hawkeyefan
Legend
In this case above, were you nullifying one or more player's input in order to wrest control of the gamestate and the overall trajectory of play toward your preferred gamestate/trajectory?
In some cases, probably, yeah. Most of those cases would have likely been to apply Force to end one player's overindulgence in roleplaying mundane encounters in order to allow things to move along for everyone else.
I'm sure I could try and come up with more egregious examples if I gave it some thought. But this is years ago.
More recently, when running a prepared adventure for 5E (and likely my last time doing so) I totally narrated the results of a path that the PCs had set upon. To summarize quickly, the archvillain of the story is the Lich Acererak, and the PCs need to brave his dungeon, the Tomb of Annihilation, in order to break a curse that he's set upon the land. The dungeon is filled with all manner of traps and monsters and so on. There is one part of the Tomb that is actually an extradimensional testing ground for the traps. Almost a "beta" version of the tomb. Kind of an interesting concept, I thought.
But I don't know if it was an interesting concept for play. My players wandered into the beta version but with no understanding of what it was. The book suggests that it is an exact duplicate of the Tomb, except with no inhabitants. I realized that this was going to cause more frustration than fun as they tried to (a)figure this out, (b)put this knowledge to meaningful use, and (c)require me to track positions of the party across two identical dungeons, and what had been uncovered in which location, and what had not.
So when this all dawned on me, I simply narrated "You realize that you've wandered into a demiplane that is a duplicate of the tomb, likely a testing ground for the traps and hazards Acererak has used" and called it a day.
I don't know if this counts as nullifying their decision, but I certainly altered the outcome to be different than it would have if we played it out as the book suggested.
I may need t know more, but this doesn't sound like a case of Force to me. So long as a participant's input isn't being willfully nullified in order for the GM to maintain control of the gamestate/trajectory of play, then this just sounds like bog-standardm, corner-case adjudication that happens in most all games.
So I suppose GM Fiat isn't always the same as GM Force.....that if the system in place says "The Gm Decides" is the method of adjudication, then that is not a case of Force.
Agreed. This is where I'm at. If we can agree that this state is attainable, then why, if this state has been attained sans-Force, would there be a need for Force?
This would seem to imply that it must be a breach of process, whether willing or unwilling.
But I'm not sure if that jibes with some earlier talking points in the thread.