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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9106446" data-attributes="member: 42582">To me, interaction connotes a back-and-forth of causal influence. Like if I interact with a person.Whereas I choose the verb engage with deliberately - it's one way. And generating makes the direction of causation even more explicit.Whenever I see people talk about the fiction in RPGs as if it, in itself, dictates or determines or causes things, especially in these conceptual and definitional contexts, I am moved to politely but firmly reiterate my view, that imaginary things don't exercise causal power.A concrete example. Here's an explanation for why a character failed to find a secret door after looking for one: there's no door there to be found! But that is not any sort of explanation for why a player's declared action "I (as my character) search for secret doors" produces the answer "You don't find any". Because that game play is all something that happens in the real world, and hence has real world explanations: namely, there is an agreed process for generating the fiction as to what happens next; the GM has implemented that process; in this case, let's suppose it includes looking at a map or notes; and that map or those notes indicate that there are no secret doors to be found in the place where the PC is looking.I would add to this: the player side moves should be, at least roughly, "correlated" with GM hard moves in the following sense, that most of the time you want the fictional circumstances where you are happy to see GM hard moves be the same sorts of fictional circumstances that will trigger a player side move.This way, most of the situations in which the protagonists find themselves (temporarily) defeated will be ones that, at the table, have been preceded by the excitement of a dice throw.Likewise, you want the same sort of correlation between circumstances that will trigger a player side move and circumstances where you are happy to see the protagonists (temporarily) succeed. The fact that (for instance) Apocalypse World has no when you sincerely profess to another that you love them move tells us something about what sort of fiction it is giving us (namely, not one where protagonists achieve their heart's desires by way of sincere professions of love - we might expect an Arthurian or even Austenian PbtA game to have a different player-side move approach to this particular field of human endeavour!).</blockquote>

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