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<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9037974" data-attributes="member: 42582">I would say a principal difference from AW is that, in AW, (i) &quot;nothing happens&quot; is not a GM move, and (ii) the GM moves are all framed by reference to player aspirations for their PCs (&quot;put someone in a spot&quot;, &quot;announce badness&quot;, &quot;offer an opportunity, perhaps with a cost&quot;, &quot;separate them&quot; (when they want to be together), etc).So it's not just that the GM eliminates standstill; at every point, the GM is inciting the players to declare actions for their PCs by putting the players' aspirations for their PCs under pressure.In the sort of &quot;rule zero&quot; play you're describing, either the GM does the same thing, and play drifts to (what The Forge calls) &quot;vanilla narrativism&quot; - that's what happened with me in the second half of the 1980s - or else the GM puts out &quot;hooks&quot; which the players are expected to pick up on, and then play drifts towards something fairly trad.A table that doesn't want either of the two options described above therefore needs to abandon &quot;it's the GM's job to eliminate standstill&quot;. This is the approach taken by classic dungeon-crawling. I don't think this last-quoted sentence covers the field: see my previous sentence just above. I think classic dungeon-crawling puts it on the players to eliminate standstill. But this requires some fairly tight conventions on how scenes are framed, and how certain canonical actions (involving doors, ropes, 10' poles, etc) are resolved: we can see those conventions presupposed and occasionally stated in Gygax's AD&amp;D rulebooks and in Moldvay Basic. I do think that one problem that can affect &quot;sandbox&quot;-type play is a lack of conventions, analogous to those which apply in the dungeon-crawling context, that govern scene-framing and some fairly canonical action declarations. My diagnosis is a bit different. I think that there is significant degree of reluctance to acknowledge that classic dungeon-crawling depends upon conventions to make it viable: and hence there is a failure to develop comparable conventions to govern play that wants to use the same sort of GM prep + player resolution of stalemate as dungeon-crawling does, but in a more expansive fictional setting than an austere and artificial Gygaxian dungeon.An interesting feature of Torchbearer is that it does set out conventions that govern the full gamut of play. It doesn't just say &quot;make it verisimilitudinous&quot; and then punt everything to the GM.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 9037974, member: 42582"] I would say a principal difference from AW is that, in AW, (i) "nothing happens" is not a GM move, and (ii) the GM moves are all framed by reference to player aspirations for their PCs ("put someone in a spot", "announce badness", "offer an opportunity, perhaps with a cost", "separate them" (when they want to be together), etc). So it's not just that the GM eliminates standstill; at every point, the GM is inciting the players to declare actions for their PCs by putting the players' aspirations for their PCs under pressure. In the sort of "rule zero" play you're describing, either the GM does the same thing, and play drifts to (what The Forge calls) "vanilla narrativism" - that's what happened with me in the second half of the 1980s - or else the GM puts out "hooks" which the players are expected to pick up on, and then play drifts towards something fairly trad. A table that doesn't want either of the two options described above therefore needs to abandon "it's the GM's job to eliminate standstill". This is the approach taken by classic dungeon-crawling. I don't think this last-quoted sentence covers the field: see my previous sentence just above. I think classic dungeon-crawling puts it on the [I]players[/I] to eliminate standstill. But this requires some fairly tight conventions on how scenes are framed, and how certain canonical actions (involving doors, ropes, 10' poles, etc) are resolved: we can see those conventions presupposed and occasionally stated in Gygax's AD&D rulebooks and in Moldvay Basic. I do think that one problem that can affect "sandbox"-type play is a lack of conventions, analogous to those which apply in the dungeon-crawling context, that govern scene-framing and some fairly canonical action declarations. My diagnosis is a bit different. I think that there is significant degree of reluctance to acknowledge that classic dungeon-crawling depends upon [I]conventions[/I] to make it viable: and hence there is a failure to develop comparable conventions to govern play that wants to use the same sort of GM prep + player resolution of stalemate as dungeon-crawling does, but in a more expansive fictional setting than an austere and artificial Gygaxian dungeon. An interesting feature of Torchbearer is that it does set out conventions that govern the full gamut of play. It doesn't just say "make it verisimilitudinous" and then punt everything to the GM. [/QUOTE]

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