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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7343465" data-attributes="member: 42582">Well, I personally don't like "hidden backstory". Clearly plenty of D&D players and GMs do.This thread wasn't started to serve as a warning or caution. The interest was in analysis of play techniques - there's a common technique of pre-authorship, what is it for?What I feel created some struggles early in the thread was that many answers offered to that question were metaphorical (eg "The players explore the world") and it took quite a bit of time and effort to get them rendered in more literal terms (eg "The players make moves with their PCs to trigger the GM to narrate to them a certain bit of information which is recorded, either literally or notionally, in the GM's notes").I don't necessarily think that the hobby is better served by having less hidden backstory in RPGing, but I do think it is better served by actually recognising, in literal rather than metaphorical terms, how various techniques work and what sort of play experience they might deliver. I think this helps break down ungrounded misconceptions: eg that the action declaration "I search the study for the map" is different from the action declaration "I attack the orc with my sword". Of course in real life, looking for something is a very different causal process from trying to decapitate someone. But in RPGing, both action declarations expressions of desire as to the future state of the shared fiction (I found a map or I killed an orc), they can both be declared from a purely first-person RP perspective ("actor stance", to use some jargon), and it's possible to establish rules for resolving either that don't rely on hidden backstory-based adjudication.So if, in fact, we are going to resolve them differently - the map one by referring to the GM's notes; the orc one by rolling dice - well, it's worth asking why we do it that way.Whether or not they are two different things depends heavily on (i) what is pre-authored, and (ii) what the goal of play is.If the pre-authorship is a whole lot of chests with gp in them and monsters guarding them, and the goal of play is to get lots of gp out of chests so as to earn XP, then the pre-authorship doesn't establish the narrative. White Plume Mountain is a well-known module that illustrates this.But (to recycle some examples from upthread) if the goal of play is to find the map, and the pre-authroship is that the map is in the kitchen and not the study, then the pre-authorship does significantly establish the narrative. Likewise if the goal of play is to avoid arrest and conviction, and the pre-authorship is of the dispositions of the police, the attitudes of the magistracy towards bribes, etc: the attempt by the players to bribe their way out of trouble will succeed or fail based on that pre-authored content.I assume that you are referring to player agency rather than the agency of the PCs. The agency of the PCs is a purely imaginary property of purely imaginary people, and can be interesting as part of the shared fiction (one of the PCs in my BW game is dominated by a dark naga, and that's an important part of the current situation) but is completely orthogonal to player agency.When you say "the world is just the backdrop" that is a metaphor, because RPGing does not take place on a stage with a literal backdrop. If the action of the game is constrained by the pre-established fiction of Candlekeep, so that player action declarations either (i) fail, because the GM reads the book and sees (eg) that the officials of Candlekeep cannot be bribed, and/or (ii) consist to a significant degree in trying to prompt the GM to tell them stuff about Candlekeep so they can establish the parameters for feasible successful action declarations. Neither (i) nor (ii) exhibits a great deal of player agency over the content of the shared fiction.It's true that saying "yes" increases the odds of player success to 100%. Saying no, though, reduces them to zero - so I'm not sure how telling "yes" or "no" based on pre-authorship is meant to increase agency.In "say 'yes' or roll the dice" games, there are a collection of techniques used to sustain player agency: framing that has regard to the signals (around theme, tropes, character motivation, etc) sent by the players in the build and play of their PCs; narration of failure consequences that likewise build on those signals to contribute to new framing that continues to "go where the action is"; and of course allowing the players to get what they were going for if their checks succeed.The reason not to say "yes" all the time is to allow for a dramatic rhythm of success and failure; it's part of what distinguishes an RPG from straight-out collaborative storytelling. The reason for the framing and consequence-narration techniques is to allow player agency to feed into the game even when action declarations are not succeeding.The idea that there is no difference between this sort of RPGing, and the GM declaring an action unsuccessful ("No, you don't find the map" "No, there are no bribeable officials") on the basis of his/her notes, is just silly. [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION] has made the general point with the reference to Calvinball; but examples closer to home will do. No one thinks it makes no difference to combat resolution that the GM decides by fiat whether or not the attack hits, rather than the player rolling the dice. Very few D&D tables treat the declaration of an attack and the making of a to hit roll as simply having the status of a suggestion to the GM; it's a move in the game. Likewise for finding maps - the difference between being able to make a move, and being able to make a suggestion to the only player who actually enjoys the power to make moves, holds just the same.That's not an argument that finding maps and attacking orcs should be resolved the same way; but it is an argument that resolving the differently has very obvious consequences for the degree of player agency in one or the other domains of action declaration.As far as the PvP issue is concerned, there are any number of ways to resolve that: opposed checks are one common one. But two game participants competing with one another on a more-or-less level playing field is quite different from the GM - who at least notionally is not a competitor, and who enjoys vastly more authority to establish the fiction in any relatively mainstream RPG - using his/her authority to stipulate an action as unsuccessful.</blockquote>

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