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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7732039" data-attributes="member: 42582">The same way as any other serial fiction.It's not secret backstory. A secret is something that one person knows and another doesn't. A piece of fiction that no one knows because it hasn't been written yet isn't secret from anyone.As to the alleged inconsistency - there's 101 reasons why the conspirators need a ship on Ardour-3 and the ones they have aren't available (eg the lab ship is undergoing reparis, and they don't want to be seen in a military vessel so far from their base with no obvious military reason to be there). If it comes up in play - and it may or may not - no doubt one of the 101 possible reasons will become established as the reason.The risks of inconsistency are, in my experience, grossly exaggerated.If I could run games half as compelling as Raymond Chandler stories, I'd be pretty pleased with myself. But Chandler himself didn't know the reason for one of the murders in the film version of The Big Sleep.In the post you refer to, I said "backstory is . . . crucial, because it establishes the infiction logic/rationale/context of the events the GM is describing. But the backstory that plays this role isn't secret from the players. In fact, it is able to play this role excatly because it is known to the players!"But that doesn't mean all the backstory is known to the players. Because, over time, new backstory will emerge, establishing new context, new significances, new twists, etc. A story is dynamic in that sense - it unfolds over time. A story is also written over time. In the sort of play I am describing, the two events are concurrent - the writing of the story occurs with the learning of it.As I posted, that also doesn't mean that the GM doesn't have ideas. As soon as I started running the Traveller game, I had the idea of the PCs being stuck on an airless world in their ATV. But one person's idea is not backstory; it's not part of the shared fiction.None of those things were true in the gameworld before they became announced by me at the table, and hence known to the players. I authored them as part of the process of adjudicating player action declarations - eg they interrogate their captives; their captives therefore tell them stuff about the conspiracy; so I make up some stuff about the conspiracy. These are therefore established as backstory, and able to inform subsequent events and provide them with context and meaning.A game where the GM vetoes PC action declarations on the basis that she has already decided (privately, in secret) that they can't succeed - what else is that but a railroad? It is the GM who is deciding where the action goes and what the outcomes are?So if a player wants to come from a village of fisherfolk, but there isn't one on your map, then they can't?That sort of GM story-telling is one way to run a RPG, but it's not the job of a GM. It's one way of being a GM. It's very far from how I like to GM.</blockquote>

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