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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ovinomancer" data-source="post: 8250541" data-attributes="member: 16814">He wasn't, he was saying there was nothing to apologize for.  However, reading elitism into the statement that your response was not exceptional and required no apology maybe does require an apology.I'm pretty sure they wouldn't, largely because I'm pretty sure that you, the GM, were improving things for the players, and not centering those on what the PCs were and were doing.  A key way to tell you're not in Story Now is if the players are often asking you questions to find out about the mystery/setting/scene.  In Story Now, they declare actions, and those become the focus for evolving the scene, not what the GM thinks is going on.To give an example, my Blades group was investigating a haunted house, and I described a creepy hallway with a creepy painting (among some other mood setting things).  Now, the difference between approaches is that in trad play, the players could ask about the painting and I, as GM, could make up something, maybe that it's possessed, or that it's nothing.  The players learn this by asking me about the painting and obliging me to tell them something.  In Story Now, however, this is different.  One of my players declared that he thought that painting would be a good acquisition for a friend interested in the occult (this PC was trying to switch vices to obligation, and this furthered this).  I now had the option of agreeing, and saying that it would, or challenging this assertion -- I cannot, in Blades, refuse this kind of action declaration.  So, we rolled a check, which the player failed, and that resulted in me narrating that the painting was indeed haunted, as the player suspected, but now it was trying to suck him into the painting, surely to a horrible fate!  Play proceeded.  Had the player succeeded, though, the painting would have been worth something to his occult-collecting friend, and the player would have successfully acquired it.  In this play, the player isn't asking me questions about the scene/setting/mystery and obliging me to tell them things, but they're making bold action declarations and testing to see if they are true.Happens all the time, though.This would, in fact, be very bad Story Now play, because this is GM Force -- which is when the GM pushes an outcome regardless of the actions/successes of the PCs.  GM Force is not a bad thing -- it's actually required if you're running most published modules, for instance -- but it is something anathema to Story Now play.It does mystery awesomely, but it doesn't do pre-planned who-dun-its at all.  Clarity about what you mean with "mystery" seems to be the problem here -- you're mixing the whole thing up in a bag, but seem to really mean "do the players learn about my clever mystery," which, yes, Story Now games absolutely do not do at all.  It's the opposite of the intent, really.  That doesn't mean that you can't have some very nice mysteries, but they're going to be organically grown through play, and plot twists are going to happen the same way.I provided an example of a mystery as it occurred in my game above, and you seem to have skipped any comment on it at all.  Do you see how that mystery occurred -- it ended up asking "who is behind the alchemical formula, what does it do, and how can we stop it?"  The answers to that were cultists trying to manifest their god, creates super vessels for ghostly possession by concentrating the field locally creating large instabilities to aid the manifestation, and they didn't, but it didn't go off as intended, either.</blockquote>

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