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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7356572" data-attributes="member: 42582">Upthread, you said "Why can't the GM have an idea in his mind ahead of time, with some ideas about what can or may happen, but not committing to anything until the players have interacted with the idea?" I responded to this, saying that this is not an account of the GM establishing any setting element. The GM does not commmit to anything until the players have interacted with the idea.If the GM has established a setting element, then s/he is already committed to something. Conversely, if s/he's not committed it follows that nothing is yet established. S/he just has an idea.I'm not sure what you mean by "abuse" here. But anyway, as I have said many times upthread already, the games the I GM are not ones in which players are per se empowered to author elements of the fiction as part of action declaration. They are no different from D&D in this respect. The players are not considering "what would make the most compelling story" - they are just playing their PCs. (Eero Tuovinen talks about this at some length in the blog I've linked to several times in this thread.)If you like. What do you think is at stake in labelling it "framing"?For myself, I'm generally interested in the players' choice of means for their PC expressing something about their conception of the situation, and what is important in respect of it, rather than reflecting some choice I made as GM to pose some sort of puzzle. So when I frame a situation, I am trying to "go where the action is" so as to provoke some response driven by dramatic need.Huh?The PCs arrive in town. They want to befriend the baron. They also learn that the baron's advisor is, in fact (but unknown to the townsfolk or the baron) the leader of the hobgoblins who are assaulting the town, whom they've been pursuing for some time. The situation puts pressure on the players - it may be hard for the PCs to befriend the baron while also meting out justice to his advisor - but what choice of the GM's devising is being forced on the players? They can choose as they think is appropriate.No.The framing is the establishment of some shared fiction, which speaks to the PCs' dramatic needs. It doesn't dictate options.The players learning that it will be hard for the PCs both to befriend the baron and deal with the leader of the hobgoblins doesn't dictate their options. It does establish a context for making choices that will tell us something about these protagonists.I don't know of any RPG that would be run the way you describe. I don't know of any RPG that suggests that the GM's job is to (i) frame the situation, and then (ii) tell the players what their PCs are or are not allowed to do in trying to engage and/or resolve the situation. Do you have one in mind?In every RPG I'm familiar with that has social resolution mechanics, the way we find out whether or not a guard can be bribed is by seeing how the social resolution unfolds.I don't know what limits you have in mind. Or what actions you are worried will or won't be considered. Do you have a concrete example in mind?As for the bit about the ability of the players to author things into the fiction - I will repeat again that the games I GM generally do not involve player fiat authorship, and in my view that this is largely a red herring as far as player agency in respect of the shared fiction is concerned."Is there a vessel in the room that would allow me to catch the mage's blood?" isn't "authoring things into the fiction." It's just an action declaration.I feel I have posted many response to this upthread. Apparently they haven't been clear or helpful. Here is something from Vicent Baker in DitV (pp 138-39):Actively reveal the town in play The town you’ve made has secrets. It has, quite likely, terrible secrets — blood and sex and murder and damnation. But you the GM, you don’t have secrets a’tall. Instead, you have cool things — bloody, sexy, murderous, damned cool things — that you can’t wait to share. The PCs arrive in town. I have someone meet them. They ask how things are going. The person says that, well, things are going okay, mostly. The PCs say, “mostly?" . . . So instead of having the NPC say “oh no, I meant that things are going just fine, and I shut up now,” I have the NPC launch into his or her tirade. “Things are awful! This person’s sleeping with this other person not with me, they murdered the schoolteacher, blood pours down the meeting house walls every night!” ...Or sometimes, the NPC wants to lie, instead. That’s okay! I have the NPC lie. You’ve watched movies. You always can tell when you’re watching a movie who’s lying and who’s telling the truth. And wouldn’t you know it, most the time the players are looking at me with skeptical looks, and I give them a little sly nod that yep, she’s lying. And they get these great, mean, tooth-showing grins — because when someone lies to them, ho boy does it not work out. Then the game goes somewhere.In a game GMed in that fashion, relatively little time is spent making and resolving moves whose main function is to get the GM to relate his/her fiction.People disagreed. And denied.The only "dismissive" thing was to actually say it.That's why I am trying to analyse rather than make aesthetic judgements. Because the analysis itself takes many posts. It's taken 1000+ posts to get some consensus that one thing that worldbuillding is for is to establish material that the GM will relate to the players when they make certain moves that trigger that.Until these sorts of literal descriptions of what happens in play are established, how can we possibly talk about what the aesthetic rationales might be?</blockquote>

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