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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9116215" data-attributes="member: 42582">What example have I posted that looks like this?Why is the player wandering into the store? Why is this even a thing in play? Who authored the need for whatever it is that the player is hoping their PC can buy in the store?Then, how is it established what might be able to be purchased in the store? And whether or not it is for sale?Without any of this sort of information, how can we possibly speculate about who is exercising authority in respect of the shared fiction of the store?I've posted actual play examples. What doesn't make sense? What is the "random mish mash". To be blunt, I'll put the depth and coherence of the fiction my group creates up against anyone else posting in this thread any day of the week.When else would the GM act? I mean, playing a game means doing the things, in the game, that the rules tell you to do. Doesn't it?Correct. What you describe here is a recipe for GM-driven play. I prefer high player agency play, as I think I've made clear in this thread for the past 180-odd pages.So I begin all my RPG play, as well as my discussion of RPG play, from the assumption that I am sitting down at the table with a group of like-minded people, who like me love the tropes and genre material that are foundation for our games - in my case, that is REH and Roy Thomas Conan, LotR and the Silmarillion, King Arthur and John Boorman's Excalibur, Star Wars and Jedi Knights, the films Hero and The Bride With White Hair and Tai Chi Master, etc, etc. Any given individual might have drunk from a slightly different well from me, but I assume that they care about this stuff, enough to want to play a game that is built around this stuff and the themes it speaks to.Last year, when I GMed a session of In A Wicked Age for teenagers, some of the tropes they drew on were more gonzo and more contemporary than I would personally bring into play. I was able to handle it, and to incorporate their ideas into my framing and my narration  of consequences.But if the only interesting course of action a player can see, in the game, is "I attach the king yuck yuck yuck" then something has gone badly wrong. Either that's someone who actually doesn't want to lay RPGs, in which case we can cheerfully part ways; or else I am presenting situations that are so lacking in interest that the best move the player can see is a completely degenerate one.I understand that this can be a problem for beginning GMs - in my first few years of GMing, as a teenager myself, I had to learn how to establish interesting situations and it took me a few years to really hit my stride (though not everything I did before then was terrible, by any means). But I've been GMing for about 40 years now. I don't pretend that I'm a master of my craft, but I'd like to think that I've worked out the basics of how to frame interesting situations.If the fiction in my RPGing could be half as compelling as Star Wars, one of the great fantasy films of all time, I'd regard that as a triumph!And I'm not the GM who has trouble creating situations more interesting than "I attack the king yuck yuck yuck".</blockquote>

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