gaining treasure by defeating or outwitting its guardians.Given that a person can't literally navigate a fictional space, I think it's clearer to drop the metaphor and just describe what is going on: the participants in a RPG construct a shared fiction - they imagine stuff together.And of course - as you say - there are rules, procedures, principles, practices etc that govern how they do this. In this respect, it's no different from any other social activity, and no different from any other sort of game-playing where the typical/conventional norms of sociality are supplemented and to some degree even replaced by a set of "artificial" norms - that is, the deliberately adopted rules, expectations etc that constitute the game that is being played.This involves a "drafting" of others only in the banal sense that when I make a move that changes the shared fiction in accordance with the agreed rules, procedures etc then other participants are expected to accept the new fiction as the shared fiction. The same is true of me when they make their moves. If the game is well-designed, then it should be reasonably clear at each point who is entitled to "go" next, so that we don't get collisions of expectations.Historically, a lot of RPGs rely on a bit of brute force and GM-as-conductor to handle a good chunk of that sort of coordination of "who goes next?" and avoiding colliding expectations. The main exception to this has tended to be combat resolution, which historically has followed wargame conventions which - being designed for competitive play -tend to be quite good at establishing clear expectations around who gets to go when, and what the results of their moves are.But contemporary RPG design has come up with much more reliable ways to manage expectations and coordinate game play without just relying on the GM to brute force it! Anyone who is still thinking in terms of GM brute force, or even players brute-forcing one another ("drafting" the other participants) is a bit behind the times, in my view.</blockquote>

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