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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9035055" data-attributes="member: 42582">OK? This may be true. It doesn't seem to bear upon what I said. A player can be very active, intently asking the GM to tell them more about how they conceive the fictional situation, perhaps with some of those answers being gated behind rolls that have to meet a certain target for success. That is not at odds with play centring the GM's conception of the fictional situation: it seems to be an obvious example of it!I don't really see how references to lusory attitudes and means are shedding much light here. I mean, yes, the GM can encourage the player to keep playing the game by continuing to reflect on the situation as conceived of and narrated by the GM, continuing to ask questions about it via their declared actions for their PC, and so on. Such urgings will maintain the centring of the GM's conception of the fictional situation.I think that the claim in the first of these two quotes is false. Abandoning failure without setback is a key means that RPGs use for centring the participants' conception of the fiction rather than centring the GM's conception of the fiction. This works in two interrelated ways:(1) Requiring failure narration to include setbacks requires identifying what would be a setback here? Which requires imposing a normative or evaluative attitude onto the situation (thus investing the situation with stakes). In games such as AW and BW, the relevant norms/evaluation are provided by the player: that is to say, it is the player who - directly or indirectly - plays the key role in setting stakes. (2) To achieve (1) requires the GM to frame situations in which there are things at stake, which can then be won or lost based on whether the players succeed or fail on their roll (or card pull or whatever mechanical process is being used). So the players, being the stakes-setters, now play a role - directly or indirectly - in contributing to the content and trajectory of framed situations.There may be other means to achieve RPGing that centres the participants', rather than just the GM's conception of the fiction. But (1)+(2) is a very common means. Abandoning failure without setback is not, on its own, sufficient for (1)+(2), but is clearly necessary for (1)+(2).We can therefore see that abandoning failure without setback is a necessary though insufficient condition of achieving a sufficient though perhaps unnecessary condition of RPGing that centres the participants', rather than just the GM's conception of the fiction. Which is to say, to use Mackie's terminology, it is an INUS condition of doing so. (Mackie thought this was sufficient to show that it is a cause. I've confined myself to characterising it as a key means.)To the extent that "story" in the second of the above two quotes means something beyond stakes, then BW and AW are not really relevant. The use of "failure with setbacks" to drive the GM's pre-conceived story seems like a type of trad play: the GM uses the setbacks to keep things moving in their pre-authored direction (eg the PCs not only lose the combat but are taken prisoner, thus finding themselves in the NPC headquarters which, had they won the combat, they would have headed to next). The use of "failure with setbacks* to drive the player's pre-conceived story seems like a type of neo-trad play: the GM uses the setbacks to keep things moving in the players' pre-authored direction (eg the NPC doesn't just decline the PC's request but storms off in a huff, with this fiction reaffirming the player's established conception of how the PC and the NPC feel about one another).Baker talked about this <a href="http://lumpley.com/hardcore.html" target="_blank">back in 2003</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? . . . 3. Sometimes, mechanics. "An orc? Only if you make your having-an-orc-show-up roll. Throw down!" "Rawk! 57!" "Dude, orc it is!" . . . 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.And as I posted not all that far upthread,</blockquote>

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