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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7396298" data-attributes="member: 42582">The point is that discovering a secret door in play, by way of resolving a declared action, doesn't simulate the authorship of something before the game. Here are two (related) ways in which this is so: (1) it is not presented as input into the fictional situation being resolved - rather, it is an outpute; (2) no one at the table knows whether or not the desired secret door will be part of the shared fiction until the declared action is resolved.Right.   [MENTION=23751]Maxperson[/MENTION] is assuming that, because the secret door, if it is found, must have existed before that particular moment of discovery - which is a "fact" about in-fiction timelines - it must therefore count as backstory - ie something authored in advance of play.But Eero Tuovinen says nothing about correlation between in-fiction timelines and the timeline of actual play. And as you say, if you take him to be implicitly accepting such a correlation then the rest of his blog makes no sense. For instance, there would be no need to distinguish between backstory and framing!EDIT:This too! (And how many times have I already posted thus upthread?!)FURTHER EDIT:He is using it as he tells us he is using it:Backstory is the part of a roleplaying game scenario that “has happened before the game began”. The concept only makes sense when somebody has done preparatory work for the game or is using specific heuristics to simulate such preparation in real-time.That will overlap with what you have said if we assume that action resolution will never reveal new information about past states of the gameworld. This is mostly going to be true in classic D&D play (although even Gygax was aware of other possibilities - eg he puts forward a different approach in the Appendix A advice on solo play, which allows a roll now to determine if a secret door was built in the wall then).But if players are free to declare actions like "I search for a secret door" or "I search for the map", with the outcome turning just on the standard resolution methods without also being mediated through the GM's opinion as to the "true" existence of a secret door or a map, then we have an example of an element of the fiction that is in the state it's in at the time the PCs interact with it but is not backstory, because no one wrote it or new it in advance, nor developed it via a proxy heuristic for pre-authorship.If you don't draw the distinction between in-fiction timelines and at-the-table timelines then you simply can't describe a whole lot of RPGing techniques.</blockquote>

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