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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9039556" data-attributes="member: 42582">I am not criticising terseness. I'm just noting inaccuracy in generalisation.For instance, the concept of delegation presupposes authority. But the authority structure that you posit is not a generic one. When the players in my MHRP game choose their PCs, and thus their milestones, they are the ones who are deciding what the focus of their play will be. They are not exercising authority that I, the GM, have delegated to them. To describe it that way is to put the cart before the horse!What actually happens is that we as a group decide to play some RPG or other, and that RPG sets out (whether expressly or implicitly) some assumptions about trope or genre or setting or whatever, and also some principles or rules about who gets to author what. And we start from there.It obscures things to frame all this in terms of "the referee". Or "the players" for that matter - eg in my Cortex+ Fantasy Heroic games I have written pre-gen PCs and the players have chosen from them.Baker didn't write Dungeon World.And DW is obviously as broad in its genre coverage as D&D, or T&T, or RM, etc.Not all RPGing involves a "campaign".Not all RPGing involves an adventure.And it is perfectly possible to create fiction about - to imagine - characters doing things without having any "background" or "setting" other than a sense of genre. Like, in my first session of Prince Valiant the players wrote up their knights, established some basic facts about their families and we agreed that they were riding through a forest on their way to a tournament:This was perfectly good RPGing - in fact it was really quite good RPGing - and it didn't depend upon the referee establishing a setting or delegating any authority to anyone.You state your steps in terms of authority distributions, but then go on to say you don't really mean it.And you describe setting in such generic terms that any colour, genre, trope or situation is "setting".With those glosses applied, what your steps really encompass is:<ul style="margin-left: 20px"> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The game participants imagine some characters in a situation.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Those participants who have taken up the player role declare actions for those characters (their PCs).</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The game's procedures are applied to determine what happens next.</li> </ul>That's a pretty generic description of RPGing. It doesn't tell us why RPGs have rules.</blockquote>

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