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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8345482" data-attributes="member: 6790260">I appreciate your positivity and friendliness. My request was a bit melodramatic, so your gracious response is genuinely appreciated for helping turn down, rather than up, the temperature of the discussion.And yes, I agree that a mixture is desirable. Sometimes, for example, the fiction requires either bringing conflict to a head, or letting an issue go. That can verge into the "predetermined" category because the weight of past decisions and current values is too great to simply let it lie unresolved. I mentioned the Song of Thorns earlier; the party knew, after digging into things, finding allies, etc. that they couldn't allow the Song to act with impunity, and that the Song wouldn't (indeed, couldn't) be persuaded to change its ways without force. That meant a fight--and I drafted up what I considered an interesting sequence for it, with the possibility of both horrible failure and superlative success. (They rolled very well and exploited their resources well, so they hit the superlative success zone--but the option WAS there for a Really Bad Time if they had not rolled well or used their resources poorly.)I appreciate the honest critique, but again feel it is somewhat misplaced.Before I dig into the other parts of this post: Are you saying your players can, at any time, determine any desired part of the game world on their own, with no input from you whatsoever? Because that's what I mean by "only indirect access through me." That is, even in something like DW, the players are dependent on what I tell them about the world. They have to ask Discern Realities questions. They have to prove to me that they have leverage for Parley. They have to turn to me to tell them what "worse outcome, hard bargain, or ugly choice" results from a partial success on Defy Danger. When they enter into a new space, they don't start narrating its contents to me; I narrate the contents to them. If they have a zany idea, they have to sell me on it; I do not "have" to sell them on anything (though I choose to do so as I see great value in it).They have some direct access, sure. But it's always gated by mechanics (Spout Lore, Bardic Lore, Bonds)--they never have absolute direct access the way I as GM, and the vast majority of the time, whatever access they have depends on me as GM. As the Agendas say, it's my job to "portray a fantastic world," to "show the players the wonders of the world they’re in and encourage them to react to it." In Dungeon World (and D&D, and most other TTRPGs with a central GM role), the players only ever have mediated access--that is, mediated by what words I tell them, what I "allow" them to see. It is thus incumbent on me to make sure that that mediated access is genuinely fair to them, otherwise I'm robbing them of the ability to actually explore that space.Perhaps my "breadcrumbs" are what you refer to as "framing"? I'm absolutely not at all familiar with most of the technical terms of art in the GM sphere; this is literally only the second game I've ever run (and the first petered out after only a few sessions). I don't know precisely what "framing" means, and some of the ways you've described it sounded...well, really railroady, "you'll do this because I'm the one telling you this story" level control. It'd be unfortunate but not unexpected if vocabulary were the central difference between us.....I do introduce new fiction. Quite often. I had thought I had expressly said so. I just have very strict limits on how I'm allowed to introduce that fiction, so that I'm not pulling "gotchas" on my players. I know for a fact I explicitly said that this was about avoiding "gotcha" issues. How could I have even the possibility of a "gotcha" if I wasn't introducing something new?And on the players' side, I am actively enthusiastic about them introducing things into the fiction. I LOVE it when the Bard tells us about his Bestiary of Creatures Unusual, or the tales he heard while living among the desert nomads. I encourage the Ranger to tell us who from his vast extended family is helping us today. Etc. Those things are automatically "in the open" because the players must insert them into the fiction while playing. The stuff I insert into the fiction is, by definition, invisible unless I either explicitly tell the party, or provide them with an opportunity to find out.But a lot of so-called "opportunities to find out" are really rather poor ones, because they don't give the players a fighting chance. How do you know to ask a question about something you have no idea is there? My "breadcrumbs" are merely my effort to make "unknown unknowns" into "known unknowns," as the saying goes--but sometimes those "breadcrumbs" are incredibly subtle, like mentioning that the winds have changed a lot lately, or have only recently uncovered long-buried secrets, stuff that very very very subtly invites inquiry. I always try to leave at least one little thing, one loose end, that the players could pull on to begin unravelling the mystery, and that loose end gets at least a teeny tiny reference, no matter how subtle, in my actual descriptions of things. That way, if the players figure it out early, they can legitimately feel smart for having tracked down the mystery early, and if they don't figure it out until the reveal, they can look back and honestly say, "Wow, I totally could've seen that coming, I just didn't!"</blockquote>

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