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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8602570" data-attributes="member: 42582"><a href="http://lumpley.com/index.php/anyway/thread/702" target="_blank">Vincent Baker</a>: "Fictional positioning is only and always retroactive. You can guess what your position is, and you can plan for your future position". I think it follows fairly closely from those two things that you can know what your fictional position - that is, "how the game's fictional stuff affects real-world gameplay" by being one of the "factors and processes . . . that determine" your "total set of all of the legitimate gameplay options available to [you] at [a] moment of play" - was. For instance, if Dro declares "I put a bolt in its face!" and that move is accepted as legitimate, Dro now learns that his fictional position included Harguld having a crossbow ready to shoot. Dro was probably already confident about that, for the reasons I posted upthread, but that confidence is now shown to be fully warranted.Conversely, I don't think it would be consistent with the retroactivity of fictional positioning to deny that there was some or other fictional position.To me, this does not seem to describe something which is known only retroactively. I also don't find "reflection" that helpful. <a href="http://lumpley.com/hardcore.html" target="_blank">Roleplaying is negotiated imagination.</a> It is that negotiation that determines fictional positioning. At the core of negotiation is making decisions together. Reflection may contribute to this - eg upon reflection, everyone agrees that a shattered faceplate on the surface of Pluto means freezing, suffocating and decompressing - but I don't think reflection is at the core.I'm not. As per Baker, I'm saying that it is one of the factors that determines what moves are legitimate. It's not the only such factor. Cues - eg that two dice pools are tied for successes - constitute another factor. And so do interpersonal considerations.You seem to be ignoring both cues, and the interpersonal, as factors that underlie legitimacy of moves. I don't agree with this. How do we even know that the fiction of Harguld and the Gnolls is about being pursued by Gnolls? We don't know what Harguld's Belief is, nor what his Goal is - and in Torchbearer these are key determinants of what the fiction is about. In this way (and others) TB betrays its origins in BW.The fiction contains or includes a pursuit of Harguld and friends by Gnolls. That's enough to let us understand the example of play, including how actions are declared. And it marks a contrast with BW - in BW we can't understand an example of play, and in particular how a GM declares consequences of failure, without knowing what the fiction is about, because in BW and unlike in TB, the GM in doing those things must have regard to the Beliefs, Instinct and Traits of the PCs. But what the fiction is about is not itself an element of the fiction (absent 4th-wall breaking stuff, like some approaches to Over the Edge). Rather, it pertains to some of the interpersonal factors that Baker mentions: being interesting, being engaging, being relevant given that everyone has gathered together here and now to play this game and not this other game. The same is true of your concerns about non-sequiturs. These are not elements of the fiction.Returning from BW to Torchbearer, the game is about hardscrabble adventurers trying to make their fortunes in a hostile world (see DHB pp 6-7, SG pp 4-6). That means that - typically - the GM would probably be going awry to narrate the Gnoll rushing up to Harguld and planting a kiss on his cheek. We can explain that in part by reference to established elements of the fiction - the cue for Gnolls (ie their statblock on SG p 186) describes their Nature as Ambushing, Devouring and Worshipping, with an Instinct to attack from ambush rather than directly, and that cue supports a shared fiction (as [USER=82106]@AbdulAlhazred[/USER] has mentioned not far upthread), a shared imagining of what Gnolls are like, which makes the planting of the kiss seem inapt. But we can also explain that inaptness by reference to what the rulebooks tells the game is about. Contrast, say, The Dying Earth where something so absurd might be less inapt.You are referring here to a NPC, it seems. AbdulAlhazred and I have been talking primarily about PCs.The parson about to strike a child seems no different from the Gnoll about to kill and eat Harguld. These are persons in the fiction, doing some things and hoping to do other things. No one disputes that such intentions are part of a fiction. But they are not particularly worthy of remark. Flowers can also be parts of fictions. Hallucinations can also be parts of fictions.What I have said, and what I believe AbdulAlhazred has also said, is that:(i) imagined intentions of imagined people play no special or distinctively interesting role in the shared fiction - they are just more imagined stuff; (ii) the imagined intentions of PCs are highly mutable in play, and often are introduced into the fiction ex-post to make sense of, or support the integration into the fiction of, declared actions (and this is why I mentioned Ron Edwards on stance - stances are particular ways of relating imagined PC intentions and action declarations, and Torchbearer is clearly not a game that promotes predominantly actor stance play; (iii) that the real intentions of real people are not part of the fiction, and are not part of fictional positioning either.Here, you are describing interpersonal factors - playing in good faith, having regard to the overarching purpose/logic of the game, etc - that inform position (ie the suite of available legitimate moves).Baker himself clearly distinguishes the from the fictional aspect of a particpant's position.And also related to the issue of legitimate moves, though on the GM-side:I think we're not agreed on this point. The features that you mention - players changing intentions, goals, beliefs etc - are all present in Burning Wheel. As I posted in <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/at-the-intersection-of-skilled-play-system-intricacy-prep-and-story-now.687017/" target="_blank">the other thread</a>, the difference I see between the systems is the relationship between player-established priorities, and the considerations that inform the GM's framing and consequence-narration.As I said above in this post, that is why we can't make sense of a BW episode of play without knowing what the play was "about" - ie the Beliefs etc of the protagonists.</blockquote>

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