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Message: <blockquote data-quote="FormerlyHemlock" data-source="post: 9027730" data-attributes="member: 6787650">(A) out of curiosity, would this question be asked during play or before play? I'm trying to understand how the words "like in a PbtA" fit into this otherwise-system-agnostic concept. But basically yes, I think we agree.(B) That's how I initially interpreted it, and my initial impulse was therefore to agree, but then I thought harder and realized that it's incorrect! The GM can frame the initial hook in a way that deprives PCs of their realistic and drama-destroying advantages like armies of skeleton archers ("your skeletons were all washed overboard during the shipwreck", which the player has already agreed to) and the fact that players don't have perfect information during play creates drama of its own, even if they turn out to be right all along. (Is refusing to eat the halfling meat but offering them cookies REALLY going to be a sufficiently non- offensive choice to win over the natives?)(C) Not exactly. It's the result of me running a very simulationist game (in terms of <a href="https://retiredadventurer.blogspot.com/2021/04/six-cultures-of-play.html" target="_blank">Six Cultures of Play</a> it's maybe halfway between Classic and OSR) while thinking hard about the D in GDS and what XP is for. XP is a reward to players for metagame reasons, and unless you view it through a sort of energy-vampire "there can be only one!" lens, it has non-diegetic effects. (In other words, if PCs know that killing dragons makes you stronger and tougher, they are basically vampires. If only players know this, because it doesn't work that way for anyone else in the gameworld, then it's a non-diegetic act of GM fiat on their behalf, as a reward designed to keep players around longer. To Gygax it was clearly the latter: by the account given in The Elusive Shift, after the first game he first played with Arneson he got excited about the concept of character advancement being used to increase a player's emotional investment in continuing play.)Metagame rewards used to produce non-diegetic effects? That sounds like everyone is in director stance! So why not embrace that fully as an alternate mode of play that has nothing to do with simulationism and everything to do with creativity and fiction-writing?Therefore, nowadays I award XP (actually DFRPG characters points) exclusively for earning good reviews from other players on your post-session writeup of something related to the session. It has been amazing! Some players write short poems; some write journal entries filling in scenes that I as GM minimized; some retell events in a more highly dramatic way with a hint of unreliable narrator; and every 3-to-5-star review from the other players (including yourself) earns you 1 character point to spend on any character you like, or save for the future. My friends seem content for now to mostly just bank points instead of actually buying new advantages/disadvantages, which means I'm also stressing less about the possibility of accidental TPK in a future scenario, because they can just write up the TPK, gain points for it, and not have wasted a Saturday (or multiple Saturdays).</blockquote>

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