TELL ME WHY!

It is harder to vividly imagine a fictional world if all we can say is yes, and, but, if

I want to go live in this picture. Jakub Rdelka

The bad doctor said it best—not on a blog, but in conversation:

“The fiction and the characters get blended into this amorphous, infinitely malleable thing without substance.”
That’s where many contemporary storygames go.
And exactly what fiction-first and OSR communities fight against.

Yes—it’s harder to imagine when there’s no resistance.
Fiction needs pushback, fragility, materiality. 

A glass thrown shatters.
A fist breaks on the wall.
Axes bite flesh.
Kisses meet lips.
These are not metaphors. They are fictional realities. Some of them are adversity, but not all. They affirm what parts of our world is part of the fictional world, or make a minimal departure. Take a look at Marie Laure Ryan if you want to chew more on that. Why and How are the questions that gently cleave that world from ours.

But the No is not enough, a glass without water can hardly be ca!-

**jingle-jingle* We interrupt this blog post with a *jingle-jingle*

PUBLIC HEALTH ANNOUNCEMENT:

You can put GM's in this venn diagram too

Dr. Joysloff’s Pyramid of Interactivity™️

Yes and

Yes but / Yes if

No and / No but

WHY / WHAT / HOW

No diet fads replace a balanced, nutritious table of players.

Yes and
Use sparingly. But rich in essential fictional truths growing from the character.
turn the and towards the giver if it needs to be controlled or toward the receiver if it needs to be rewarding.

Yes but / Yes if
Use regularly.
Sometimes, the giver sets the conditions, the receiver chooses. Other times vice versa.The Bad Doctor (a better doc than the name implies) wrote some scary good advice on this.
Don’t overload—like shoes, only one pair at a time: Too many, and choice paralysis hits hard. Bunions everywhere.

No but / No and
Use freely—unless you're on a pure story-game diet.
Without proper tools, they break the creative engine: A no should come with something: a new opening, a shift in focus. It is the word after the no that matters.

WHY / WHAT / HOW
Bread. Butter. Bedrock.
Without them, the pyramid crumbles;
No fiction to stand on. No shared concept. No interiority.

**jingle-jingle*

- Aah, uh! That was weird. Now where was I?

Diets are cool and all, but it’s easy to get trapped in the semantics of semantics.

Pew pew. Hernan Bas

As a GM—and as a player—I want to know what makes your character yours. I want to celebrate them.

That includes:

• Putting them through cogent adversity.
• Watching them fail.
  
• Watching them succeed.
  
• Watching them take another path.
• Watching them just be.
• Seeing when and how and why they change. And when they choose not to.

That change though needs both materiality. Resistance.
But that resistance means nothing if there’s no Why providing the interiority.

Deep player investment doesn’t come from saying Yes + But/And/If, why, or no, and no-but-why, and yes-but-and-why-no and have you ever had a dreams? Like some broken boyband record or diet self-hypnagogist.

It comes from being utterly, wildly, deeply invested in both:

• Their triumphs
• Their failures
• How they go about it. Their actions.
• And most of all—their reasons
  

And the world-inverse to these questions, that the players should invest themselves in.

For all it comes down to holding answers lightly: Let them shift. Let things change. Let SISTER become DEATH KNIGHT become MOTHER become LONER.

If you don’t let go, you’ll be dragged. (and please don't let go stoically, let go with emotion and with grace.). I think a lot of GM’s or world-players or whatever tend to think investment comes with holding tight, hugging the baby, squeezing it until its blue.

Instead allow yourself to be surprised.
Ask Why. Ask How.

It all ends with me. By  Lawey D

So what about Why? And How?

We should ask both the fiction and the character sheet as a representation of that fiction:

• Why does that scar matter?
• Why did they fall in love?
• Why wield that trait in a duel of wits?
• Why erase “In-love” after reuniting?

Depending on the player’s answer, we—player or GM—should lean in with interest.
Find out why. Work lovingly with the answer. Reincorporate it.
Be genuinely interested in the character’s behavior and what it means to the player.

Why did they choose to look Medusa in the eyes

Don’t say, “You're stone. You're dead. The end.”

It's human to reach for an easy yes, noble to reach for a what seems a real “no”.
But we—players, decision-makers, GMs—can choose something else:

Ask Why. Listen to the answer. Let them live in that moment.

“Sure, the medusae totally had my rapt attention. I lay down my weapons and take the blinds off - How much have you suffered at the hands of adventurers? The statues all carry weapons. They are not any different from the men that burned my village. I will not be found here with sword in hand. I release my grip open my eyes.
Uuh, what is your intent?
To not partake in this senseless bloodshed”

everyone knows the fictional significance of that moment. Say it would probably make more sense in this case that:

• The heroine become a golem protector. A Medusa’s stare is different to the willing.
• The Medusa realizes and turns away last second, our heroines eyes turned marble – new allies are made.
• The Medusa, moved by the sacrifice, lays down her arms.
• A treasured statue in a garden tended by not a medusa, but a snake woman, who goes on to be the players next character.

Or maybe our heroine does become inert stone.
Finality. Doom. A monument to defiance. That medusa was really a sucker.

That Radical Openness to what counts as a real answer in that fictional world—
That’s what I miss in OSR thinking. They assume medusa suckers.

When the world is a riddle, players become answer machines.
The GM a referee. Correct answers exist somewhere:
In the prep. In the GM’s weighing system. In the design.

And yes, OSR resists numbers.
But the OSR just hides the problem: The world becomes something to solve, not to inhabit.

Let’s assume instead:

1. The character’s actions make sense because they are part of that world.
2. When we do not understand the action, we ask Why? and How? from a place of openness.
3. We let the answers reshape the world and deepen its meaning.

I’m not pushing for story. I’m pushing for immersion.

If we explore a character’s intentions, emotions, interiority—
And see those as shaped by the world—
The world, in turn, becomes shaped by them.

Not character versus world, but character with world. And i think that is perfectly viable with having our adversity-riddle-cake - necessary even, to provide the materiality.

It starts with assuming that characters are not puzzle-pieces that have to fit into the world, but that the world must accept them and vice versa:

• A tree flowers, and the flower also trees.
• A human must universe if a universe can human.
• And if a human atrocities—so does the world

It ain’t all roses being part of a world. Machuca.

What am I rambling about?
Alan Watts? Maybe. Maybe not.

What i am saying is: If a player character is a fae queen bent on conquering the midlands - then you better work with that, and they better work with you. Validate their concept. They should validate your world.

The GM and the players must allow themselves to be surprised.
Surprised by play. By consequences. By choices. By playing to find out what happens.

To me there is ironically a specific set of interjections and conjunctions that help establish that connection:

At the beginning i think the first word is yes. A double-sided Yes binds character and world together.

Yes to the fae queen on her summer travels.
Yes to the warlock and his hunger-blade.
Yes to the midwife tagging along. 
Yes to the thricecursed demolycan moonsteward.

That fragile beauty of the initial Yes? It was present in the OSR, and is somewhat present in the FKR and the fiction first hiding as a possible budding playstyle. I think the OSR was scared when the fae queen was the one that started riddling the world.
Play worlds, not rules, as the FKR says.
But where does that leave the characters? As pieces to fit an already varnished painting.  

Anyway. After that first yes, then Why, then How.

From there, the roots grow. Interest grows. How the characters treat the world shows how they’ll treat others. Vice versa. Axe bites flesh, lips meet.

From there we form plenty of sharp no's. Oh shit, we are talking diets again. Ahem.

All throughout though the Why powers it all.
Why does three vital things:

1. It signals and regenerates interest.
2. It loads the moment with meaning—zooms in.
3. It can target either character (offers identification) or player (offers interrogation).

Okay. Praxis.

How the hell do we do this?

Start by giving more concrete, more cogent choices.

Not five flavors of vague—
One good choice with teeth. (The product of a well balanced diet)

And then, instead of spiraling into  rigid, forced Yes-But-No-Why loops:
Make your Why’s Timed and Poignant.

---

Why Timed?

Why’s slow things down. That’s the point.

They invite pause. Deliberation. Imagination. They force the player to look inside their character (so gently that its almost hypnotic, most of the time.)

Too many why’s, and we stall. Any sense of urgency is killed. Dead. Stopped. Stone.
Too few—and we lose that textural materiality that is as important as adversity.

---

Why Poignant?

The Why is still new to me, uncharted land. It's what i explore in this very blog – but I know it feels similar to love. I know it needs:

• Radical openness
• Empathy
• Wild and patient and real interest - not asked out of courtesy but of want. need. desire.

Sutexii

And so far my Why's have been best when they are Caring. Tender. Curious. How do you do that. I don't fucking know. But i do know that in love:

We constantly re-invent in our own eyes the ones that are the subject-objects of our love —and allow them to re-invent themselves. At the same moment we must paradoxically love them exactly for who they are. Allowing us and them and the relation to simply be, without expecting, demanding or loving anything in particular apart from what shows up.