You described the Certificate earlier as an auto-win. Are there limitations or restrictions on that?
On the idea of "tools from outside the fiction" - a flashback doesn't invovle tools from outside the fiction (the PC packed his/her rucksack well), nor does looking for a chandelier or recognising a friend in a crowd. These are all things that the PC has done or is currenlty doing.Using tools from outside the fiction--maybe even including auto-wins; I'd have to think on that--doesn't feel to me as though it's the character doing it.
Of course the fate point or whatever exists outside the fiction, but so does the d20, the action ecnomy, the hit point, etc. These are all mechanical apparatuses.
In non-OSR RPGing I've often had a player ask something like "Can we assume that I bought some rope when we were back in town?" A flashback is like that but with player-side control: it shifts agency but it doesn't change the basic process.
And spending a Storyteller Certificate to kill someone, or find something, or arouse the passions of a crowd, or make someone fall in love wish you (these are the affects that have been used in our game; others include things like escaping, or remaining hidden, or saving someone in combat, or causing fear, or granting ispirational buffs) isn't any different from achieving such a thing via a check, except the check is not required. (It's no coincidence that the most frequent user of Kill a Foe in Combat is the player whose PC has the weakest combat stats on his PC sheet.)
Here are fuller accounts of those two moments of play:clearly there's something in the fiction that led the PC to pray in Hagia Sophia and introduce himself, so the player could declare those actions expecting those results to be among the possible consequences? I figure there's some elision happening, there, because I don't see the recognition as described as a consequence I'd expect of an introduction
I decided to use the scenario The Crimson Bull. The PCs met an old man, the last survivor of an assault, holding a crimson bull by a black cord. He asked for help to take the bull to the Valley of Mudde. Through good fortune rather than good planning on my part, the map (we are using the Map of Britain on the inside cover of the Pendragon book) indicated that this would be at the southern end of a large fen on the mid east coast. The PCs (and players) were curious about this, but being noble knights offered to help. Sir Justin introduced himself as Sir Justin and then made a successful Presence check, with the result that the old man knew of him - "You're Sir Justin the Gentle, of the shrine of St Sigobert" [in an earlier session Sir Justin helped care for some of the ill in that hospice, earning the sobriquet Sir Justin the Gentle] - and I was sufficiently impressed and amused to give him a Storyteller Certificate.
Sir Justin, who had been badly wounded in the forest [by the Bone Laird], was utterly spent (reduced to 1D in each of Brawn and Presence).
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the dragon was slain by Sir Morgath. An Oratory check by Sir Gerran enabled him to maintain control over the soldiers still on the boat and that had fallen into the water, so only two Huns of the PCs' entourage were lost. The bones of one was recovered so that they could be placed in the reliquary for martyrs of the Order
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When the PCs and their retinue arrived in Constantinople they were welcomed as dragon-slayers. Luxurious pavilions had been established outside the walls of the city, and taxidermists were waiting to prepare the body of the dragon. The players abandoned their plan to turn the hide into armour and instead gifted the body to the Emperor: a troop of their soldiers carried the body up to the gate of the city, where they handed it over to Varangians to carry it to the Emperor. The PCs also entered the city unarmed and unarmoured (wearing their fine clothes, and with Sir Justin being borne on a litter as he was still on Brawn of 2 ie 2 down from his normal 4) and did homage to the Emperor in one of his palaces. He presented them with gifts, which I asked the players to narrate: Sir Morgath and his wife Elizabeth were gifted fine robes, which provided the standard +1 prestige bonus in the East but would provide a +2 bonus when worn in the West; Sir Gerran was gifted a jewelled and damascened sword of Syrian make (+1 prestige when worn); and Sir Justin was gifted a mace which had once been wielded by the Gothic holy man St Cuthbert, and so seemed a fitting gift for a Western knight who had come to the East to fight a holy war (the mace of St Cuthbert grants +1D when fighting heathens).
The PCs then prayed in Hagia Sophia. I can't now remember whether or not there was a check associated with this, but Sir Justin had a vision of St Sophia and St Sigobert side-by-side, with the host of martyrs behind them, who assured him that his crusade would not fail so long as the reliquary of the Martyrs of St Sigobert was not despoiled. As a result he healed, going from -2 to -1 Brawn. I also gave his player a Storyteller Certificate.