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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7336618" data-attributes="member: 42582">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.</blockquote>

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