What is *worldbuilding* for?

[Manbearcat]

Well, this does tend to be the default assumption whenever people feel some kind of tribal lines are being drawn. Two Eagles fans can commiserate about shared Nick Foles concerns; they're not going to accept that same critique from a Patriots fan.

Uh huh, which is precisely what I was getting at! I just felt I had to call it out for what it was as it was sitting there an LED lights yet defiantly acting like it wasn't even there!

To my mind, this is the most salient point. Player-driven play is hard, certainly much harder than a GM-driven adventure path, unless you have a group where the majority of your players are skilled and motivated role-players. (Having a critical mass of skilled, motivated players tends to motivate the others to be more creative, I've observed.)

If your group has been brought up in a tradition of ambivalently adversarial exploration focused play, player-driven play is going to seem downright alien.

I think the frustrating thing about this is (a) folks having a mental framework on the limits of RPGing evolved from decades or more of a very specific play paradigm (which you outlined in your final sentence) while (b) simultaneously having entrenched positions on different play paradigms that don't reflect the reality of the gameplay therein (due to erroneous extrapolation or fundamental lack of understanding). Which leads to (c) them never trying these games/techniques and (d) reducing these games' exposure both passively and actively by advocating hard, and sometimes relentlessly (see 4e), against them (for some reason).

 

[Manbearcat]

@Manbearcat I think your translation of Lanefan’s example to a DW framework and how it would play out there is interesting. I’m actually impressed that you could make such a direct correlation.

But I don’t know if it helps with the OP question all that much. All it says is that the results determined by Approach A can also be achieved using Approach B.

My goal in this conversation is to advocate for creative use of Secret Backstory tagged as “worldbuilding” by Permetton in the OP. Tome, the presence of such material does not necessarily prevent the GM from playing to find out.

To me, Secret Backstory is clearly usefulfor a few reasons:
- to help establish the scope of play via setting
- to help establish long term thematic elements
- to help guide the course of play when the players have not shown a desire or ability to do so

I think in the course of this comversation that Agency has been conflated with Engagement. And I don’t think that should be te case. Players can be very much engaged by any style of game, even the purest of railroads. To look atanother medium, moviegoers are passive, but movies can of course be engaging.

I think the differences between writing a novel and reading a novel are pretty apropros to the discussion. Yet I don’t think most games must correlate to one or the other, or that thise who enjoy one cannot enjoy the other.

Thank you for saying it was interesting and impressive, but I was going for provocative

Since it didn't seem to provoke analysis on the two widely disparate play excerpts (not in outcome, but with respect to content generation and play aesthetic), let me do a little bit of it and you tell me what you think.

Lets pick out a seminal moment of backstory and conflict generation:

The harlot.

In the first excerpt, she is generated well in advanced with no ties to the party. Her nature is opaque or "hidden" (an agent for the Duke who is inserting herself into a situation with the PCs for undetermined reasons...spy?). She is fundamentally the catalyst for the GM's major off-screen move to set them in conflict down the line with the Duke and potentially put his trigger-hairs upon them later (which the PCs don't know about).

Contrast that with the second excerpt. She is generated at the table as a response to one of the most fundamental moves in The Dashing Hero's playbook; A Lover in Every Port. The 6- result immediately turns her from ally to complication. In this case, she serves as (a) an overt ticking time-bomb and (b) an immediate complicating input in the PCs' decision-point in city-fairing and danger navigation. She gets us "right into the action." And she is fundamentally connected, at a thematic level, to one of the PCs who will naturally now be invested in her (either steering clear of her or perhaps righting whatever wrong happened in the past); So play could easily see an "Indy and Marion" angle emerge just by a simple roll of the dice and some genre logic.

---

So I asked about comparing the disparate excerpts with respect to:

(a) setting generation
(b) initial situation generation and related framing
(c) offscreen-part moving/move-making by the GM
(d) information (or lacktherof) and player decision-points/action declarations
(e) the evolution of the gamestate from the initial state to subsequent states.

Does hawkeyefan or anyone else have any thoughts on the harlot dynamics of the two play excerpts with respect to the above? Why does the backstory generation procedure that you prefer (just limiting evaluation of the harlot) work better than the other one?

 

[pemerton]

Interesting, its sometimes hard for me to say if what I'm doing is close to what you're doing. In HoML you can make trade-offs. By expending a resource a player can turn the narrative in a direction he desires, which is generally assumed to be favorable to the player's character, but it doesn't have to be. It is also possible to accept a 'setback' in order to reacquire the ability to spend this 'plot coupon'. I'd note that it ALWAYS requires narrative explanation, which is normally via some attribute of the character.

Players are also generally free to establish their character's backstory, etc. As you say, when an adverse check result is produced, then it is up to the GM to 'reveal an unpleasant truth' or even make some sort of 'hard move' (IE introduce a direct threat which the PC must then react to or suffer some immediate effect from).

I've found that the majority of my players are also good at introducing general story elements that move things forward.

The "general story elements" and the backstory authorship are both parts of how I GM (subect to the standard disclaimer that different systems handle the minutiae of this stuff a bit differently - eg in 4e, having a nemesis as part of your backstory is just a thing you decied on; in BW, having a nemesis as part of your backstory is a player resource you have to pay for as part of PC building).

The bit where I think I'm probably a bit less liberal than you, [MENTION=99817]chaochou[/MENTION] and [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION] is in relation to your first paragraph. For that sort of thing I generally look for action declaration, and then (assuming it's a big deal and so we're not just saying "yes" I'd really put that under the "general story elements" label) we'd resolve that check.

As far as taking a disadvantage to earn a resource, for me that's system dependent. Cortex+ Heroic PCs have "limits" (eg War Machine's armour can suffer a system overload) - when the fiction permits, the GM can trigger these at a cost from the Doom Pool, or the player can instead take a plot point (= fate point, more-or-less). In BW, whenever following an Insinct gets you into trouble you get a fate point, which can be spent on dice pool manipulation (eg my knight PC's wizard follower has the Instinct "Never meet a stranger's gaze" - when I play to the instinct and it causes issues with social interaction, she gets a fate point).

In 4e, the way I implement something a bit similar is to use risks to manage p 42 action resolution: so when a player wanted his (2nd level, I think) paladin to say a prayer that would grant combat advantage against a wight as a minor action, I allowed the attempt, but with the prospect - if the Religion check failed - of psychic damage to the PC (as he feels the will of the wight stronger than that of his divine mistress as channelled through him).

In some cases success can also bring a cost, if it makes sense in the fictional positioning (I tend to confine this to "big deal" stuff).

I've also been thinking a bit more about [MENTION=99817]chaochou[/MENTION]'s "driving questions". In our first BW session, the player of the mage declared a Circles check to make contact with the leader of his sorcerous cabal, Jabal the Red. The existence of Jabal was established as part of backstory by the player (he hadn't spent any resources on a relationship, and so had no entitlement to this bit of backstory, but it seemed like good stuff). The check failed, which gives the GM some options, and I chose to have Jabal make contact but in an angry way. This could have been an opportunity to ask "Why is Jabal mad at you", but I didn't. Earlier in the session, a failed Aura Reading check had resulted in the PC discoverig that the angel feather he had purchased from a peddler was cursed. And I decided that it was this curse that had made Jabal angry - he wanted the mage and his companions to leave town, rather than bring down the consequences of the curse upon the cabal.

I see that as the BW spirit: the GM is expected to use failures to turn the screws of already-etablished difficult situatios - and the odds for success (noticeably less than 4e, at least in our 5 starting lifepaths game) are such that this is likely to occur quite a bit.

Something we did closer to "driving questions": in our Traveller game one of the PCs had to be introduced in the second session, which started with the PCs in the domed city of Byron on the corrosive atmosphere, desert world of Byron, investigating a bioweapons conspiracy. The PC was a one-term marine conscript who had failed her survival roll by 1 in that first term, and hence forcibly musterd out with no checks on any mustering out benefits table. (This is a house rule that combines bits of a MegaTraveller option with bits of an Andy Slack house rule from his old White Dwarf "Expanding Universe" series.) As well as having no money because of no benefit rolls, the PC also had only one skill: Cutlass-4. (One for being a marine, the rest rolled by way of skill checks.)

So how did a penniless 20 year old former marine fencer end up on Byron? The player decided that she had faked an injury to secure a discharge (he had wanted her to be a doctor but had failed that enlistment roll; hence her being drafted into the marines). I decided that the other PCs found her, shivering and obviously ill, on the streets of Byron, where she remebered nothing bu escaping from a cold sleep chamber in a warehouse and out into the streets.

Investigation by the PCs (via actions declared by their players) established that she was infected with the bioweapons pathogen. Discussion with the player established that her last clear memory was of being in hospital in a naval base - I rolled up the world of Shelley to be the site of this base, as Byron doesn't have one.

So how did she get from Shelley, into a cold sleep berth, and onto Byron, infected with the disease? A mixture of talking it through at the time, plus elaborating as further elements of the bioweapons conspiracy have been established, led to an agreement that she had been infected on Shelley - presumably by Lt Li of the Imperial Marines, the apparent leader of the conspiracy - before being placed into cold sleep for transport to the labs on Byron.

But why would Li do that to her? After some discussion, which included reviewing Li's "UPP" (ie character stats), we decided that the PC and Li had been rivals in the marine's competition fencing squad, but the PC was clearly superior (more skill, higher DEX) - and so Li had had an animus against her, which led her to choose the PC as her experimental subject. And because Traveller has no mechanics to deal with this at all, really, it's been worked out through conversation at the table. Some of that discussion has been purely at the metagame level; but some of that has been in character, as one PC wonders "Why did Lit have it in for you?" and then someone else chimes in with a conjecture which makes no less sense treated as a piece of in-character RP rather than as a purely out-of-character suggestion.

That's not identical to what [MENTION=99817]chaochou[/MENTION] described - it's a bit of PC backstory that has been established over the course of mutiple sessions, both by making up the necessary new fiction (like the world of Shelley) but also by incorporating other facts about Lt Li and her conspiracy that have emerged out of play.

But I've outlined it just to give a sense of the sort of thing that happens in our games.

 

[hawkeyefan]

From what you've said, I'm going to try a conjecture. Hopefully it does not misfire too badly!

It sounds like the player interest in the shades led you (perhaps also informed by your own interest/enthusiasm?) to make up some internal details about the shades, which you were then able to use as elements of framing as the PCs dealt with the shades.

Pretty much. We talked out some possible trade route options. We did this precisely so that I could do some high level prep based on their choices. So they came up with a few possibilities. I then, in between sessions, jotted down some possibilities for each route. I also jotted down some ideas that might be usable regardless of the route they chose. This last bit is probably not your cup of tea! But I like to have a couple of options as a back up depending on how everything goes.

My selection of the Shades was equally about the existing connection to a PC’s past, what made sense based on the locations involved, and my personal interest. I’ve used them in the past when we’ve played a Realms campaign. I find the concept and possible themes pretty interesting.

As an aside, my previous use of them is perhaps what led the player to incorporate them into the character’s background. Kind of a feedback loop that may be the best endorsement I can give about my approach.

Comparing that to my own 4e game, it reminds me a bit of when the PCs arrived in the stronghold of the duergar, I came up with the idea for two factions among the duergar, with different attitudes towards the PCs' desire to take the duergar's fragment of the Rod of Seven Parts. A possible point of difference (again, conjecture at best) is that my framing made it reasonably clear that there were two fractins: by the way the PCs were housed (some were treated well; others, deemed too chaotic, were under house arrest); by the way NPCs approached the PCs; etc.

I didn’t hide the multiple factions from the PCs. Not for any significant amount of time anyway. I don’t mind my players being in the dark about aome things, but I usually (admittedly not always) try to make the major decisions that they face about elements they know.

With resolution, it sounds like the players engaged with the situation and thereby learned some of this stuff that you had worked out; and then declared actions that traded on those ascertained elements. It sounds as if the framing of the action declarations relied rather heavily on an implicit sense, among the participants, of what might be at stake; and left it to the GM to work out the details for successes as well as failure.

I suppose. To describe it plainly: I came up with a basic scenario of conflict among the Shades, the ruling elite and a rogue group, and then I let the PCs decide how to proceed with each faction, trying to determine the best side to choose and what agreement to make. The negotiations were weighted by what the PCs decided to include. So a Persuasion check to appeal to the ruling faction was easier if the PCs were making large concessions, or offering additional offerings.

At this point, it was largely a back and forth DM to players and back, each sode reacting to the other, and making checks where relevant.

Of the three approaches I've described - no player agency; player agency but GM carries the weight for the "crunch"; full player agency with resolution determining outcomes - my sense is that the play you described may have been (roughly) in the second category; my prediction is that, if that was so, it will have generated internal pressure in the game to drift towards the third category. If anything I've said is remotely on target, I'd be interested in knowing if my conjecture and prediction are at all right, and (if so) how you felt the game play may have evolved as stakes and player investment stepped up.

I’m not quite sure what you mean by the GM carrying the weight for the “crunch”. But I expect that you’d consider the game to be in the second option you describe. I consider it a middle option certainly. If you mean that the narrative leaned largely on the GM at this point, then yes, I’d agree. It was up to me to decide how things ultimately played out. But the breadth or scope of possible results was significantly reduced by the players and their actions.

So surely this is not a case of pure GM fiat, or the players being mostly passive and having the DM read his notes to them. But neither is it a case where the players can introduce fictional elements through action declaration. The players essentially tell me what their characters want to achieve given what the characters know, and then I let them know what kind of check is appropriate.

So perhaps there are two levels of play going on. A high level, thrust of the campaign, this is where things are going kind of level which is largely determined by the players. And then a lower level, this is what my PC is doing right now level, which although it may involve player agency, also relies on GM judgment.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

If you think no hint exists and are unaware of any such text, you need to read page 9 under Character Abilities. Unless you think Gygax was a complete ass was taunting people by giving them 3d6 and then saying, it's usually essential to have two 15's or higher BUT HAHAHHAHA!!! YOU'RE STUCK LOSERS!, then his saying that was a statement to the DMs implying that they allow players to re-roll until they got two 15's or higher. He himself was quoted saying that he ran his own games that way, coming up with alternative methods and allowing re-rolls in order for players to have sufficient stats to have a chance to survive.

And yet then none of Gygax's rules follow through on this at all. Its not ACTUALLY true. Method I (by far the most common in my experience) produces a 23% chance of 0 15s, and only an 28% chance of 2 15s. Of the other methods only Method III produces a majority of characters of the type that are claimed to be NECESSARY, and it doesn't allow them to be arranged as desired (though chances are you'll be able to sub-optimally join most all classes with such a character). Method I at least lets you arrange things as you wish.

Now, what difference in survival does two 15s make? Is it really that much? It could be somewhat handy depending on the stats in question. A 15 STR does almost nothing, a 15 WIS is pretty good for a cleric, a 15 DEX raises your AC by 1 (nice), 15 CON is good for 1 HP/level, 15 CHA gives +15% reaction/loyalty and 7 henchmen max. All of these are useful, though the CON and DEX are probably the best. None of them is going to transform a character into one that is profoundly more survivable though. Obviously an extra hit point (or 3) or point of AC MIGHT save your skin. Clearly if you factor in 16-18s you might also get those are even more useful.

Seems to me that its kinda oversold though. Ability scores in AD&D are just not THAT critical.

As an aside, 16, 14, 13, 12, 10, 9 is the average array of Method I, almost identical to the standard array in 4e and the expert array in 3e. So for anyone thinking that stats have inflated, not since 1979... Now, the VALUE of those stats has increased considerably, since a 15 in any stat in 3.x, 4e, and 5e is worth a +3 bonus.

 

[pemerton]

[MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION], the drinking with orcs in your post reminds me of our last Cortex+ Heroic Vikings session:

The PCs had been beaten up by marauders who took a whole lot of villagers prisoner before razing the village. In the next session (I think - maybe in the second half of the same session?) the PCs recovered left for dead in the village, found the villagers missing, and followed the trail back to a giant steading they'd visited in an earlier session. The villagers had been sold as thralls (or food?) to the giants, and the marauders were celebrating their victory with some heavy drinking at one end of the giant chieftain's hall.

The berserker PC arrived at the steading and made out that he wanted to join the marauders, and joined in with their drinking - from memory another PC was meant to have infiltrated the kitchens so as to be able to put some sort of herb in the berserker's flagon to help protect him from getting drunk, but if I'm remembering right that didn't work out. But anyway, drunken antics, arm wrestling etc in the hall helped create a distraction (I think this was probably an assett passed to one of the other PCs, although my memory is a bit foggy) which then enabled the other PCs to sneak the villagers out through a hole in the pallisade (itself an asset that one of them had established).

Because of it's pretty liberal asset creation rules, I find Cortex+ Heroic leads to a lot more player establishment of the shared fiction at the moment of resolution than (say) BW or 4e. But because it is done by way of opposed rolls against the Doom Pool, the Czege Principle is not violated!

 

[pemerton]

So surely this is not a case of pure GM fiat

I don't think so. At least as I understand it, the players' action declarations affected the framing. Eg those action declarations made it the case (say) that this Shade NPC was sympathetic rather than hostile to them, which makes it impossible for the GM to (say) narrate that everyone among the Shades turns on them.

(That's a simplified example, obviously, just to try and convey what I mean.)

I’m not quite sure what you mean by the GM carrying the weight for the “crunch”. But I expect that you’d consider the game to be in the second option you describe. I consider it a middle option certainly. If you mean that the narrative leaned largely on the GM at this point, then yes, I’d agree. It was up to me to decide how things ultimately played out. But the breadth or scope of possible results was significantly reduced by the players and their actions.

The last sentence here is helping me reach the description I gave just above: the GM's narration was constrained by elements of the framing that had changed, or been established, by action resolution.

When I talk about the GM carrying the weight at that final point, I think I'm talking about the same thing as your "how things ultimately played out." A difference between us is that I would generally look to the players for a desire as to how things ultimately play out, and have that be a direct consequence of the action resolution (which doesn't meant it has to be simple - the action resolution might unfold over mutliple checks, with both mechanical and fiction-to-fiction iteration, etc).

My tentative prediction was that your game might have come under pressure to let the players exercise more control (not narrative fiat control, but settling-it-through-action-declaration control) up through those final/ultimate elements as it went along: as the players got more invested, and formed more concrete ideas about how they wanted to see things end up, and so made a greater effort to frame and push their action declarations in those definite directions (rather than, say - and to use another toy example - just trying to make the negotiator friendly to them, but leaving it to the GM to work out exactly what "being friendly" yields in concrete terms).

Did your game experience any such trajectory or pressure?

 

[Maxperson]

And yet then none of Gygax's rules follow through on this at all. Its not ACTUALLY true. Method I (by far the most common in my experience) produces a 23% chance of 0 15s, and only an 28% chance of 2 15s. Of the other methods only Method III produces a majority of characters of the type that are claimed to be NECESSARY, and it doesn't allow them to be arranged as desired (though chances are you'll be able to sub-optimally join most all classes with such a character). Method I at least lets you arrange things as you wish.

Which doesn't really matter since implied re-rolls if you don't get the two 15+ stats is in the PHB. Method I has a 42% chance of giving two 15's by the way, so few re-rolls are necessary.

http://anydice.com/articles/4d6-drop-lowest/

Now, what difference in survival does two 15s make? Is it really that much? It could be somewhat handy depending on the stats in question. A 15 STR does almost nothing, a 15 WIS is pretty good for a cleric, a 15 DEX raises your AC by 1 (nice), 15 CON is good for 1 HP/level, 15 CHA gives +15% reaction/loyalty and 7 henchmen max. All of these are useful, though the CON and DEX are probably the best. None of them is going to transform a character into one that is profoundly more survivable though. Obviously an extra hit point (or 3) or point of AC MIGHT save your skin. Clearly if you factor in 16-18s you might also get those are even more useful.

It makes quite a bit of difference. You get AC bonuses, spell advantage for magic classes. Extra system shock and survival roll chances. And very importantly, exp bonus if you get a 16 in your prime stat.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Thank you for saying it was interesting and impressive, but I was going for provocative

Since it didn't seem to provoke analysis on the two widely disparate play excerpts (not in outcome, but with respect to content generation and play aesthetic), let me do a little bit of it and you tell me what you think.

Lets pick out a seminal moment of backstory and conflict generation:

The harlot.

In the first excerpt, she is generated well in advanced with no ties to the party. Her nature is opaque or "hidden" (an agent for the Duke who is inserting herself into a situation with the PCs for undetermined reasons...spy?). She is fundamentally the catalyst for the GM's major off-screen move to set them in conflict down the line with the Duke and potentially put his trigger-hairs upon them later (which the PCs don't know about).

Contrast that with the second excerpt. She is generated at the table as a response to one of the most fundamental moves in The Dashing Hero's playbook; A Lover in Every Port. The 6- result immediately turns her from ally to complication. In this case, she serves as (a) an overt ticking time-bomb and (b) an immediate complicating input in the PCs' decision-point in city-fairing and danger navigation. She gets us "right into the action." And she is fundamentally connected, at a thematic level, to one of the PCs who will naturally now be invested in her (either steering clear of her or perhaps righting whatever wrong happened in the past); So play could easily see an "Indy and Marion" angle emerge just by a simple roll of the dice and some genre logic.

---

So I asked about comparing the disparate excerpts with respect to:

(a) setting generation
(b) initial situation generation and related framing
(c) offscreen-part moving/move-making by the GM
(d) information (or lacktherof) and player decision-points/action declarations
(e) the evolution of the gamestate from the initial state to subsequent states.

Does hawkeyefan or anyone else have any thoughts on the harlot dynamics of the two play excerpts with respect to the above? Why does the backstory generation procedure that you prefer (just limiting evaluation of the harlot) work better than the other one?

I didn’t mean to imply that I didn’t find your analysis provocative. I honestly think of the two scenarios described, your DW take on things is far preferrable. I would much rather have PC investment in such an NPC, and also some kind of motovation for her. Even if all the details aren’t sorted yet, I like to have a general sketch. The mechanics of DW certainly help in that regard. I don’t know if I’d say they are essential to achieve what you did, but I can see how they lend themselves to that.

I think that if I were to design this encounter, I’d likely have arrived at something closer to your DW example. Although I don’t play DW, so I would have arrived at it using different methods. I also don’t think that Lanefan presented his scenario as clearly as he could have....I think he was loosely describing a scenario in hope that the broader strokes would illustrate his point. As such, it’s difficult for me to analyze it very much.

To address each of your listed items is then difficult, because one example is clearly drawn while the other is not. I don’t know if it’s fair to assess the two approaches based on these examples. Instead, I’ll focus on your example:

(a) setting generation- the DW mechanics are interesting, they add to the setting and involve the PCs in the setting- always good in my opinion
(b) initial situation generation and related framing- the DW method creates a sense of immediacy; this NPC must be dealt with in some way
(c) offscreen-part moving/move-making by the GM- here is where the unclear areas of the Harlot example Lanefan gave make discussion difficult- without knowing the reasons for keeping her role as a spy secret, I can’t say if it’s justifiable- personally, I’d have at the very least establised that there was more to her than there seemed
(d) information (or lacktherof) and player decision-points/action declarations- depending on the role she takes, there are many possibilities here, a complication of what kind? How can the complication be resolved? I like how this is going to make the player make some decisions, but it still feels like a lot of this is left up to the GM.
(e) the evolution of the gamestate from the initial state to subsequent states- I think it helps drive the play forward, it goves the PCs an immediate goal or obstacle. My concern is that perhaps this is a bit distracting? Depending upon what the PCs were doing until this character was introduced. I’m sure that’s not necessarily the case, but it seems possible.

Again, sorry if it seems like I’m dodging the question. I just feel that the initial example offered by Lanefan is too vague to analyze and to contrast it to your version.

Would an example from my own game maybe help?

 

[hawkeyefan]

I don't think so. At least as I understand it, the players' action declarations affected the framing. Eg those action declarations made it the case (say) that this Shade NPC was sympathetic rather than hostile to them, which makes it impossible for the GM to (say) narrate that everyone among the Shades turns on them.

(That's a simplified example, obviously, just to try and convey what I mean.)

Sounds about right. I generally let the PCs actuons and the results of their rolls determine events. I did have one NPC who could not be influenced by them, but they pretty much recognized that by the way he behaved toward them.

The last sentence here is helping me reach the description I gave just above: the GM's narration was constrained by elements of the framing that had changed, or been established, by action resolution.

When I talk about the GM carrying the weight at that final point, I think I'm talking about the same thing as your "how things ultimately played out." A difference between us is that I would generally look to the players for a desire as to how things ultimately play out, and have that be a direct consequence of the action resolution (which doesn't meant it has to be simple - the action resolution might unfold over mutliple checks, with both mechanical and fiction-to-fiction iteration, etc).

My tentative prediction was that your game might have come under pressure to let the players exercise more control (not narrative fiat control, but settling-it-through-action-declaration control) up through those final/ultimate elements as it went along: as the players got more invested, and formed more concrete ideas about how they wanted to see things end up, and so made a greater effort to frame and push their action declarations in those definite directions (rather than, say - and to use another toy example - just trying to make the negotiator friendly to them, but leaving it to the GM to work out exactly what "being friendly" yields in concrete terms).

Did your game experience any such trajectory or pressure?

I think so, yes. There were negotiations, some progress was made, a complication was introduced, more progress...the players decided which faction they wanted to work with, further negotiations. I used the Diviner’s relationship with her Mentor to further complicate things.

I realize I’m not being specific, but if I said I remembered every detail, I’d be lying! In the end, they had to ally with the Royal Family and the Mentor would lose out (and likely suffer a horrible fate), or they could side with the Rogue Faction, but they’d have to do so in secret and they’d earn the ire of the Ruling Family.

So we kind of distilled things until there were two courses to take based on what the PCs wanted. Neither of which was ideal. Each had a drawback of some sort.