What is *worldbuilding* for?

[Lanefan]

The agency over pacing, for instance, seems to be a big concession -- players in DM facing games tend to have much more agency over pacing than in player facing games because crisis is an emergent function of DM facing games while it's a focus in player-facing games. Players in player-facing games cannot avoid or mitigate crisis by slowing down the pacing. Players in DM-facing games have less agency to introduce new fiction to overcome crisis. This is because they have more agency in pacing to mitigate and overcome crisis. Much of the discussion about resting in 5e is really about how much agency the players have over pacing and how it can trivialize many elements of the game that the DM uses to advance to crisis. So, this isn't something that's new, even if it's not normally discussed in terms like 'agency over pacing.'

QFT - 'pacing as agency' is certainly relevant here; and I see it as incumbent on a good DM to follow the pace the players seem to want to set.

 

[Emerikol]

My only beef with you [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] is the misuse of terms. I don't think what you call agency is really agency. Maybe it can be worldbuilding agency if you will. It's definitely not PC agency. PC agency just means the PC's can do anything in the GM's world they want with the only limitation being what their characters are legitimately capable of. To me that is 100% agency.

If you mean, agency outside of their characters, then sure. There is 0% agency outside of your character in my game. It's still a game very full of PC agency. Just not player as worldbuilder agency. I think the term agency probably triggers people on the other side because they very much feel like they are playing a game where they have lots of choices as characters.

And I go back to the real world. How much agency do you have over your life? I would say I have total agency within the limits of what I as a human being with my skillset can do. I can't make a building vanish no. I can't (yet!) make a car fly. But I don't feel a lack of agency. So really I think using that term is a mistake.

Maybe the right term is player authoring. How much can players author worldbuilding content as players outside of their characters? In my games you can't. In Iserith's games, you can create entire nations so long as it doesn't contradict prior shared knowledge. I imagine in your games Pemerton it falls somewhere in between.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Early Traveller adventures are pretty much what you describe only more boring if that's possible - they really are "poke at this situation and get the GM to tell you stuff until you figure out what is going on". It's like the early part of an Alien franchise movie but more tedious and with no payoff!

LOL, yeah, I never ran any of them, they were really mostly poop. I mean, there were some reasonably interesting locations and potential in some of the plots, but they had the weakness of almost any D&D module (you have to basically follow the author's path through the thing, usually with fairly minimal available branches) AND they didn't have the virtue of being an enclosed environment where such a path is at least pretty natural and likely to result from whatever the PCs do. That is to say, dungeons pretty much get explored, so when the PCs show up at White Plume Mtn, or Castle D'Amber, they are pretty much going to explore it! Granted, there are some possible plots and whatnot in some of those, but the tight focus on a narrow location works.

Traveler modules tend to be much less that way. Most of them involve a presupposition that the PCs will take the bait, do whatever social/political/economic maneuvering is needed, get to the primary location, and then stick there when they could most likely (and most logically) just bug out. Obviously SOME of them instead railroad the party into the action, but that's just WORSE. A game where characters can roam a large fraction of the galaxy should NOT be a game where they get railroaded into a 'dungeon', yet that is sadly the description of most modules.

On more modern versions, I can't comment on Mongoose Traveller but MegaTraveller is (I would say) an objectively bad system:

* it turns nearly every entry on the skill chart into a cascade skill, with choices like (say) Liaison vs Carousing as opposed to the Wheeled vs Grav Vehicle type stuff that you get in Classic, thus losing the quirks and virtues of random PC gen without getting a coherent (say, points buy) alternative;

* it replaces the interesting rules for skill resolution in CT (where, say, 1 rank in Vacc Suit means something different depending whether you're trying to avoid tearing your suit running across a moon, or you're trying to emergency patch your suit having torn it; and where, say, unskilled driving is easier to pull off than unskilled Streetwise, let alone unskilled Medicine or Engineering) with a complicated and utterly bland universal skill resolution system;

Yeah, I have had very little exposure to it. What I read didn't seem like an improvement over CT and I still own that, so...

Mongoose Traveller OTOH seems like mostly just a more polished CT. It refined the skill check mechanic slightly, but the chargen system is pretty much lifted verbatim from the original game, with the appropriate refinements that were introduced in the supplements. I think there are a couple minor tweaks that help get rid of a few quirks like the totally useless guy that got booted from the marines at age 22 and has no useful skills (not a good trade off for lack of age reductions to physical stats if you ask me).

* it replaces the intriguing and workable ship design system from Book 2 with some unworkable descendant of the barely workable High Guard system;

The High Guard system is literally just "take the CT core system and break it down to infinite levels of granularity" plus the extrapolations to a whole range of giant ships. It is a bunch more work to build a ship using it, but I used to do it regularly and once you know the system its really not bad at all.

The real issue with it is the way it completely recasts the whole concept of ships. By the standards of the original core books and the first few supplements a 50k ton Azhanti High Lightning class cruiser is a HUGE warship. By High Guard standards it is barely more than a ship's boat for REAL warships which range on up into the megaton range. Had they started out with this concept in mind, then it would have been a bit less incoherent, but it comes across as kind of weird. Of course HG has been around for 40 years now, so you always have the choice to just go with what it dictates from the start.

I will admit, million ton merchant vessels kinda implies a whole different sort of economics though....

Basically, at every point where the game could lose its charm and playability and become more like a poor cousin of GURPS, MegaTraveller makes that move.

Well, isn't it basically a spawn of the GURPS Traveler expansion? I think essentially that is the thing's pedigree. GURPS Traveler came out, was met with something of a yawn, and then some people folded the new material back into the original rules structure, with updates. I'm NOT a GURPS fan (said by someone who really liked Steve and Co. and playtested a lot of their early stuff, but it just never floated my boat).

The only innovation it has that I think is worthwhile is the "special duty" line on the PC gen charts, which gives starting skill loads out a bit more in line with Mercenary/High Guard-type characters.

I haven't had occasion yet to use "loss of Social Standing" as a stake in my game, but I think it's completely viable, and Andy Slack had a version of it (connected to criminal convictions) back in his early White Dwarf Expanded Universe series.

Yeah, I think Mongoose has basically the same tweak. I always thought that Traveler should have made INT, EDU, and SS as 'mutable' kinds of things. INT in terms of cyberpunk/transhumanist stuff, and the other two simply in narrative terms. I guess physical stats would be up for grab as well in that case, but it would seem like there should be some sort of trade offs there which Traveler doesn't really deal with.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I can see the logic of this. For me, full equality suggests a game like A Penny For My Thoughts that I posted about upthread. Once you start having distinct player and GM roles, there have to be different functions to establish that distinctness. I see those differences of function to include, at least potentially and - given my habits - by default, different sorts of authority over content-introduction.

For instance, I think player content introduction - again, by default given my habits - is circumscribed by the PC as some sort of centring device. So eg a player can say, "I reach out to Jabal, the leader of my sorcerous cabal", therefore making it the case that the fiction includes Jabal as a leader of the cabal. But the player probably can't just declare that Jabal has a step-child who is a magic-using prodigy; nor just declare who the head of the butcher's guild, to which the PC has no connection, is.

I think all the above is often very informal, and as I've said guided by habits and assumptions. But I hope you can see a certain logic to it!

Yeah, in HoML I introduced the 'Inspiration' mechanic where you only get points either 1 per session or if you accept a 'setback', and anything you add to the game has to be based in continuity and related to a trait of your character. So basically it ends up being very much like the Jabal thing, players add new relationships, maybe 'remember that they packed a knife', etc. I mean, you might remember that the bad guy has a step-child, assuming you can justify that in terms of a trait of your own character, but that IS a pretty big limiting factor there! It seems to work out. Mostly the GM handles the framing details, and the players just toss something in now and then which adds to their fun.

And yeah, I see the fun and logic of it. Now my problem is I start to see all the limits to my insight into these techniques WRT whatever I've put together, and then I feel an urge to make a better set of rules... lol.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

What AbdulAlhazred has described does not violate the Czege Principle: he is positing that the GM has framed the PC into an endless indiscernible maze; and the player decares "I search for a secret passage to take me to the land of the Yuan Ti." That is just the play of a RPG!

To be honest I find it interesting, and potentially quite telling, that both you ( @Ovinomancer) and @Lanefan look at perfectly ordinary action declarations in response to GM establishment of the situation - like "I'm in place X - the maze - and want to be in place Y - the land of the Yuan-ti - and so search for a secret passage from X to Y"; or "Enemies have broken down the door to my redoubt, and I want to escape, so I search for a secret escape tunnel" - and see violations of the Czege Principle!

You are treating the principle as supporting a prohibition on players' freely declaring actions that would resolve their current predicaments - ie as a licence for railroading!

Well, I think what they're objecting to, and I'm unable to say if it relates to whatever Mr Czege wrote about since I haven't read it, is that the player could posit a goal "find the Yuan Ti" and a solution to achieving that goal "a secret door to the Yuan Ti temple". In the simplest form its equivalent to "I want gold, I search for a chest full of gold!" Now, in some games that might be a feasible move I guess, but it seems poor RPG play, at best.

I freely admit, my example wouldn't be very good clever play. The character's motivation is shallow, the player's goal could be interesting, but his attempt to shape the narrative to instantly fulfill it isn't. Obviously a GM in a realistic game would, at best, make the secret passage lead to somewhere that might be the first step on a long road to finding the Yuan Ti. HOWEVER, the point still stands, Yuan Ti would now have entered the game as a thing to achieve.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Sure, you had all of the assumptions!



I think, again, it's a bad comparison because the intent and declaration are outside of the scope of the model -- the model is that there is only the maze, but the declaration both presents something outside of the maze and a way to achieve it, neither of which are part of the model. It's like searching the study for a ray gun - it breaks the assumptions of the game. In doing so, it doesn't represent what you intended it to represent, and actually takes on characteristics that go against the model of player-facing games and right into some of the easy but incorrect criticisms made against player facing play, ie, that the players can just make up whatever they want.

As such, your example does more against your point that for it.



No, I understand all of that, I pointed it out because, given the simple model, the player declaring that there is a yuan-ti jungle in a world defined as only a twisty maze is introducing their own challenge and the fiction necessary to support it, ie that the spherical cow now has a tumor that's yuan-ti jungle shaped. And then the player proposes their own solution to this inserted problems with the declaration of a secret door. There's a mechanical check, which prevents a complete violation, but a success looks very much like one and a failure leaves the problem of whether or not the cow tumor yuan-ti jungle is negated as well.

OK, you are generally concerned here with problems of 'integrity of the milieu' or 'genre appropriateness' and maybe other variations on that theme.

I think its up to the people playing a game to work out what it is that is in genre. Its true, if the GM is the only one introducing fiction, then it may be perfectly consistent in this way, since presumably he has at least a coherent vision of that; though I think this is actually very frequently not the case, at least from the player's perspective.

I'd also point out that there can be any degree of milder agency, like a player might be empowered to say "I search for clues to where the Yuan Ti temple is" instead of suggesting any specific fiction. Maybe the character would share a story with his companions around soup about how he's fascinated with Yuan Ti because he read a book about it when he was a kid, or whatever.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

This is a bit vague. My understanding is that the GM is supposed to frame scenes that bring the player agendas into crisis, which isn't the same thing as framing things the players are interested in. The form of the crisis is the invention of the GM, not the player, and only loosely follows player interests in that the crisis formed attacks some part of the player's agenda. The fact that all scenes are supposed to place the player agenda into unavoidable crisis is the bit that I'm actually talking about. The defense that 'well, it's still the player's agenda' doesn't really defuse the point that the players lack agency to mitigate or choose the crisis they're forced into.

Well, one point here strikes me instantly. There's a huge difference between the pacing at the table, and the pacing in the game world. Its perfectly feasible to run a game where a character mostly does his own thing and only meets up with a few crises where his interests are threatened. The rest of his life could be just plain boring, but we're not going to play through that, so it doesn't matter. I'm not saying this is 'the answer' to what your saying, but just to put it out there, the PLAYER is the one playing from crisis to crisis.

And yes, the GM is going to threaten the character's interests, and thus ENGAGE the player's agenda. However that doesn't mean that character accomplishments are simply going to be open to constant threat. In fact [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] mentioned that several times, the sort of 'no regression clause'. I would give the example of the fighter's castle. Its not cool to keep constantly taking it away and forcing the player to endlessly win it back. It would be more cool to

Again, this is analytical. I think that there's a lot of fun in games that do this, that constantly bang the drum on crisis and make the players make hard choices. But, it that fun does come as some costs -- it's not all free lunch. And, when discussing agency, I think it's okay to acknowledge that it is a zero-sum game because we all can't have total agency in a shared space -- we also have to share the agency or it's not a shared space. How we share that agency is useful, but not when we're denying that agency sharing occurs and try to claim that one style has more agency than another in total.

Frankly I think the type of agency you talk about is like apples, and you are stacking and counting those, and we're over hear talking about oranges. While the numbers of apples and oranges might not be totally unrelated, I do not think they constitute a zero sum relation. 'Control of the narrative' itself may be zero sum in that there's only so much narrative produced, but even that isn't really a very good model because its not a one-dimensional situation, there are elements of content, quality (and consider this has multiple definitions, think WotC style 'player types') and quite likely a number of other dimensions here.

This is why I've tried to be so clear about how @pemerton has defined agency for his discussion. Under that definition, the agency over what's added to the fiction and how is more broadly given to players and taken from the DM in player-facing games (by definition of player facing, I'd argue). However, this doesn't mean that some other agencies aren't given back to the DM to compensate. The agency over pacing, for instance, seems to be a big concession -- players in DM facing games tend to have much more agency over pacing than in player facing games because crisis is an emergent function of DM facing games while it's a focus in player-facing games.

I don't take this as proven, or even self-evident. TBH I don't really take it as very coherent, as again I don't know what 'pace' we're talking about. Is it the pace of play at the table, or the pace of events in the narrative? I know of no principle of the Standard Narrativistic Model which states that character's must be hammered with a blizzard of attacks on their interests at every moment. They might well progress in stately and serene fashion about their business, and we only pick up their story at those points where it becomes interesting.

I'd also question the idea that everything must be a crisis like "your house is on fire!" or something like that. If a player's agenda is "build a trading empire that lasts 10 generations" (I'm thinking OA with its clans and such would be fun for this) then a 'crisis' could simply be "some new guys sail into port with cheaper goods!" and what happens next. Or "you meet a ship captain who tells tales of a fantastic island full of valuable spice you could buy very cheaply, but you'll have to risk a lot money on equipping an expedition, and risk being arrested, because the king has forbidden trade to that island!" or something like that. You don't need to be flinging burning flaming death at the PCs every day of their waking lives. That's crude.

Players in player-facing games cannot avoid or mitigate crisis by slowing down the pacing. Players in DM-facing games have less agency to introduce new fiction to overcome crisis. This is because they have more agency in pacing to mitigate and overcome crisis. Much of the discussion about resting in 5e is really about how much agency the players have over pacing and how it can trivialize many elements of the game that the DM uses to advance to crisis. So, this isn't something that's new, even if it's not normally discussed in terms like 'agency over pacing.'

Meh, I think what you're talking about, really, is player input, in game as the character, into a 'logistics game'. This is what 5e resting is about, calculating when it is advantageous to stop and recoup ones resources. 5e seems to feel this should be in the player's hands, though there are issues with that design. I don't think those issues are about agency though. In fact I'd say ONE of the issues is actually stemming from LACK of player agency, that the GM has to resort to 'plot costs' in order to create a dilemma for the players, should we rest or press on? Mechanically the answer is, 100% of the time, REST! I suppose this was also somewhat true of 4e, you can only really balance resting's mechanical benefits against narrative effects of doing it.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

A wall in a dungeon can be illusory or can contain a secret door or may have a message carved into the stone. It may do much more than simply block the PCs' progress. The only way to know is for the PCs to interact with the wall.

And I don't actually find 'secret doors' in the Gygaxian sense very interesting, outside of purely Gygaxian play where you're in a puzzle dungeon and that's just part of the puzzle. In a game of the type I'm talking about, why would a GM establish a secret door as part of the fiction? Well, establishing fiction ONLY happens for the purpose of framing scenes who's focus is on the player's agenda. So, a secret door in my kind of play will ONLY EXIST in order to further the engagement with that topic. There's no objective world, even an imaginary one, in which the secret door 'exists', it is a narrative device.

Now, if a player really wants to engage in puzzle-solving, then maybe setting up a situation where he has to figure out the existence of a secret door from whatever clues might be a thing. In that case the GM might actually decide at some point that the parameters of the mystery include a secret door at a specific location. This is a possible kind of play which could resemble 'classic' D&D play where the GM maps out an area and places a secret door.

OTOH a secret door could be a 'resource' ala Cortex+, or something that a player simply declares, as in "I search for a way through the wall, like a secret door" and then succeeds on a check. There are no real dearth of secret doors in my games, but they don't appear as fixed, established elements of mapped-out locations, unless such has been established by canon.

Same with the guards. Why would the bribeability of the guards be broadcast to the players, but a secret door would not? I don't see the distinction here within the context of your analogy.

I was just pointing out that a wall and an unbribeable guard differ in that one way. Of course I wouldn't have an unbribeable guard, just like I wouldn't have an unbeatable one either! So, in my style of play it would only be established that the guard is unbribeable or the wall impenetrable by testing that possibility, in which case the character's action will be thwarted and a different solution will be required.

Now, having said that, I would almost never have totally unbribeable guards in a game, unless there was some really compelling reason for it (I mentioned earlier that Modron guards on Mechanus would definitely fit this description). Especially if the players want an intrigue-laden, caper type campaign along the lines of the Gentlemen Bastards series.

Right, there's nothing wrong with genre conventions. Modrons are unbribeable, the walls of Asmodeus' palace are impenetrable. This kind of thing is OK, but it should be fairly obvious that these things are true, given their genre convention status.

But let's say there is some compelling reason for bribery not to work. Modrons, per my example above, or magically compelled guards, or whatever the case may be. Why offer this information? Why not make the players work for it in some way? The players can find themselves in a situation where their normal solution won't work. Can't that be an interesting scene that goes where the action is?

Agreed. I don't have a problem with walls. Maybe this is where the characters pull out a pickaxe and make a new door.

I don't think I see the fear of keeping secrets from the players that seems to be a major concern. Yes, I get that such secrets can be used poorly by the GM. But I also think they can be interesting complications to the players' plans, and what courses of actions are available to the characters.

Pemerton would likely dismiss this as not being interested in this kind of "puzzle solving" but I don't really see it that way. So I'd like your take on it, if you care to share.



So if I pre-establish in my GM notes that the guards may be open to bribery, but it will depend on the results of the PC's check, then how is this different from Story Now? I mean in the result at the table and the impact on the players' agency in this instance?

This was my point. I see Framing as limiting agency to an extent. It puts a choice to the players and is compelling enough that it must be addressed. So their choices of what to do are now limited to what is possible to address the situation before them. The fact is that the player is accepting of the limits placed on his agency. And I don't have a problem with this....this is fine. But it's interesting that you agree with me, but Pemerton does not.

My point being that Framing acts as a limit on player agency. It says "here is the situation...what do you do?" and in any situation, there are a limited number of actions.

Eh, is it limiting if the players can simply pick another direction to go in? As long as they're finding choices and as long as those choices have thematic narrative consequences its fine. Its when they have no choice as to what the story is ABOUT that they lose their agency.

I'm not advocating for either approach....I think I utilize both, but I tend to always have the players' interests in mind. But I think as you hint at above, a GM can take a LOT of leeway with what the player has offered as their interests in the game. The character who wants to prove his father wrong? You provided several different takes on it, and we ca come up with more, many of which would likely be very different from one another.

Yes, the GM always has a lot of choices, potentially. The art is really more in making it work for the players than in giving people choice.

 

[Lanefan]

Well, one point here strikes me instantly. There's a huge difference between the pacing at the table, and the pacing in the game world. Its perfectly feasible to run a game where a character mostly does his own thing and only meets up with a few crises where his interests are threatened. The rest of his life could be just plain boring, but we're not going to play through that, so it doesn't matter. I'm not saying this is 'the answer' to what your saying, but just to put it out there, the PLAYER is the one playing from crisis to crisis.

But what if the player wants to slow it down and make everything more granular; for example making each left-right choice at each intersection even if there's nothing there, rather than jumping straight to the 'action' without real opportunity to do anything else. This is what I mean when I refer to pacing; where more (or less) granular exploration and interaction with the game world means less (or more) overall story gets told or produced in a session.

I'm not sure what your take is on this, but from things pemerton has posted he seems quite concerned with maintaining a 'fast' pace, where lost of story gets told or produced each session (and thus the campaign as a whole is completed sooner); where I by contrast don't care about speed - it can all take as long as it wants to as long as people are having fun. There'll always be another session, and another after that...

And yes, the GM is going to threaten the character's interests, and thus ENGAGE the player's agenda. However that doesn't mean that character accomplishments are simply going to be open to constant threat. In fact [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] mentioned that several times, the sort of 'no regression clause'. I would give the example of the fighter's castle. Its not cool to keep constantly taking it away and forcing the player to endlessly win it back. It would be more cool to

This is quoted as posted - I think you were going to say more but it got lost somewhere?

Frankly I think the type of agency you talk about is like apples, and you are stacking and counting those, and we're over hear talking about oranges.

Sometimes it feels more like comparing apples to motorboats.

I don't take this as proven, or even self-evident. TBH I don't really take it as very coherent, as again I don't know what 'pace' we're talking about. Is it the pace of play at the table, or the pace of events in the narrative?

I'd say it's more pace of events in the narrative. Pace of play at the table is another issue entirely.

I know of no principle of the Standard Narrativistic Model which states that character's must be hammered with a blizzard of attacks on their interests at every moment. They might well progress in stately and serene fashion about their business, and we only pick up their story at those points where it becomes interesting.

Fine, but it'll seem like a constant barrage of attacks anyway if there's no chance for "downtime activities" between them. And this is what I'm getting at - if no attention is ever paid to downtime* then it might as well not exist.

* - on both the small (exploring empty passages, or PC-to-PC interactions while camped out) and large (what the PCs do during their three-week stopover in town between adventures) scale.

I'd also question the idea that everything must be a crisis like "your house is on fire!" or something like that. If a player's agenda is "build a trading empire that lasts 10 generations" (I'm thinking OA with its clans and such would be fun for this) then a 'crisis' could simply be "some new guys sail into port with cheaper goods!" and what happens next. Or "you meet a ship captain who tells tales of a fantastic island full of valuable spice you could buy very cheaply, but you'll have to risk a lot money on equipping an expedition, and risk being arrested, because the king has forbidden trade to that island!" or something like that. You don't need to be flinging burning flaming death at the PCs every day of their waking lives. That's crude.

Here I agree, and would go a step further and say you don't always need to be flinging anything at them at all. Give them a chance to determine their own next course of action - that's a part of player agency too.

Meh, I think what you're talking about, really, is player input, in game as the character, into a 'logistics game'. This is what 5e resting is about, calculating when it is advantageous to stop and recoup ones resources. 5e seems to feel this should be in the player's hands, though there are issues with that design. I don't think those issues are about agency though. In fact I'd say ONE of the issues is actually stemming from LACK of player agency, that the GM has to resort to 'plot costs' in order to create a dilemma for the players, should we rest or press on? Mechanically the answer is, 100% of the time, REST! I suppose this was also somewhat true of 4e, you can only really balance resting's mechanical benefits against narrative effects of doing it.

The poor-ness of the 4e and 5e resting rules aside, input into the in-game logistics is very important as a player; and is a part of the 'pacing' agency.

Lanefan

 

[pemerton]

Well, I think what they're objecting to, and I'm unable to say if it relates to whatever Mr Czege wrote about since I haven't read it, is that the player could posit a goal "find the Yuan Ti" and a solution to achieving that goal "a secret door to the Yuan Ti temple". In the simplest form its equivalent to "I want gold, I search for a chest full of gold!" Now, in some games that might be a feasible move I guess, but it seems poor RPG play, at best.

I freely admit, my example wouldn't be very good clever play. The character's motivation is shallow, the player's goal could be interesting, but his attempt to shape the narrative to instantly fulfill it isn't. Obviously a GM in a realistic game would, at best, make the secret passage lead to somewhere that might be the first step on a long road to finding the Yuan Ti. HOWEVER, the point still stands, Yuan Ti would now have entered the game as a thing to achieve.

I would go further than you have here (and I think you might come along with me).

I agree that your examples (the Yuan-ti and the gold), as presented, seem like fairly unexciting play. But I treat that just as a function of toy examples in a post to make a point.

I'll give a real example, from actual BW play:

A PC has (as two of three Beliefs) I will free my brother from possession by a balrog and I'm not leaving Hardby without gaining some magical item to use against my brother. The very first scene, that started the campaign, found this PC at a bazaar where a peddler was offering an angel feather for sale (ie a magical item that might be useful in dealing with a balrog-possessed mage).

This sees those two beliefs (one as instrumental to the other) engaged right away. And it doesn't make for poor play at all!

Now the retort might be that was GM framing. But I don't think that makes any difference.

In my Traveller game a couple of sessions ago the players had a group of PCs make planetfall on a particular world to try to find alien artefacts there. Traveller doesn't have a formal belief mechanic, but we could say the goal is We will find alien artefacts on Enlil. I had established (by way of the world generation system) that the world in question had a class C starport and was TL 3; and hence had decided that the starport was an orbital station (there being no onworld starport on a TL 3 world). A NPC had subsequently let the PCs know that DNA scans on the inhabitants of this world revealed alien as well as human elements to their DNA.

The players posited (i) that the world must have markets, and (ii) that the starport would have information for tourists about markets, and hence (iii) decided that their PCs would get the tourist information, go down to the planet, and check the market for artefacts that showed signs of alien manufacture. The actual resolution was a bit Traveller-esque (ie not quite Burning Wheel or even 4e in its robustness; and even within those constraints I'm not sure I handled it ideally - as I posted somewhere way upthread): but the strucure of play was pretty much the same as your toy examples. That is, the players have a goal, they posit the solution to that goal, and then the resolution mechanics determine whether or not their solution works.

Issues of goal, pacing etc can also go the other way. Consider this (from p 54 of the BW Gold book):

Beliefs are meant to be challenged, betrayed and broken. Such emotional drama makes for a good game. If your character
has a Belief, "I guard the prince’s life with my own," and the prince is slain before your eyes in the climax of the scenario, that's your chance to play out a tortured and dramatic scene and really go ballistic.

Conversely, if the prince is killed right out of the gate, the character is drained of purpose. Note that the player stated he wanted to defend the prince in play, not avenge him. Killing the prince in the first session sucks the life out of the character. He really has no reason to participate any longer. But if the prince dies in the grand climax, c'est la vie. The protector must then roll with the punches and react to this new change. Even better, if the prince dies due to the actions or failures of his own guardian - now that's good stuff.

Another example: We once had a character with the Belief: "I will one day restore my wife’s life." His wife had died, and he kept her body around, trying to figure out a way to bring her back. Well, mid-way through the game, the GM magically restored his wife to the land of the living. I've never seen a more crushed player. He didn't know what to do! He had stated that the quest and the struggle was the goal, not the end result. "One day!" he said. But the GM insisted, and the whole scenario and character were ruined for the player.​

Ron Edwards also has a discussion of this same general issue:

[A] minor problem [for narrativist play] is to resolve play-Situations rapidly and without developing them much beyond the initial preparatory circumstances: "over before it begins." This typically occurs when people are so floored by the possibility of actually addressing a Premise through play, that they hare off to do so before some RPG god notices and intervenes to stop them. Usually, this sort of play is a short-lived phase as the group builds trust with one another.​

At least in my experience, the group will probably develop an understanding (based on genre, a general sense of "how the game works", etc) which implicitly answers the question of whether or not it is appropriate play to delcare as an action "I search for a tunnel to the land of the Yuan-ti."

And my conclusion is that these issues of pacing in relation to how the GM frames things; whether the tunnel leads to the land of the Yuan-ti or just a clue to it; when it is appropriate to put the prince's life at stake; etc - are so contextual that it's impossible to give general advice, other than to follow the players' leads and try not to make the sort of mistake described in the BW extract.

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These bits from the Ron Edwards essay also sees relevant to the overall discussion, although not this particular issue of pacing:

Since Exploration is best understood as a medium and tool in Narrativist play, rather than a product itself, the role of "in game reality" needs some review - not so much about who has authority over it (the usual concern in Simulationist play), but what the heck it is. The answer is, it's a medium and tool for addressing Premise, and nothing more at all.

. . .

Force (Illusionist or not) isn't necessarily dyfunctional: it works well when the GM's main role is to make sure that the transcript ends up being a story, with little pressure or expectation for the players to do so beyond accepting the GM's Techniques. I think that a shared "agreement to be deceived" is typically involved, i.e., the players agree not to look behind the Black Curtain. I suggest that people who like Illusionist play are very good at establishing and abiding by their tolerable degree of Force, and Secrets of Gamemastering seems to bear that out as the perceived main issue of satisfactory role-playing per se.

Producing a story via Force Techniques means that play must shift fully to Simulationist play. "Story" becomes Explored Situation, the character "works" insofar as he or she fits in, and the player's enjoyment arises from contributing to that fitting-in. However, for the Narrativist player, the issue is not the Curtain at all, but the Force. Force-based Techniques are pure poison for Narrativist play and vice versa. The GM (or a person currently in that role) can provide substantial input, notably adversity and Weaving [= a GM technique of bringing NPC activities closer to the player-characters and to introduce multiple responses among NPC and player-character actions], but not specific protagonist decisions and actions; that is the very essence of deprotagonizing Narrativist play.​