Just because a PC manages to roll well on a streetwise check doesn't mean he's going to find a bureaucrat willing to give him license to set up a hamburger stand in the 2000 Worlds.
<snip>
The 2000 Worlds is the empire of the K'Kree - a highly militant interstellar culture descended from herd animals. They are militantly vegetarian and very prickly.
Given that the skill is expressly about human subcultures and notes that interaction with aliens is at the referee's discretion, I'm not sure this is a sound example.
I find that line of argument, that a player should be able to get pretty much anything they want simply by rolling a success with a particular skill, the worst sort of crunch beats fluff (or roll beats role) argument that undermines the best differences between role playing games and board games.
Well, I find the idea that a GM would ignore the rules text and decide that Streetwise checks also have a prior "GM approval/random roll" clause one of the main "GM railroading over player creativity" things. I've seen it wreck games. I've seen it sour and crush players.
Traveller is a game about, among other things, taking ridiculous quantities of weapons into places where they are illegal and then hoping you don't have to use them. The Streetwise skill is part of that. It sets the tone of the game. And, as written, it allows the player to introduce new content into the shared fiction without it being the case that the player's character is the causal origin of that new content.
If you want to houserule that out in your Traveller games, that's your prerogative. But player authorship, in a limited fashion, was in RPGs back in 1977.
Which they discover and encounter and interact with through their characters. I know you understand this because you are reading and quoting from sources that explain it.
The rules are very clear. A player can roll Streetwise without his/her PC having met a contact, and without his/her PC even knowing - at that point - that a potential contact exists. The Streetwise check resolves, through one roll, both the existence of the contact and the contact's willingness to help the PC.
You also haven't answered my question - when the Traveller book says that the GM has a responsibility to introduce encounters that will further the adventure, do you think it is ruling out having regard to what the players want? I think it is not. Which is to say, I think that back in 1977 it had occurred to RPG authors that the players might have input, via requests and other expressed desires, into the referee's framing of the ingame situation. Much like the beard and box examples.
Nope, and neither are third level spells which a first level wizard can someday pursue authorial control rather than a resource.
The difference is that the paladin's "spell"
interacts with at least one NPC - the warhorse - who is therefore deemed to exist even though the paladin didn't create it.
It would be analogous to a Charm Monster spell that also guarantees that a convenient monster wanders along.
Much like a wizard can craft new spells, the paladin as part of his role in a setting can call and quest for a warhorse.
Which therefore must exist. Even though the paladin didn't bring it into being.
A GM is neither obligated to have it happen
So you're seriously saying the GM can unilaterallly override the player's class ability? The paladin, at 4th level, calls for a warhorse and the GM says "No, you can't have one"? That sounds like crappy GMing to me. I don't see any warrant for it in any AD&D material that I'm familiar with (maybe it's in one of the 2nd ed books that I thankfully avoided).
"via their PCs" It literally says that? That the player interacts with the setting through the PC?
No. Moldvay just says that the GM should design a dungeon that gives the player's a reason to adventure. Moldvay is fairly loose on player/PC terminology, and in context I think that my interpolation is a fair reading of what he meant. There is a contrast in this respect with Gygax, who takes it for granted that the PCs will be motivated by nothing more than the desire for fortune.