I’m finding myself nodding a lot.

For me one of the key, and difficult balances, in the way I GM in high-trust games is the ratio of provocation of players to react vs. respond. Too much of either isn’t quite right and won’t be best.

I think there is sometimes a hesitance (in myself and/or others) to push reaction as much, as it is the one that leads more often (IME) to disaster. Like, when I have a very responsive game it’s nice. Maybe flat, but nice and everyone contributes. (All other variables having gone well, of course.) But a game that has more than the balance of reaction can just crash and burn — either that night, or over time as folks aren’t able to find a good state, and feel like they’re just jumping from one thing to another.

Also, for me, someplace in this matrix is the “act” portion of the grid. Which is to say, your graphic shows the places where we’re already in a reflexive mode — a thing has been done and now we are doing a thing in return. But there’s also another critical element in how much players vs. GMs, and GMs vs. rules are empowered to start new conversational lines.

It’s something I’m infamous for as a player. Perhaps because of my heavy GM background. I’ll just be like, “naw fuck reacting or responding to that, instead Imma go over here and do this totally new thing.”

The ways that interacts with respond/react I’m not quite clear on yet, but I have a gut hunch that in my most successful long term games that the balance hasn’t been as much between responding and reacting, as between enabling players to act, me provoking reactions, and response being the middle where we negotiate a lot of the work through the mechanisms of the game.