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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9318481" data-attributes="member: 42582">No one's game fiction is an "amorphous mutable mess" as best I'm aware of. And the players in the games I GM make impactful decisions with real meaning - eg to kill Gerda, to kill Megloss, to seek the help of the Void cult, to reach a deal with Lareth the Beautiful, etc.You seem to be assuming that there is a more-or-less strict correlation between an absence of resolution by causal extrapolation, and an absence of concrete fiction elements and relationships at stake in a given scene. That assumption is not correct.And if you're not making that assumption, then there is even less basis for thinking that you have identified a distinct virtue of the causal-adjudication approach to play. It's virtue is not meaning. It's virtue is something in the neighbourhood of puzzle solving - analogously to identifying the hidden pieces on a gameboard.I can't comment much on planning in BitD, which I've not played - although I do know that there is such a thing as gathering information, which looks to me like a type of planning.But I don't really see the connection between (say) the sort of planning that Gygax describes in his PHB (equipment and spell load-out, a "plan of attack" for the dungeon level, etc); or the sort of planning that might figure in a Shadowrun or certain sorts of Traveller or even Cthulhu scenarios; and "impactful decisions with real meaning".I've GMed sessions of Rolemaster where a lot of time has been spent by the players optimising the use of spell power points to prepare for a particular mission their PCs are about to undertake. There's a type of pleasure there, somewhat comparable to the pleasure in solving a sudoku or crossword - but it's not about meaningfulness.And I've played RPGs - investigative scenarios in various systems - where a good chunk of play is about ascertaining the "true" state of the fictional situation, by unearthing the hidden information without doing anything so flagrant that it upsets the whole applecart (in virtue of the GM's causal extrapolations). Again, there can be a type of pleasure there, but it's not about meaningfulness either.</blockquote>

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