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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9111064" data-attributes="member: 42582">Upthread I've talked about RPGing as "puzzle solving", and [USER=6696971]@Manbearcat[/USER] has mentioned Torchbearer in this context. Here are some actual play examples which will permit elaboration:The first sequence of play - in which the PCs try and sneak in to Megloss's house to steal the papers - is an example of the players exercising agency over the shared fiction. The broad goal is to obtain some sort of advantage, or leverage, by taking the papers from their enemy Megloss's house. The house itself, the locked door, and its inhabitants including the Cinder Imp, are all elements of GM-introduced adversity. There are thus two broad conceptions as to how the fiction should go next - mine as GM, in the adversity role, is that the Cinder Imp gets their lantern and they don't get the papers; theirs as players, in the role of advocating for their PCs, is that they get the papers, which will be useful to them, and keep their lantern, and evade/escape the Imp.Which of these two conceptions prevails is determined via the appropriate rules procedure, namely, a Trickery conflict (broadly comparable to a Burning Wheel Duel of Wits, or at a higher level of abstraction to a 4e skill challenge). As the post above reports, this ended up with the PCs successful but the players owing a compromise: thus they got the papers, but the lantern was smashed, and the Imp angered.I've snipped what followed, to go to the town phase which involved four relevant player action declarations. The first three are these:*Korvin reading the papers; *Golin doing research in the library of the Wizard's Tower; *Fea-bella doing more research.These do not involve the players exercising significant agency over the shared fiction. Rather, the players are deploying their resources - in this case, tests made during a town phase, each of which adds to the Lifestyle Cost of the PC who performed it. Because each test in Torchbearer is normally its own reward - contributing towards advancement of the tested skill or ability - there is an element of sheer mechanics here: the players spending resources to accrue tests.But the successful tests also obliged me as GM to reveal information. This information pertained to the Shadow Caves, a dungeon beneath Megloss's house that I had already written up. In the writing up I had had regard to thematic content introduced by the players - the nature and fate of Elves - but also included some ideas of my own. (As I've mentioned a few times upthread, this GM pre-authorship is one way that Torchbearer differs from Burning Wheel. This aspect of Torchbearer - GM pre-authorship, which the players can try and gain information about - is deliberately based on classic D&D.)The players learned about 3 bits of my pre-authorship:*Celedhring, an Elf who abandoned dreaming and the West and turned instead to the powers of the Outer Dark; *That Megloss's house had originally been the house of the wizard Pallando, who had built the house around a post from an Elven Dreamhouse that had been stolen by Celedhring; *That Celedhring, after entering the Shadow Caves, had never left them.This is where the puzzle-solving bit came in: in particular, the players used some of this information to inform their planning for their excursion. And this is the fourth of the relevant town phase tests: the Resources test to acquire holy water. Because this failed, I as GM got to narrate the consequences in accordance with the rules, which I did: successful acquisition of the desired item, but with a condition (Taxing of Resources) being imposed. (Later in the town phase, but snipped in the above posts, there were more failed resource tests where rather than success with a condition I imposed a twist, in the form of a new enemy for one of the PCs.)The final part of the quotes sets out the PCs' encounter with aptr-gangrs in the Shadow Caves. Here the play is no longer puzzle-solving: rather, it is very similar to the Cinder Imp scenario in its basic structure: as GM I have one conception of how things will go (ie that the PCs are captured by the aptr-gangrs) while the players have a competing conception (at first that their PCs will escape the aptr-gangrs, and then given that they can't escape the aptr-gangrs, that their PCs will capture them instead!). That was resolved using the rules for a trickery conflict, then a flee conflict, then a capture conflict. As the post described, in resolving these conflicts the information that I had pre-authored - the dungeon map - provided material for framing and for narrating consequences (eg it gave places that were advantageous for the aptr-gangrs, or advantageous for the players) but resolution was not map-and-key based, which is to say there was no adjudication of declared actions by reference to pre-authored material. The resolution took place via the conflict system.This sort of toggling between play that involves a reasonably high degree of player agency in respect of the shared fiction, and play that involves the players getting information from the GM which serves as grist to their puzzle-solving mills, is central to Torchbearer play.</blockquote>

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