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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8227765" data-attributes="member: 42582">OK.The players in my game, as their PCs, were curious to learn more about the pendulum. It was clearly part of the apparatus of a technically complex establishment. There was no sense in which it would be a "distraction" - when the goal is to find out what the establishment is for and how it works, learning what a part of it is for and how it works is not a distraction. It's the point.Here is what [USER=6696971]@Manbearcat[/USER] actually posted upthread, that you ([USER=29398]@Lanefan[/USER]) quoted:There is nothing at all there about consequences, naturalistic or otherwise. There is something about not using secret backstory to oppose PCs. Which is something that I do not do (with one prominent exception in our Traveller game: the game calls for a secret roll to determine if a branch of the Psionics Institute exists on a world, and I have used that mechanic).Saying all of the consequences could as easily have been based on pre-made notes is like saying instead of rolling the dice in a D&D combat, the GM might have just narrated all the outcomes of all the declared attacks. That's true, but it doesn't entail that there is no difference between using the combat mechanics to find out what happens in combat, and having the GM just tell you.There is also nothing in [USER=6696971]@Manbearcat[/USER]'s post hostile to "thinking offscreen", which is one of the principles of Apocalypse World, the original PbtA game. What he does say is you do not use your pieces to convey a thematically neutral, PC-disinterested world. The wedding I described was not thematically neutral. Nor was it PC-disinterested. It involved a powerful wizard who leads a cabal to which the main PC wizard belongs. The attack of the Imperial armada I described was not thematically neutral. Nor was it PC-disinterested. The PCs were on the world in pursuit of religious and psionic secrets; and the armada was there - it seemed - to enforce the Imperium's anti-psionic policies.There are a million possible things I could tell my players about what is happening in the galaxy, and what they encounter. I choose to tell them about things that engage the dramatic needs of their PCs. That's why I have no use for the technique of setting up "agnostic" rosters of events. These do not enhance the game I want to play. Somewhat similarly, in REH's Conan we don't hear random news of things that don't matter to Conan; in Raiders of the Lost Ark we don't hear about random German military operations, but only the ones that implicate the ruins that Indiana Jones wants to explore; in an X-Man film or comic we don't hear about changes in interest rates, and the only hearing of the "World Court" we ever learn about is the one where Magneto is on trial for crimes against humanity.</blockquote>

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