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Message: <blockquote data-quote="deleuzian_kernel" data-source="post: 9010315" data-attributes="member: 7036985">This brings us back to one of the foundational theory posts that originated this thread, specifically this <a href="http://lumpley.com/index.php/anyway/thread/466" target="_blank">one</a>.Sure, we can pretend that moment-to-moment assent is a given aspect in any social situation, specifically those that have to do with creative endeavors, and still be able to go on with our gaming lives.Even if we choose to ignore these (seemingly) invisible mechanisms, its extremely likely that we can still produce acceptable accidents, more so if there are other elements to our creative negotiation that conspire to indeed make it be a productive one, such as blunt authority distribution. Play happens, sure, and is good and successful most of the time.But ignoring that moment-to-moment assent is the driving force of creative collaboration, dismissing it as 'utterly worthless', will definitely cut off participants from being able to do anything else other than follow procedures inherited from tradition and assume that they will always 'magically' work and produce healthy creative collaboration. Historically, we have found that this is not true!I'm thinking RAW Vampire The Masquerade*, one the most deprotagonizing, uncollaborative systems ever. Players are given a good number of tools to manifest their protagonism, but their impetus is promptly cut off by a sloppy authority distribution scheme inherited from the "GM-as-primary-storyteller" tradition that follows AD&D. In this dynamic, every single player creative contribution in the fiction must necessarily conform with the GM's own vision of the fiction, which in turn usually conforms with the meta-plot concerns of the setting. These creative contributions can be easily vetoed off, or bent through illusionism.GM as "keeper of the fiction" works in old school gaming because the agenda of that tradition requires it, and having players act as moral protagonists is not it. Even then, there are other arenas in which these games employ moment-to-moment assent.When these "given and obvious" procedures don't work to suit our goals, people are confounded and start looking at the wrong things, missing completely what the underlying problem is. Turns out they weren't paying attention to the actual social mechanisms of how fiction gets built.*This is not an attack on VtM players! If your VtM game was fruitful, I believe you. How did YOU overcome the shortcomings I described above?</blockquote>

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