thread: 2009-06-22 : Secrets: the Smelly Chamberlain
On 2009-06-22, Sean Musgrave wrote:
(a) Uhm, never? The chamberlain NPC isn't a real person? Is this a trick question?
(b)I'd say we're dealing with two different facts:
1) The chamberlain's odor is generally considered offensive,
and
2) The PCs all perceive the chamberlain as offensively odored.
Fact #2 is established in the fiction shared by the -players- by the secret meeting to the players and forms a cause for their behavior in game, but isn't communicated to the GM until much later. Fact #2 very strongly implies the existence of Fact #1, but because it goes across a strongly agreed GM/player split, the GM is given control over how that fact would govern non-PC stuff (I think in this play style it would be somewhat absurd for the players to ask for others to be grossed out by the chamberlains smell)
In some of the examples, the GM picks up on the clue and retroactively adds Fact #1 to the fiction. (In the first two examples, somewhere in "session 5") In others, he holds that fact #1 isn't true, and makes the players retroactively amend fact #2 to give some other explanation of their behavior.
