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<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9034249" data-attributes="member: 42582">What does this look like, stated using the language of rules for RPGing rather than by way of reification of the purely imaginary?A player can attempt a thing, where the cost of failure is simply not achieving the thing.Given the context of the discussion, &quot;a thing&quot; here seems to mean a thing the player declares that their PC tries to do. Failure seems to have a dual meaning: it means the player attempts to throw a certain number or higher on the dice, and doesn't (maybe in some games it's a dice pool or card draw or whatever instead, but the same idea of win/lose applies); it also means in the fiction, the PC doesn't succeed in the thing they try to do.The phrase &quot;invoking additional badness&quot; which is glossed as &quot;being punished&quot; or &quot;suffering setbacks&quot; is presented impersonally, but presumably the person in question who would narrate the fiction that counts as &quot;badness&quot;, &quot;punishment&quot; or &quot;setbacks&quot; would be the GM.So the rule here is something like if a player declares an action for their PC, and performs the mechanical procedure that is prescribed as the method of resolving such a declaration, and gets a losing rather than a winning outcome from that procedure, then the GM is not obliged to narrate any additional fiction beyond (perhaps) the passage of an amount of time commensurate to what the PC tried to do.And when we say &quot;it can put it back on the the player to switch plans&quot;, that means that the fiction continues to be unchanged (but for the passage of time) and so the player is still thinking about what to try and contribute to the same given bit of fiction.I think it is obvious why this sort of RPGing is experienced by many participants as centring the GM's conception of the fictional situation. As the post I replied to illustrates, the most common way of describing it is by way of a reification of the GM's imagination. And when that reification is set aside and instead the actual rules and process of play are described, we can see that the player can make proposals about the fiction (&quot;My PC tries to do such-and-such&quot;) which - once resolved - impose no obligation at all on the GM to change the fiction.Whether this is good or bad play is a further thing, a matter of preference. In this post I'm just trying to clearly bring out some of its salient features.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 9034249, member: 42582"] What does this look like, stated using the language of rules for RPGing rather than by way of reification of the purely imaginary? [I]A player can attempt a thing, where the cost of failure is simply not achieving the thing[/I]. Given the context of the discussion, "a thing" here seems to mean [I]a thing the player declares that their PC tries to do[/I]. Failure seems to have a dual meaning: it means [I]the player attempts to throw a certain number or higher on the dice, and doesn't[/I] (maybe in some games it's a dice pool or card draw or whatever instead, but the same idea of win/lose applies); it also means [I]in the fiction, the PC doesn't succeed in the thing they try to do[/I]. The phrase "invoking additional badness" which is glossed as "being punished" or "suffering setbacks" is presented impersonally, but presumably the person in question who would narrate the fiction that counts as "badness", "punishment" or "setbacks" would be the GM. So the rule here is something like [I]if a player declares an action for their PC, and performs the mechanical procedure that is prescribed as the method of resolving such a declaration, and gets a losing rather than a winning outcome from that procedure, then the GM is not obliged to narrate any additional fiction beyond (perhaps) the passage of an amount of time commensurate to what the PC tried to do[/I]. And when we say "it can put it back on the the player to switch plans", that means that the fiction continues to be unchanged (but for the passage of time) and so the player is still thinking about what to try and contribute to the same given bit of fiction. I think it is obvious why this sort of RPGing is experienced by many participants as centring [I]the GM's[/I] conception of the fictional situation. As the post I replied to illustrates, the most common way of describing it is by way of a reification of the GM's imagination. And when that reification is set aside and instead the actual rules and process of play are described, we can see that the player can make proposals about the fiction ("My PC tries to do such-and-such") which - once resolved - impose no obligation at all on the GM to change the fiction. Whether this is good or bad play is a further thing, a matter of preference. In this post I'm just trying to clearly bring out some of its salient features. [/QUOTE]

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