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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8235807" data-attributes="member: 42582">On collaborative creativity and discovery:Humans tend to find it easy to tell stories, and imagine more things happening than came out expressly in the story. We can speculate about "what happens next" after the end of a film or book. We can debate about what the events of a story tell us about the personality of a character from it, and thereby debate about how that character would respond in some other situation that was not part of the story and hence has never been authored.Sometimes those ideas are arrived at through reasoning. Sometimes they occur spontaneously.The way that the sort of play [USER=85870]@innerdude[/USER] is describing works is by drawing upon, and deploying, these human tendencies and capacities. So the dice are rolled and the result dictates that the barkeep knows two useful things. And so then everyone at the table wonders, what might those things be? And one player says "Didn't we learn last session that the barkeep's cousin once fought in the shadow wars? And just before you (the GM) mentioned something the barkeep seemed to be keeping hidden under the bar. It's probably the cousin's sword or armour from their time as a warrior!" Of course, when the GM mentioned the barkeep's furtive glances to something under the bar she may, or may not, have had some idea about what it might be. But that's not established fiction and so doesn't matter at this point.And then someone else says something, and at the same time the GM says "The barkeep reaches under the bar and pulls out something long and wrapped in oiled cloth. . . ." And so the conversation goes on. And all the participants experienced a revelation: the mechanically-generated obligation to add new fiction satisfying a particular requirement has led some throwaway or off-the-cuff remarks from a session ago, or 5 minutes ago, to crystallise into this new thing. But no one sat down and self-consciously authored it. They spun it out of what was already there, and the trajectories and possibilities it suggested, because that's what people do when they encounter stories and set their imagination to work.The sort of thing I've just described happens all the time in my games, with players introducing new fiction because that's obviously how it is given what's already been established, and what seems to be implied by what came before. Sometimes as GM I will step in and throttle it back a bit if it seems to contradict something established or some part of the framing; but most of the time I just run with it.As a player, it's pretty different from being told by the GM what s/he extrapolates from his/her notes. As a GM, it's pretty different from working with notes or extrapolations therefrom.</blockquote>

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