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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9025551" data-attributes="member: 42582">You are making very heavy weather of what strike me as reasonably simple.Describing the GM as an "expert" on turple dragons and turple trees, with that expertise having been "conferred", is just a rather obscure way of saying that the GM is the recognised author of those parts of the fiction.And saying that the GM has not been conferred expertise on the GM about oxygen and referring to a "pre-existing norm" that has not been "superseded or extended" just seems to be a way of saying the following: that when the GM introduced the fiction you are having trouble breathing, he intended that we (the players) would accept this as a logical extrapolation from his earlier remarks about things like oxygen and leaks in the station wall (all the italicised phrases were being used in their ordinary sense); and what went wrong was that the chemical engineers among us were capable of understanding how oxygen leaks behave, and hence the intended extrapolation didn't do the intended work.It's an instance of the sort of thing that Baker discusses <a href="http://lumpley.com/hardcore.html" target="_blank">here</a>: So you're sitting at the table and one player says, "[let's imagine that] an orc jumps out of the underbrush!" What has to happen before the group agrees that, indeed, an orc jumps out of the underbrush? 1. Sometimes, not much at all. The right participant said it, at an appropriate moment, and everybody else just incorporates it smoothly into their imaginary picture of the situation. "An orc! Yikes! Battlestations!" This is how it usually is for participants with high ownership of whatever they're talking about: GMs describing the weather or the noncombat actions of NPCs, players saying what their characters are wearing or thinking. 2. Sometimes, a little bit more. "Really? An orc?" "Yeppers." "Huh, an orc. Well, okay." Sometimes the suggesting participant has to defend the suggestion: "Really, an orc this far into Elfland?" "Yeah, cuz this thing about her tribe..." "Okay, I guess that makes sense." 3. Sometimes, mechanics. "An orc? Only if you make your having-an-orc-show-up roll. Throw down!" "Rawk! 57!" "Dude, orc it is!" The thing to notice here is that the mechanics serve the exact same purpose as the explanation about this thing about her tribe in point 2, which is to establish your credibility wrt the orc in question. 4. And sometimes, lots of mechanics and negotiation. Debate the likelihood of a lone orc in the underbrush way out here, make a having-an-orc-show-up roll, a having-an-orc-hide-in-the-underbrush roll, a having-the-orc-jump-out roll, argue about the modifiers for each of the rolls, get into a philosophical thing about the rules' modeling of orc-jump-out likelihood... all to establish one little thing. Wave a stick in a game store and every game you knock of the shelves will have a combat system that works like this.The situation I describe is analogous to (2), except that the analogue of "this thing about her tribe" - namely, the description of the oxygen leak - failed to establish credibility, because it was meant to be a physical explanation and we had experts who could see that it made no sense.I see an obvious contrast with something that happened in a Traveller session I ran a few years ago. The PCs were exploring an alien installation. Following the description of the installation in the module I was using, I described a type of electrical energy field that was containing certain gases in the atmosphere of a particular room. One of the PCs is an electrical engineer, and he shook his head and facepalmed when I described it.I acknowledged his expertise, we had a brief discussion, but he let it pass because it didn't hurt his game position for their to be a type of barrier containing the gases, and he was happy to hand-wave the technical explanation for that.Whereas in the convention game that I played, the state of affairs that we (the players) were contesting was one that seriously hosed our PCs (I think it may even have led to a TPK).This is also another illustration of why Vincent Baker is correct to say that content-neutral allocation of authority is not the main purpose of well-designed RPG rules. The problem in the convention game would not be solved by insisting that the players accept the GM's authority over all of the setting but for the PCs (which would, therefore, extend to the rate at which oxygen leaks from a space station). That would just reinforce how terrible the whole thing was.Contrast, say, the soft/hard move structure in AW, which precludes the GM narrating a hosing of the PCs (like "You've all got trouble breathing") as if it was a low-cost sort of thing like Vincent Baker's (2) in the quote above. It requires the GM to gain credibility in respect of oxygen loss in the course of play, by first making the soft move and then having the PCs fail whatever roll they make in the course of trying to avoid or reverse the threat.EDITed to add a response to this, which I just noticed:In Baker's terms, this would be (i) stipulating that we're low on oxygen, gaining credibility by being the author and curator of the scenario; and then (ii) asking the engineers to explain - if they care to - what the analogue is of "cuz this thing about her tribe" is in this case.The reason this "inversion" is anathema, in my view, is precisely because it makes it obvious that the source of credibility is metagame authority and not "logical" extrapolation from the fiction, which becomes mere colour that is retrofitted in the name of verisimilitude. Whereas, as per my OP:If the GM is upfront that they are using their authority over the scenario to establish credibility, they are no longer generating a degree of uncertainty on the part of the players about the process they are using to determine what happens next.</blockquote>

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