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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7351635" data-attributes="member: 42582">The bit I quoted was what stood out in my first read through a long post. I was wanting to cut to that chase.What about when the GM does something that creates a boring story?As you yourself have stressed, it's not particularly helpful to focus on ideal cases. I am trying to talk about procedures for play. A rule that says "The GM can veto/block/manipulate-backstory-to-defeat any action declaration that will lead to a boring story is (in my view) a rule that is at odds with player agency over the content of the shared fiction. As I posted way upthread, it tends to reduce all player action declarations for their PCs to suggestions.If, in a high player agency game, you're worried that you're going to get a lot of silly stuff like maps being found in kitchens, then my own advice - derived from a mix of experience and reading - would be to work on your framing as GM, and encourage your players to work on their PC building (especially to do with goals, etc).In the first few weeks of my first RM campaign, one of the players - perhaps intoxicated by the player agency? - played his character as a type of anti-Jack-the-Ripper ie the PC would pick up customers looking for sex and kill them. As a GM I adjudciated this in a relatively light touch, off screen fashion - it's not at the core of what I'm looking for in a RPG, which is at least a little bit more 4-colour - and it was fairly clear from me and the other players that this was not what were especially interested in. The player himself realised that for those extrinsic reasons, and perhaps some intrinsic ones as well, he was probably better off coming up with a different sort of PC, and so we wrote out one characer and wrote in another.But there's also the question of who gets to decide what's silly. In the BW game where I'm a player, my PC is a knight of a religious order has relationships with some family members, and has cooking skill. Of course there's no guarantee that any action for this PC will take place in a kitchen, but it wouldn't be absurd either.In a player-driven game, the question of whether or not it's silly for important stuff to happen in the kitchen isn't a unilateral matter for the GM.</blockquote>

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