But, for example, telling someone what the emotional state of their character is results in a massive red flag for some people. Bram the Brave is never frightened by anything! Just ask Joe, the player. Now, I think that fear and our reactions to certain situations is pretty much baked into us and is healthy. Unless Bram is abnormal, there are times when they should be frightened. Doesn't mean they won't still do what they need to. I'm reminded of the difference between bravery and courage, bravery is being too stupid to be afraid and courage is doing it anyway. But it's really not my place to tell Joe that their PC is frightened, it's his character and fantasy not mine. Maybe they've based their PC on a fictional character, maybe it's just his way dealing with some real life issues.
So here you indicate a "massive red flag for some people".
I'm a person for whom a
massive red flag would be a GM insisting that they are the only participant in the game with a true conception of the setting and the shared fiction.
It just feels like something that could imbalance the game if it was limited to clerics (or warlocks I suppose) which is why I was curious. If a cleric can always be calling in favors, why have a spell list?
I feel that this question has already been answered, in quite a degree of detail, by
@hawkeyefan and me (and maybe other posters too).
@hawkeyefan gave the example of sacrifice (eg of an eye, or some other valuable/meaningful thing). I gave examples, from actual play, of skill challenges with consequences.
I mean, I actually played 4e for 7+ years using the sort of approach that hawkeyefan and I have described, and it didn't cause any issues, and ritual magic didn't become obsolete - in fact, my discussions on these boards led me to think that ritual magic played a much larger role in my 4e game than it did in many other people's.
I think the idea that players will immediately jump on any possible advantage and seek to exploit it to win, while it may be relevant to you and your game, isn’t a concern for many.
Right. In my 4e game, one of the players - the ritual-using Invoker/Wizard/Divine Philosopher/Sage of Ages - took a feat that granted +2 to checks associated with rituals. I think the design intent was that "ritual" in the feat description had the technical rules meaning. The player interpreted the word as meaning anything that, in fiction, was a ritual. Given that the feat was hardly an over-powered one, I (as GM) had no quibble with the player's interpretation.
And the upshot was not that the player broke the game declaring everything his PC did to be a ritual! Rather, the upshot was that the player would explain, in scenes when magic and checks pertaining to magic came up, why something was not or was not a ritual, and what his PC was doing to interact with that magic. It significantly enhanced our play, because it made the fictional character and "reality" of magic far richer than it otherwise would have been.
Likewise for stuff involving gods and divine favours.
Do any other player characters have relationships with Freya, Thor, or Lolth? Is this bound to come up? Will whatever idea the player has line up with things relevant to those deities?
<snip>
if a player had a character that had a relationship with Lolth, and then made some kind of plea to her for aid, and it was something that Lolth may have found interesting or worthwhile, or similar to something about her... yeah, I'd try and roll with it. Incorporate what the player is trying into the game instead of saying "no, that doesn't work".
If rules change on a whim and the setting is a nebulous non-mythic mush
My experience is that taking the sort of approach that I and
@hawkeyefan have described makes the fiction, and the at-the-table experience of it,
more mythic. Players develop conceptions of who the gods are, how their characters relate to them, what their faith and values demand, etc.
I also don't accept the characterisation of "rules changing on a whim". The rules remain the same: declare you PC's action having regard to fictional position; apply the appropriate resolution procedure; establish what happens next. (And, contra
@Oofta, this is entirely consistent with the D&D play loop - the D&D play loop does
not insist that the GM is not constrained by appropriate procedures in their narration of what happens next.)
In my experience, if gods and magic and so on become part of play in the fashion that I'm describing in this post, then the players will actively participate in deciding whether or not their fictional position is such that a certain action declaration makes sense. So, as in my example above, the player whose PC has the ritualist feat will actively participate in working out whether or not the thing his PC is doing is performing a ritual. The player whose PC wants to pray to Lolth will actively participate in working out whether or not the thing they wish is the sort of thing that Lolth might be willing or able to grant. Etc.
This is why, for me (and in what might be a slight difference of perspective from
@soviet), I don't see any difference of kind between these sorts of things and the "I punch the nearest dude" example. That latter is also an example of the player helping establish the appropriate fictional position: their PC is in a tavern; it's a given that taverns have nearby dudes in them; therefore the player declares the action that makes sense to them.
that "something" was not allowing player to invent/infer/suggest for some setting element. That "something" was allowing a specific tactic to work.
For me, this is not at all how I look at or think about or experience RPGing. What I'm describing, with these examples around magic and divine favour, is not "tactics working". I'm describing how players declare actions based on their sense of fictional position.
Whether or not things work is then resolved by applying the appropriate resolution procedure.
A not-very-religious rogue suddenly dropping down and praying for a miracle? I'd need a pretty compelling narration, but I'm not outright saying no.
I mean, there's a reason we're able to speak about a Damascene conversion!
