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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7394447" data-attributes="member: 42582">Can you say more about what you mean by "input"?I can say that, in practical terms, when eventually I start to form some views about my PC's order's doctrine, I don't want the GM to hand me a page of notes but then solicit my input on what I do or don't like about it. I'll establish my own doctrine. (And the GM can either say "yes", or make me roll a skill check: if I fail the roll, the doctrine isn't going to be quite what I hoped it would be!)In the description of one of my campaigns that I quoted, when I say that the theology and metaphysics were (part of) the stuff of play, I don't just mean that the players cared. I mean that the truth of this stuff was being worked out by playing the game. Can the laws of karma be circumvented? The players came up with a way of doing just that. It also involved acting contrary to a divine promise, although that promise wasn't one any of the PCs had made. But this saved the world, rather than ended it. It could have ended up the other way if some actions had turned out differently; and the method of circumventing the laws of karma was come up with only at the last minute - the warrior-monk was about to sacrifice himself to ensure karmic continuity.In this context, player input just means players declaring actions for their PCs. Not negotiating at some meta-level about what's true in the fiction. And writing tons of lore doesn't really add much to the play in this context.Well, a GM who just makes stuff up as they go along, sometimes saying "yes" and sometimes saying "no" and sometimes calling for checks, probably isn't going to run a great game. (But I think [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION] once played under a GM who did something like this and did run a great game.)But I'm not talking about edge cases. When I GM, or play, a RPG, I'm looking for a certain sort of experience. Part of that is that the truth about the fiction, the "stuff" of the setting, comes out via play rather than out-of-play discussion and negotiation.There are some exceptions: starting a campaign needs some out-of-play discussion (which system? which setting? what are the PC backgrounds?). But mostly I want action declarations. To give another example: the PCs in my Classic Traveller game had learned that the inhabitants of a certain planet which (not entirely coincidentally) was likely to be their next stop had mixed alien/human origins. One of the PCs has as his goal to travel the Imperium trying to discover aliens and alien artefacts - so naturally he was intrigued by this.When the PCs arrived in orbit about the world in question (Enlil) they first debated among themselves (at the table, the players had this debate) because it would cost the shipowner money to stay in orbit for a day rather than continue on (ships aren't free to buy and operate) and the owner had no real interest in the aliens. A compromise was reached whereby those going down onto the planet would pay the owner. Then the next question was "How do we find signs of alien origins?" The players (as their PCs, and also drawing on their own experiences as (non-interstellar) travellers) thought that their must be tourist markets, and so got relevant information about these from the starport and then flew their shuttle down to one such market, where they proceeded to check out local trinkets hoping to find signs of alien manufacture or other influence.This is the players having input, but it's in the form of action declaration ("We get tourist information from the starport"), not meta-level negotiation about what is or isn't in the setting. If the action declaration was completely outrageous (eg utterly genre-breaking - like looking for a tourist bureau in a standard D&D game) then some meta-level negotiation might be unavoidable, to reach consensus on something less outrageous. But in my experience that doesn't happen very often.If the existence of a tourist bureau seemed possible but unlikely, or if I (as GM) thought that it would make a good pressure point in the game, then I could call for a check (probably Admin, maybe Streetwise, depending on ingame context including eliciting more information from the players about what their PCs are doing). But in this particular case I just said "yes", because it didn't seem that it would add anything to play to have the PCs fail to find a tourist market and look for alien trinkets.The action declaration needs a little bit of worldbuilding to give framing and context (in Traveller this is mostly handled via random world generation) but tons of notes, in this context, would be either pointless or even counterproductive. (I mean, never in a hundred years of GMing would I have thought about the PCs going to tourist markets to look for trinkets, until it actually came up in play.)I hope it's clear I'm not saying that every RPGer should want to give this sort of priority to action declaration. It's just what I enjoy in RPGing.</blockquote>

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