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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7344995" data-attributes="member: 42582">Who do the second and third "you" refer to? Presumably the PC. Who does the fourth "you" refer to? Presumably the player. What about the first "you"? It's co-referring to both player and PC. Where does the player cause things to happen? Presumably in the real world? Where does the map appear (if anywhere)? In the fiction - it's a purely imaginary appearance.In other words, your sentence is hopelessly confused with equivocations between fiction and the real world that obscure all helpful analysis.Here's one tenable paraphrase, using <> to signify the content of the player's decision, and using underline to signify the negated content:If a player decides that <his/her PC decides to search a study for a map, because his/her PC knows that s/he will only find it where it already is since the world is not in a state of quantum flux whereby the player may cause the map to appear somewhere else as a direct result of the PC searching for it>, then that's role-playing.I think this requirement for roleplaying is going to be satisfied in most cases, as no one will be playing a PC who knows, or even believes, that the player has any causal power over his/her fate. The only RPG I know of that actually plays with this sort of self-referential metagaming is Over the Edge.It certainly doesn't violate your constraint that the content of the shared fiction concerning the location of the map is established in this way rather than that!For fun, here's an alternative paraphrase that resolves the equivocations differently:If a player decides that <his/her PC decides to search a study for a map>, because the player knows that his/her PC will only find the map where it is already imagined by the GM to be, since the shared fiction is not in a state of "quantum flux" whereby a player may cause details to be established as a direct result of declaring and resolving an action for his/her PC, then that's roleplaying.That's a strong constraint, but quiet implausible, as it doesn't turn on anything tenably connected to the playing of a role (eg the centrality of first person action declarations; the special salience of the fictional positioning of key protagonists; etc). It is simply a claim that RPGing requires GM authorship of the shared fiction.This alternative paraphrase also makes clear how learning the content of the GM's notes is a key goal of play in RPGing with a high degree of GM pre-authored backstory; because the player is only making the action declaration for his/her PC because of his/her opinions about what the GM is imagining.</blockquote>

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