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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7354648" data-attributes="member: 42582">I don't know that it is - why would it be?If the GM has decided that there is an unrevealed invislbe opponent present, and then a player declares "I use my wand of truesight", that is making a move that triggers the GM to tell the player some bit of pre-authored backstory. Isn't it?As I understood your account, you had already decided that there was a blocked stairway. You then, as part of the resolution of the PCs' conversation with the orcs, decided that the stairway had been blocked to keep the boss from coming back. But it wasn't clear to me whether that was a note you made to yourself, or something that you told the players (eg one of the orcs says "The day after the warboss went missing, the shaman had us block up the stairs.")You're right that "deciding the moves" may not have been the right term - "establishing a bit of the necessary fiction al positioning" is more accurate.The hostage example is interesting, because there are many ways that could be adjudicated, and the differences betwween them can be highly illuminating of the etent to which play is GM- or player-driven. There was an extensive discussion of a similar example (hiring an assassin to kill the king) upthread, between [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] and [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION], which I think brought out some of the relevant points.not you seem very dismissive of play that doesn't have the players telling the DM new fiction</blockquote>I've repeatedly posted, and I'm sure that some of those posts have been in reply to you, that none of the RPGs that I GM has a mechanic for player fiat introduction of fiction (and I have repeatedly drawn the contrast with Fate and OGL Conan in this respect).Players don't have to be able to tell the GM new fiction in the course of play to exercise agency over the content of the shared fiction.not The entire point, I thought, of your complaints about secret backstory was that is was pre-authored ficiton and it could be used to thwart player action declarations. Backstory that was presented as framing, even if prepared, and made known to the players was acceptable. Yet you've repeatedly commented that the notes employed, despite not thwarting player actions or even being secret (almost everything was known to players and the few things that weren't were trivially discovered and made known before having an impact), are pre-authored, secret backstory. It seems your goalposts are shifting, but I'm not sure as you may have just failed to make your points clear.[/quote]I'm not sure what you think the "goalposts" are here.For the past X (> 200) posts, there has been an ongoing discussion about player agency. I've been focused on discussing player agency in respect of the content of the shared fiction. I've talked about various ways this can arise and be exercised, and various techniques that tend to reduce it. The use of pre-authored backstory to establish unrevealed fictional positioning is one way. The GM establishing the stakes of play, McGuffins, fetch quests, etc is another. If a fair bit of the focus of play is on the players making moves that will trigger the GM to narrate bits of the pre-established fiction, well that's another way in which the players will not be exercising a great deal of agency over the content of the shared fiction.I'm sorry if the above is not clear - I've done my best to reitereate it many times over many posts. And I've linked multiple times to Eero Tuovinen's outline of the "standard narrativistic model" which also sets it out pretty clearly - the players build PCs with dramatic needs, the GM establishes situations that speak to those needs and hence provoke action declarations, those action declarations are resolved which generates various sorts of consequences, which feed into new situations, etc, etc.There are a number of fairly common approaches to RPGing that constitute departures from the standard narrativistic model: the GM establishing stakes and goals for play that are not related to PCs' dramatic needs; play being focused on the players acquiring information from the GM about the content of the fiction, rather than on addressing the PCs' dramatic needs; the PCs not having any clear dramatic needs; consequences being established based on the GM's conception of what is important in the situation, or basedon GM pre-authorship of gameworld elements ("secret backstory" as a factor in action resolution); etc.[/QUOTE]

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