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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9035107" data-attributes="member: 42582">I don't understand what your italics are adding here.What do we gain, in our understanding of rules, by relabelling the truism that they govern responses to certain actions or circumstances with the jargon "description"? What does the adverb "functionally" add to the proposition, that I stated, that the rule requires the GM to say what happens next, under certain constraints, if the player fails their roll? What does it add to my statement of what the rule requires to describe that requirement as a "fitting consequence"? "Fitting", here, seems to be a strained tautology meaning conforming to what the rule requires.When, in the OP, I asked "Why do RPGs have rules?", isn't wasn't because I was puzzled by the general form of rules, which - in the context of game playing - are voluntarily-adopted normative standards pertaining to actions or circumstances that arise in the course of playing the game. I asked the question in order to promote a conversation about the reasons for adopting such normative standards: what does the adoption of rules add to RPGing, that cannot be obtained just by engaging in cooperative imagination play?Well, to me it seems that you have restated what I stated in my post that you quoted: namely, that it the rule I set out, in conjunction with some other rules that I alluded to be didn't set out ("intent and task", "let it ride"), will make the unwelcome and unwanted part of our shared fiction. Thus, in Baker's view, this is the sort of rule we have a reason to adopt in the course of our RPGing. Hence, my disagreement with this: It is precisely by focusing on who - in the rule I stated, the GM - and thereby making use of asymmetric participant roles, together with the what - in the rule I stated, saying something about what happens next, that clearly defeats or sets back the goal the player was hoping the action would achieve for their PC - that ensures that the rule will bring the unwanted and unexpected into the shared fiction.Not really. He is concerned with both (for instance, in the "Advanced F***ery" chapter in the AW rulebook, there is an extended discussion of the importance, in the design of player-side moves, of ensuring that there is an interplay and structured sharing of entitlements to narrate the fiction). He is also rejecting the notion that "brute assignment of authority" is a good way to ensure adherence to rules such that play does not break down into moment-to-moment negotiation.This is why the rule I set out gives the GM the job of saying something about what happens next, that clearly defeats or sets back the goal the player was hoping the action would achieve for their PC - it does not require the player to cease advocating for their PC and inhabiting their PCs' situation and aspirations within the fiction. This is also a reason why it centres the players' goal for their PC: while the application of the rule means that the PC suffers in ways the player would not have chosen (given their advocacy for their PC) and that the GM would not have chosen (being a fan of the PC), it does not demand the player to abandon their concern with and focus on their PC as the core of their role in the game.This is an example of how the rule, to us Baker's language (as quoted in the OP), sets expectations and confers permissions that will "make as sure as possible" the participants' adherence to the rule even when it brings the unwelcome and unexpected. This, in turn, is how the rule improves upon what would be possible via "vigorous creative agreement".Contrast a neo-trad variant on the rule (as per my post not far upthread), which would presuppose that the player does not solely advocate for their PC, that the player may have an arc of suffering in mind for their PC, and that requires the narration of the defeat or setback to express that player pre-authored arc. I think Baker's view of that neo-trad variant would be that it is essentially redundant, as we could just collectively tell the story in accordance with the pre-authored arc with no need for mediation via mechanics. To put it as Baker does (quoting again from the OP), "if all your formal rules do is structure your group's ongoing agreement about what happens in the game, they are a) interchangeable with any other rpg rules out there, and b) probably a waste of your attention. Live negotiation and honest collaboration are almost certainly better."</blockquote>

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