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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ovinomancer" data-source="post: 7334228" data-attributes="member: 16814">I misspoke, I didn't mean request as in ask for, I meant request in the sense that the player is presenting new fiction and then asking if it's accepted or tested.  Further, I think it's a strong point of confusion that you think your formulation and conception is common, especially given the evidence that secret backstory is the majority mode of play.  You note this yourself in talking about posts on this board, and WotC's continued successful business plan involved a major pillar of providing pre-authored adventures, which despite being primarily for DMs (a fraction of the player base) still account for a market share in excess of most indie games combined.This goes back to my points that your arguments are special pleading -- you're saying that this argument about RPGs deserves special consideration and isn't applicable except where you say it is.  That doesn't make it as useful argument.  If it cannot be applied to even all kinds of tabletop RPGs, much less non-tabletop RPGs, how is it useful to discussing the difference between those RPGs styles you say it's good for?  I snipped out the wall of words in the middle of your post because it read as you going off on tangents - none of it responded to anything in the post you're quoting, and, honestly, I'm not sure that it addresses any points I've made previously.  Most of it is uncontroversial, and most of it is you describing how you play in different systems, a topic I'm sure you find fascinating but I understand how those systems work so that's not the crux of my arguments.  I have never argued you can't play like that, and most certainly I've never argued you shouldn't play like that.  My arguments have focused on trying to explain how I do play and addressing the arguments you use to explain why I don't have to play like that.  Largely, you arguments keep trying to establish some concrete reason your method is better (which I readily accept it's better for you) without accepting that there is anything subjective about your preferences.You failed to follow that argument.  You claimed that the fiction doesn't exist.  This, logically, means it doesn't matter.  Things that have no existence cannot, by definition, matter to the real world.  This part of my argument establishes that this, in fact, is false -- the fiction does have relevance.  The thing you claim doesn't exist does, and that you use that thing to constrain the act of authoring.So, this part where you say you didn't say that -- well, you did, you did say the fiction doesn't exist, but you didn't mean it.  And that part of the construct was to show that you couldn't mean it because the ramifications of fiction not existing in any way would be that the rest of your argument failed.It fails anyway due to your myopia about playstyles being subjective.Man, it's really validating to be told that my argument is a non-sequitur (latin for 'does not follow' and meaning it's not even related to the discussion) and then you tell me what you meant is exactly what I said you meant -- that you constrain authoring new fiction with arbitrary and subjective constraints.  Only you deny that these are subjective, despite the obvious fact that they only matter to authorship of fiction because you prefer them to not having them.  There's no reason you can't author fiction without adhering to genre tropes except that this would be something that you would not prefer happen in your game where you want genre tropes adhered to.  So the reason for that constraint is subjective: it's there because you prefer it to be there (and presumably your other players).  It certainly has no objective reason to be there -- you can author fiction without adhering to genre logic at all.So, this is exactly what I'm talking about with your arguments:  you are blind to the fact that you're making arguments based on your preferences because you mistake your preferences for objective measures and/or commonly held beliefs.This isn't true, again as evidenced by all of those ways to play 'let's pretend' that you admit don't fit your arguments.  Why do you believe that the ones you include do?It's actually very much about the structure.  The metaphysics I'll let you argue with someone else, as I'm not terribly interested in determining who has the best way of playing 'let's pretend' and getting the metaphysics of their play correct.  That really seems silly (and I direct that to [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] equally).But structure is the core of this:  how is the ability to author the fiction structured?  In secret backstory games, that structure is to allow players to author fiction so long as it follows genre conventions and meets both the open and hidden fictional positioning.  The DM can accept that fiction, test it, or reject it in total or part.  If the player declares they search the study for a map, that's in genre, and meets the open fictional positioning (they're in the study and can search).  The DM then checks the secret positioning and determines if the outcome succeeds, fails, or must be tested according to the overall structure.  Based on the result of that step, the DM narrates the outcome of that fiction.  Note that this structure implicitly binds the DM to also restrict their authoring to the same structure: that is adhere to genre conventions and meet the open and hidden fictional positioning.In the no-secret backstory game, the structure is slightly different.  The player is allowed to author fiction so long as it follows genre conventions and known fictional positioning.  The DM, however, is structurally limited to either accepting or testing that fiction -- he cannot reject it so long as it's properly formed.  The DM is allowed to alter the fiction if the test if failed to whatever the DM wishes, so long as he follows the same authoring structure as the player.  The player is not allowed to modify or reject this fiction from the DM.These are different structures, with power allocated differently.  They are similar, and the results of both methods for a given play may be indistinguishable, but other results can vary widely.  There's no room for DM rejection without a test for properly formed fiction in the latter, but there is in the former, based on information the player does not have.So, the argument that there's no structural difference isn't true:  it's only true if you make a set of assumptions about play that favor your preferred structure and ignore that other structures of play exist.  And there a other structures of play that exist than these two, including a huge amount of increased sophistication and modification of these basic chassis.You didn't say that imaginary things aren't real (although that's also debatable), you said that they don't exist.  Which makes me ask what it was about a novel that made you feel emotion?  Claiming imaginary things don't exist is saying that ideas don't exist because you can't pick them up or look at them.  This is obviously false, as what we're doing here is throwing ideas at each other, and those certainly cause reactions and use to use real world resources to engage.  I just spent some of my life responding to this, for example.  Why would I do that if the ideas you presented didn't exist?To address the pivot to 'well, okay, they exist but they aren't physical things' my question is then 'what's your point?'  Even if I can't pick up an idea, that doesn't mean that idea isn't constrained by real world thing, or by subjective things, or by other ideas. It doesn't mean that ideas are fungible, or that the idea of hitting an orc with a sword until it dies is the same as an idea that there's a map in the study.   Heck, the existence of ideas as things is part and parcel of the argument you are making -- you require ideas to be real and effective to make your points about genre appropriateness after all.  So, this sideline you're making about ideas and fiction being non-existent is very, very strange and, as I've said, absurd and not conducive to discussion.</blockquote>

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