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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9033027" data-attributes="member: 42582">Two things:First, you haven't shown that in sim play, where the GM narrates the weather, that there is no hope on the GM's part.Two, it's not an insight or a new contribution to note that narrativist/"story now" play is sensitive to what one or more players want for their PCs. That is obvious and well-known.In the first quoted sentence, you say "participants can often agree" etc.  Then in the second, you move from third person plural to first person singular, where a person consults a calendar that they accept as authoritative. Where have the other participants gone? Then, in the final quote passage, the plural returns. And so all that has happened is that we've come right back to Baker's point: rules ease and constrain social negotiation around "what happens next?" (Eg everyone accepts that the calendar is authoritative; or everyone accepts that the weather table is the appropriate process; or whatever other method is being used of establishing shared imagination about the weather in this place.)This is a proposition that was already set out at the start of the thread, in the OP. It's fine that you've worked you own way to that same conclusion, but you present your reasoning as if it provides new insights when in fact it contains no new results and produces no new knowledge.This appears to be a complicated way of saying: in D&D, the GM gets to say what procedure will be used to work out what happens next and further to say that, at least sometimes that procedure is that the GM authors it, unmediated by any other process. This seems obviously true for some approaches to D&D. I don't think anyone in this thread is confused about it.I know Hart's work quite well. From time to time I teach it to undergraduates. I know Schauer's work - I have seen him present it. Although I am familiar with this work, I struggle to work out what you are saying in the first two of these three quoted passages.Like, if you are trying to work out the function of rules in RPGing, why do you say your concerns are generally ontological? On what basis do you deny that (say) they are primarily social psychological? How do we know that Schauer is more relevant than Durkheim? (I mean, your use of "norm" appears to have something in common with the way Durkheim and social psychologists use it.) And what difference does it make that the status of rules and of authority, in RPGing, is wildly different from in systems of legislation and adjudication that Schauer is primarily concerned with? The paradigm of rules that Schauer is concerned with are legal rules that establish sanctions for conduct. And the puzzle about matching that arises in respect of these rules is  how to state the rule so that the right sanctions will always attend a given bit of behaviour. Games don't have this problem, because - as Suits reminds us - they are voluntary. The principle issue with games, precisely because they are voluntary, is to maintain adherence by the participants. Which is why Baker is so concerned with the social aspect of play, including his doubts about the utility of a mere focus on authority (as quoted in the OP). AW uses two main methods to ensure that concerns about "matching" will not cause the "social contract" of play to break down:(1) The AW rulebook has extensive discussions of how "takebacks" work (both player and GM side) - there is no parallel to this in the sorts of cases Schauer is primarily concerned with, where the conduct is a given and the rule is now applied to generate a sanction; (2) If a player in AW declares an action for their PC, and after discussion the MC is of the view that the action doesn't trigger a player-side move, then (i) the rules are clear the player can vary their action declaration if they really want to trigger the move, and (ii) if the player elects not to vary their action declaration, then what they had their PC do becomes part of the shared fiction, and all that can happen is that the MC makes a soft move and then asks the player "what do you do?" Which is to say, the issue of "matching" is extremely low stakes. This contrast with, say, the debates that can break out in traditional D&D play about whether or not a player's action declaration for their PC triggered a trap.I don't think this is a very illuminating characterisation of mechanics. Like, if someone wanted to know how the game bridge works, telling them "it is made up of rules" would not be very informative. Telling them that those rules govern transitions from one game state to another would still not be very informative: that's just a wordy way of restating the triviality that bridge is a game.Key to understanding bridge is that play involves the use of cards - real physical items, distributed among the participants initially via a random process, and then used by the participants to generate states of play via decision-making within certain constraints.What is key to appreciating the function of RPG mechanics is not focusing on the rules in which they figure, but rather on the processes that the mechanics involve - processes of tallying (hit points, gold pieces, plot points etc), processes of generating numbers by rolling dice, processes of comparing things (eg dice results to table entries). The use of processes that are not fully under the control of participants (rolling dice, drawing cards from shuffled decks, blind declarations of actions, etc) is one way of introducing the unwelcome and unwanted into play.It sheds little light on the difference between a character casting a spell in AD&D, and a character casting a spell in Torchbearer, to notice that both are governed by rules about how the fiction changes. It sheds quite a bit of light to notice that both involve a process of tallying (a spell is crossed off a list of memorised spells) but only Torchbearer also demands that a roll be made, which if it fails permits the GM rather than the player to have the principal say of what happens next. From that difference we can see straight away that, in TB, playing a wizard is less different from playing a thief than is the case in AD&D, where playing a wizard is profoundly different from playing a thief. (And that's just one example of the differences we can see.)This is not responding in a clear way to what I posted. I said "Once we take seriously that the rules are rules for RPGing, it is not obvious that play can be such that it does not, by its very nature, place specific people front and centre. This would need to be shown". In RPG play in which the only bits of the fiction that are told to the players are bits that their PCs are experiencing, then the PCs are placed front-and-centre. This is not a proposition about anything being for anyone's sake, but rather about how a "field of experience" is constituted. In the real world it has the "self" at its centre. In "immersionist" RPGing it has an imagined self at its centre.Again, you present this as if it is new knowledge, when in fact it is just a complicated restatement of things that are quite straightforward."No myth" means that that the GM is precluded from appealing to secret backstory to stipulate what happens next without any intermediation via mechanical processes. Whether the process of extrapolation from secret backstory to "what happens next" is described as a norm or a rule or whatever else is irrelevant to that basic point, and to me seems to shed no light and in fact to obscure that basic point.The reason for including the phrase without intermediation vis mechanical processes is because - in no myth play - if the player fails their roll, then the GM may very well draw upon secret backstory to decide what to say. This is the function of "fronts" in Apocalypse World: they serve as an aide memoire, or a prompt, for the GM to decide what to say."No myth" is an approach to the resolution of declared actions, and so the question becomes What is the player's action declaration? What bit of the fiction has been put into question by that?In the example I gave, the question was not what does the protocol book say? but what will the captain do? The fact that the contents of the protocol are established fiction does not dictate an answer to that question, and hence does not dictate a resolution of the declared action.We could even imagine how this might unfold in Burning Wheel: the player declares a Wises check - "Don't I recall that the protocols for distress calls are such-and-such?" The check fails, and the GM responds "But in putting it that way, you're forgetting <this other bit about the risk of fake signals>" And the player responds "OK, but we'll try anyway because maybe this captain is a soft touch" and there is a +1 Ob due to the failed linked test.No myth is not a conceptually complicated approach to RPGing. I first did it, before the label had been coined, in the second half of the 1980s. It just requires adopting a different attitude towards the relationship between GM prep and action resolution.This is already contentious.Normative normally means something like establishing a standard of behaviour or stating a reason for action. S doesn't state a reason for action, nor establish a standard of behaviour. It states a proposition about an imaginary place.Suppose that the PCs run into someone from among the rest of the inhabitants, then by definition that person is one of the lay-folk. But the PCs run into one of the lay folk is a piece of fiction that must have been authored by someone. And that is where norms come in: what reason did that author have for authoring that thing? Did authoring that thing conform to other relevant reasons?Only if there is some reason to think that is a person run into by the PCs and is one of the lay folk are reasonably tightly correlated, is there a reason to think that normally when the PCs run into someone it will normally be a gardener, herder, cook, etc. I don't know about Stonetop, but Burning Wheel obviously does not accept the correlation: rather, BW begins from the premise that most people a PC runs into are from among that PCs circles. Which, for some PCs, will not include the lay folk.How did "yes myth" go from describing a type of play (in contrast to "no myth") to describing an element of secret backstory?If jargon is going to be used, I think it is helpful to use it consistently.To me, this makes no sense.The description of the lay folk seems no different from an AW front, and its relationship to no myth or low myth play is perfectly clear, as per what I said just above.And this is just an overly-complex way of saying that, at some tables, everyone has agreed to let the GM decide what happens next. No one is confused about that, or unaware of it as an approach to RPGing. I think everyone posting in this thread has probably participated in such RPGing, either as GM or as player.What is the relationship of the statement to player priorities, and in particular the dramatic needs they have established for their characters? That will tell you whether or not it should be made known in advance of play.In AW, the GM does not need to announce their fronts in advance. But they don't write any fronts until after the first session, to ensure that fronts cohere with player priorities as those emerge in the first session.Ron Edwards <a href="http://www.indie-rpgs.com/_articles/narr_essay.html" target="_blank">wrote about the relationship between revealing vs concealing backstory, and player protagonism</a>, 20 years ago, under the heading "pitfalls of narrativist game design":Metaplot. From Sorcerer & Sword (Adept Press, 2001, author is Ron Edwards): Metaplot. The solution most offered by role-playing games is a supplement-driven metaplot: a sequence of events in the game-world which are published chronologically, revealing "the story" to all GMs and expecting everyone to apply these events in their individual sessions. These published events include the outcomes of world-shaking conflicts as well as individual relationships among the company-provided NPCs involved in these conflicts. Metaplot of this sort, whether generated by a GM or a game publisher, is antithetical to the entire purpose of Sorcerer & Sword. Almost inevitably, it creates a series of game products that pretend to be supplements for play but are really a series of short stories and novels starring the authors' beloved and central NPCs. The role of the individual play group in those stories is much like that of karaoke singers, rather than creative musicians. Metaplot is central to the design of several White Wolf games, especially Mage; all AEG games; post-first-edition Traveller; AD&D2, beginning with the Forgotten Realms series; as well as others. Nearly all of them are perceived as setting-focused games, and to many role-players, they define role-playing with strong Setting. However, neither Setting-based Premise nor a complex Setting history necessarily entails metaplot, as I'm using the term anyway. The best example is afforded by Glorantha: an extremely rich setting with history in place not only for the past, but for the future of play. The magical world of Glorantha will be destroyed and reborn into a relatively mundane new existence, because of the Hero Wars. Many key events during the process are fixed, such as the Dragonrise of 1625. Why isn't this metaplot? Because none of the above represent decisions made by player-characters; they only provide context for them. The players know all about the upcoming events prior to play. The key issue is this: in playing in (say) a Werewolf game following the published metaplot, the players are intended to be ignorant of the changes in the setting, and to encounter them only through play. The more they participate in these changes (e.g. ferrying a crucial message from one NPC to another), the less they provide theme-based resolution to Premise, not more. Whereas in playing HeroQuest, there's no secret: the Hero Wars are here, and the more everyone enjoys and knows the canonical future events, the more they can provide theme through their characters' decisions during those events. In designing a Setting-heavy Narrativist rules-set, I strongly suggest following the full-disclosure lead of HeroQuest and abandoning the metaplot "revelation" approach immediately.These are solved problems!</blockquote>

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