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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7350751" data-attributes="member: 42582">You're the one who said we were talking about GM-driven games - I'm just following your lead!If, in fact, the players are contributing the key material (eg the stakes, the context, the motivations that are going to be actually salient in play - see my reply just above to [MENTION=85870]innerdude[/MENTION] - etc) then why would you describe it as GM-driven?I think that saying that "all games contain elements of both "styles"" is, in the context of a thread like this, mostly unhelpful. It adds nothing to the analysis, and tends to make everything dissolve into porridge. It makes it impossible, for instance, for [MENTION=85870]innerdude[/MENTION] to make the point he just made in his most recent post. It means that we can't talk about the difference between [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION]'s example of the GM making up all this off-screen fiction about the harlot, and the way that [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION] might conceivably have produced similar fiction using DungeonWorld.I honestly don't know much about how you run your game. I haven't read a lot of actual play examples from it. You persist in calling it GM-driven (as best I can tell from your posts and my recollection of them) but you also say that the players have a lot of agency in respect of the content of the shared fiction, and I am left trying to understand what you have in mind.All I can say is stuff like this: if, at key moments of crunch (eg trying to find the important map; trying to persuade an NPC to accept a bribe; etc) the outcome depends to a significant extent on what the GM decided about the fiction in advance (eg s/he wrote in her notes that the map is in the kitchen; she has already made a note that the only official in town who will take a bribe is Old Ludo the cemetery gatekeeper; etc), or what the GM secretly decides about the fiction at that moment; then the players are, at that key moment of play, exercising little agency over the content of the shared fiction.Or stuff like this: if your game is run in a similar way to what the Alexandrian describes with his "three clue rule" and "node based design", then you are running a game in which most of the agency over the content of the shared fiction resides with the GM.If sometimes your game is like that, but sometimes like something else, then that means that sometimes the GM is the predominant author of the shared fiction, and at other times the players have agency over it. That sort of precision is - in the context of a thread whose aim is analysis - far more helpful than a bland statement that tries to average everything out. (For the same reason that, when you're analysing human thermal comfort, it sheds little light on the matter to describe the person whose head is in the fridge and feet are in the oven as having the same overall thermal experience as the person who is in a room heated to 40 degrees.)</blockquote>

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