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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7347095" data-attributes="member: 42582">EDIT (and call out to  [MENTION=6688277]Sadras[/MENTION]) - this post is best read together with the one just subsequent to it, which tries to catch up on some more of the thread action over the course of the (Australian) day.  [MENTION=6688277]Sadras[/MENTION],   [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION] - re actual and hypothetical play examples.   [MENTION=99817]chaochou[/MENTION] gave two hypothetical examples:(1) GM establishes dramatic need, GM provides solution.(2) Player establishes dramatic need, player provides (ultimate) solution.I've already posted multiple times in this thread that I am more conservative than chaochou on the boundary between GM and player content introduction. So it's proabably not surprising that my actual play example falls somewhere between (1) and (2)!The player builds and plays a PC who (i) seeks world domination, (ii) is a wizard who is part of an ancient group of wizards with connections to the now-long-lost Suel Empire, and (iii) isn't afraid to traffic in dark arts.I offer up a pathway to the possibility of world domination in the form of Vecna, a wizard of the same order who has returned to life out of the long-lost Suel Empire, and is certainly not shy of using a dark art or two.It is the player who actually chooses to approach Vecna and make an alliance. That is already a significant choice (given that the other PCs, and the generic gameworld NPCs, regard Vecna as a villain and a threat). My main contribution at that point is to connect the alliance to a need to betray the character's home town.Upthread I've posted more than once that one important form of player agency over the fiction is to contribute material other than by way of succesful action resolution, I would regard this as a case in point. Vecna is my "repackaging" of the player's material into a form that permits and eventually that calls for significant choices to be made, that will tell us something about the PC as a character. I don't think that player agency is buried,As far as the map is concerned, every hypothetical example has its limits, and rests on some unstated assumptions. I've been assuming at least (i) tbat the map's existence in the fiction is already established, (ii) that (somehow or other, in the course of play) acquiring the map has become important to the PCs (and their players), and (iii) that it is salient that the map might be in the study (ie this is not like Boromir searching Rivendell for Sauron).In the footprint example, I'm taking it that the goal is to find the villain, and that answering "no" to the inquiry "Are there footprints" is part of establishing the framing. The analogue in the map example would be "We're in the library, looking for the map - is there a catalogue?" If the GM answers "yes", that's an invitation to (say) a Research check; if the GM answers "no" then we're back to Perception (or whatever) to try and find the map in the library.To see the hunt for the map in the study itself in the same sort of way, it would have to be something like this: the players have as their goal the location of the map, the PCs find themselves in a study (as narrated by the GM in the course of framing), the players say, "Hey, maybe the map's in this study!" and the GM replies "No, the study's not the big deal here, there's no map, let's move on to . . . <whatever comes next that is the big deal>."When is it good rather than bad GMing to answer "no" and shut down some avenue of inquiry (footprints, catalogues, looking for the map in a not-a-big-deal study, etc)? I would say that's highly contextual, but in my own case generally I'm trying to (i) avoid play drifting into areas where I have nothing useful to offer as a GM (thus, everything else being equal, I tend to avoid encouraging long wilderness journeys), and/or (ii) the avoided avenue does not speak to any establsihed or evinced player concern. If one of the PCs is a devotee of Ioun, or is an expert tracker, or really is treating the studyu as a big deal, then saying "no catalogue" or "no footprints" or "no map" looks like bad GMing to me.</blockquote>

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