GM fiat - an illustration

[zakael19]

In fact @Crimson Longinus you could do everything Blades does around the P&E discussion in a D&D game. Let's talk a little bit about what Position and Effect really are, right? Position, expanded, to my understanding is: "what you risk when you take this action, given everything established within our fictional imagination about your character and the current situation." You don't have to even shorthand it down to Controlled/Risky/Desperate (although that's convenient and has recommended consequence-space tied to it in FITD games), you can just. say what it means. "Based on how you've approached this and the annoyance on his face, you can tell that a failure on this Persuasion check means he's had enough of this audience."

Effect is just being clear of how close the result will map to what the players are hoping for. Most of the time when I played D&D we didn't always have a clear goal/next step in mind - but sometimes we did. Just playing goal forward and clear in the conversation would get you a pretty similar point as well, "ok, you were hoping he'd give you a writ of passage through the Warded Gate, right? I think with your reputation on a success he's going to demand some additional payment/work/etc, but will begrudgingly sign it."

Sure, the design doesnt really have the mechanics for improving position and effect, but I'm told that "just RPing better" is the answer there most of the time. Which is definitely not GM fiat.

 

[pemerton]

Alarm creates a magical tripwire. It alerts the caster if a creature enters or touches a specific area. It lasts for 8 hours and doesn’t require concentration. It doesn’t alter the world, shift probabilities, or guarantee a specific outcome. It provides information if a defined trigger is met.

Aetherial Premonition is something else entirely. It manipulates the odds. It alters the outcome of the camp event roll (+1) and directly influences future tests (+1D to avert disaster). It’s not just awareness, it changes reality. That’s the difference between that reacts and give notice versus the active alteration of reality and fate.

This is not an accurate account of Aetherial Premonition.

Quoting from the Dungeoneer's Handbook, p 184:

The caster sets an aetherial alarm in the Otherworld to provide warning against approaching danger. . . . This spell wards a camp, house or the like. It creates the sound of a ringing bell in the event of trouble.​

The nature of the spells is very similar (not identical) to the Alarm spell - not identical, because it is not a tripwire but more like an early warning system. But the spell does not manipulate fate - contrast, say, Destiny of Heroes (p 193): "Channeling raw power into the Skein of Destiny and strumming the taut strings like a harp, the magician infuses allies with heroic power." That spell does manipulate fate, by strumming on the strings of the Skein of Destiny.

It almost sounds like a roundabout way of rolling for random encounters. Instead of saying "roll three times during the night, there's an encounter if you roll 15 or above" like you may find in a D&D game, it's more like "there's an encounter if the players fail a camping roll." If that's the case, then it sounds like they're the same thing, it just shuffles the responsibility of determining the likelihood of an encounter occurring to the player.

Yes, this is basically correct.

A proper 5e equivalent would be a spell that modifies random encounter rolls for 8 hours and gives the party advantage on checks if an encounter occurs. That’s not what Alarm does. The comparison fails, and any argument that hinges on their equivalence doesn’t hold up.

Of course, that is what Alarm could do. As I posted upthread, it's not as if D&D eschews the incorporation of mechanical effects into spell resolution:

it's not foreign for 5e D&D spells to include mechanical information. The old version of Pass Without Trace says, "A veil of shadows and silence radiates from you, masking you and your companions from detection", while the new version says "You radiate a concealing aura". But both than go on to say that this grants the masked/concealed characters a +10 bonus to DEX (Stealth) checks.

So Alarm could similarly refer to warding a place, no larger than a 20' cube, raising the DEX (Stealth) DC to sneak into the place by 10. If the NPC assassin has knowledge of magic then that can be applied via the standard skill augment rules (whatever those happen to be for the GM in question - 5e D&D is a bit ad hoc in that respect, I think). The benefits of using a ranged attack then simply get bundled into the benefits that confers on a DEX (Stealth) test, compared to attacking from melee distance.

The changes/additions I've just described wouldn't deal with the issues around timing (for casting, and for warding duration), but would deal with the issues around precise tracking of distances down to the last inch.

So why not express the spell's effect by reference to the surprise rules, initiative rules, etc? As I've just posted, it's not as if D&D 5e resolutely refuses to incorporate mechanics into its spell effect rules.

Some of these issues go all the way back to the early days of D&D. For instance, the AD&D rulebooks do not set out any clear integration of the rules for thieves moving silently or hiding in shadows, or the rules for invisibility, with the rules for surprise. Whereas the rules for rangers' stealth are (straightforwardly) integrated into the surprise rules.

AD&D integrates the surprise rules into the encounter rules via the evasion rules: a party who obtains surprise can always evade an encounter. An alternative approach, adopted by Rolemaster (and so dating back about 40 years) is to have the encounter roll modified by the party's attempts at evasion/sneaking.

No one ever - to my knowledge - described that feature of Rolemaster as "alteration of reality and fate". Doing so would be just as silly as applying that description to Aetherial Premonition. @Faolyn has understood the basic premise of the spell perfectly well.

Alarm functions meaningfully in play, not because the GM “lets it,” but because it's used in a world where time, space, and NPC behavior are structured. If a referee is making things up as they go, then yes, Alarm can be rendered meaningless. But the same is true of any tool in that kind of campaign. That’s not a problem with the spell, it’s a problem with the lack of underlying procedure.

In contrast, Torchbearer’s Aetherial Premonition encodes its effects directly into resolution mechanics. That’s a design choice, not a moral high ground.

The notion of "moral high ground" is yours, not mine. As the OP said,

Some RPGers might prefer the GM fiat-free Torchbearer 2e approach; others might prefer the approach of the Alarm spell, which puts some parameters around the GM's narration (eg the GM can't just narrate someone wandering into the warded area 4 hours after the spell is cast without also narrating that the alarm is triggered) but otherwise leaves the GM free to introduce a threat, or not, that does or does not trigger the alarm, as they see fit.

But I think the difference between the two approaches is clear.

You seem to agree that the difference between the two approaches is clear. You add that what determines what they GM might see fit is further procedures.

if the idea is "the intruders can wait 8 hours and 5 minute" as in D&D or games that have alarm-type spells that work similarly, there's a lot of other things to take into consideration. Including the intruders having no idea that there's an alarm there at all, or deciding to attack from range.

Presumably, the intruders would have to watch the caster casting the spell and make an Arcana check, and be stealthier than the entire party's passive or active Perception (or the equivalent in a different system) and continue to beat their Perceptions for the entire eight hours. That's a lot to just accept.

Presumably some potential intruders - especially assassins, mage-hunters and the like - would have the ability to detect and analyse magic. And might be very stealthy - using invisibility, pass without trace and the like.

And some assassins presumably would used ranged rather than melee attacks. And even some unprepared intruders might, simply by luck, avoid the alarm in the course of making ranged attacks (eg a manticore might do this).

I honestly don't know which one is better, mechanically. For D&D, it assumes you're rolling for random encounters. Not everyone uses them, which means a nighttime encounter is either planned or a spur-of-the-moment decision based on hopefully logical events.

Well, I think the notion of "better" doesn't have much purpose until we ask "better for what" or "better for whom"?

But as the example of Pass Without Trace, and the AD&D rules for rangers and surprise and evasion, show, it's not true that D&D always or in general eschews mechanics in favour of sheer fiction that the GM then has to adjudicate.

_For example, in Torchbearer, it is decided that the party will camp, whether a monster shows up and how the party responds is resolved by a series of rolls, and only afterward is the narrative constructed to explain what happened. In my Majestic Fantasy campaign, whether a monster shows up depends on what factions or creatures exist in the area, what they’re doing, and whether the party’s actions intersect with that, then I roll if the situation calls for uncertainty. It’s a reversal in how fiction and mechanics interact.

As you probably know, the Torchbearer roll for a camp event is modified by such things as whether or not someone is on watch, how dangerous the environs are, whether or not the camping PCs light a fire, etc.

Of well-known RPG systems, the clearest comparison to a TB2e camp check is a classic D&D wandering monster roll. There is a general rule that tells the GM when to make the roll (every N turns, where N normally equals 2 or 3 depending on version being played). If the roll is made, a table is then rolled on to see who turns up. And the GM then establishes fiction around that to make sense of the encounter.

Classic D&D wilderness encounters are similar, although the whole procedure is not quite as tight, and in Gygax's DMG is a bit more confusing in how it is presented.

_The difference between @pemerton’s view of GM fiat and mine stems from fundamentally different philosophies on how tabletop RPG campaigns should be handled.

The OP draws a distinction. On the basis of the drawing of that distinction - which you seem to agree is a real one! - you then impute a "fundamentally different philosophy" to me. But Torchbearer cites the original D&D game, Moldvay Basic and B2 Keep on the Borderlands in its bibliography. There is nothing about Aetherial Premonition, as a mechanical effect, that would be out of place in a classic D&D game: it would affect the encounter rules (as @Faolyn noted) and/or the surprise rules and (thereby) the evasion rules.

This thread, at least from the perspective of the OP, is not about "philosophies". It's about techniques.

EDITed to fix a misattributed quote.

 

[hawkeyefan]

I think the use of "GM fiat" to describe how “Living World” or “World in Motion” GMs operate can be misleading. In my experience, and that of others I know who run this style, it’s not about whims or unstructured choice.

When I update the world, I base it on a combination of three things: plausible extrapolation from prior events, the motivations and capabilities of NPCs and factions, and the dice (random tables or oracles) for uncertainty. The goal isn’t to author what’s most dramatic, but to simulate how events might logically unfold given what’s been established. It’s more like running a historical simulation than authoring a story.

The difference from clocks is that instead of a fixed clock with predefined segments, I’m working from a timeline, how the setting is described and its internal logic. The resolution is still procedural; it just isn’t formalized into a visual tool.

I think the key difference is the presence of some kind of randomizer or other input beside what the GM imagines.

“Plausibility” honestly yields such a wide range of outcomes for most cases that I don’t think it does a lot of work. It’s the GM deciding the outcome.

Now, if there’s something more to the process… a roll on a table, or a roll to see if the result is positive, negative, or some mix… then I think that’s something different.

As for Clocks and timelines… how do the timelines work? Clocks are pretty simple. What goes into your timeline process?

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I just do not think this is true, especially with several of the things having been decided beforehand instead of as reactions to what the players say. It is real but still somewhat vague limitation to the GM's decisions, just like principles in narrative games.

Except those principles are written in the book (at least in AW/GW/BitD) so they're pretty objective. Of course people are people and they don't always interpret them consistently, etc. So, of course there's variation in quality. Even good GMs now and then botch something or at least put something out there that doesn't quite end up doing what it was supposed to. I guess what I'm saying is that trad principles are much more internal to the GM than Narrativist ones are.

What you mean you don't? Wasn't one of the supposed strengths of this approach that the players could impact things via negotiations with the GM? This makes what's in GM's mind rather central!

I cannot remember the last time I really did something I'd call negotiating with the GM. I guess something a bit like that happens in specific BitD situations, like if you are wanting a Devil's Bargain you might angle for a certain thing, make some suggestions, something like that. But I don't need to bargain to get what I want, I have all sorts of character resources in most games (certainly in BitD). Anyway, say I am hoping for a trap on the safe, seems like a thing I can handle well. So, I recon in info gathering and ask the question "Is there a trap on X's safe?" The fiction can be I do a favor for the local locksmith, or whatever. I tool up with a special gear designed to deal with said trap that I've already ascertained is likely to be there. How likely do you think it is that no such trap is going to be there for my sly trap handling self to work on? I didn't negotiate, I just signaled what I wanted to see in play!

Now, when the time comes and we're way short of time, so the position is desperate, and it looks like the ghost is going to manifest from the trap, maybe I have a choice "hey, you can dump your cousin's spirit out of that bottle you collected last week and trap this ghost..." How bad do I want in that safe? That's what BitD is about! And that's what the GM's techniques and principles are designed to bring about.

That is true to all RPGs.

In trad play it is much more fruitful for me to reason like "Mike Pockette is a rat bastard of a GM, how is he going to specifically screw my character? Aha, there's going to be an anti-magic zone around the safe!" vs trying to yank out of my already incomplete knowledge of the scenario all the possibilities that are deemed by the GM to be most versimilitudinous and likely. And honestly? The later type of GMing is, IME not the one that actually produces the best trad results to start with, though overusing it is also going to be bad. Mike Pockette is a genius level GM, he knows exactly how far to go, and exactly how to get things to fall out the way he planned it.

I don't understand what you mean. Good mechanical play in Blades is to roll your best trait and avoid unnecessary rolls that might cause consequences. So the skill is inventing ways you can sell the GM getting what you want via the skills you have most dots in.

You don't have to 'sell them', you simply depict doing the things that represent those skills. Of course the GM is not going to just sit around saying "yeah, great effect!" all the time. The skill is either making sure the GM knows what kind of situations you are looking for, or finding ways to avoid your weak spots, like by having another team member do that task, or using some resource, or taking some stress, or a devil's bargain, etc. Whatever it takes. I've never yet wheedled a GM in Narrativist play. I like to think I'm at least an average good player, game-wise.

I don't see it as similar, which probably is a good thing as that is the least interesting part of D&D. (Though still fun, but only as brief interlude. I wouldn't want the whole game to work like that,)

I wouldn't draw the analogy too far, but my point is that most Narrativist play is much more structured in some sense as a game than the weird nebulous nothing that is non-combat play in a lot of trad games.

 

[zakael19]

Except those principles are written in the book (at least in AW/GW/BitD) so they're pretty objective. Of course people are people and they don't always interpret them consistently, etc. So, of course there's variation in quality. Even good GMs now and then botch something or at least put something out there that doesn't quite end up doing what it was supposed to. I guess what I'm saying is that trad principles are much more internal to the GM than Narrativist ones are.

I cannot remember the last time I really did something I'd call negotiating with the GM. I guess something a bit like that happens in specific BitD situations, like if you are wanting a Devil's Bargain you might angle for a certain thing, make some suggestions, something like that. But I don't need to bargain to get what I want, I have all sorts of character resources in most games (certainly in BitD). Anyway, say I am hoping for a trap on the safe, seems like a thing I can handle well. So, I recon in info gathering and ask the question "Is there a trap on X's safe?" The fiction can be I do a favor for the local locksmith, or whatever. I tool up with a special gear designed to deal with said trap that I've already ascertained is likely to be there. How likely do you think it is that no such trap is going to be there for my sly trap handling self to work on? I didn't negotiate, I just signaled what I wanted to see in play!

Now, when the time comes and we're way short of time, so the position is desperate, and it looks like the ghost is going to manifest from the trap, maybe I have a choice "hey, you can dump your cousin's spirit out of that bottle you collected last week and trap this ghost..." How bad do I want in that safe? That's what BitD is about! And that's what the GM's techniques and principles are designed to bring about.

In trad play it is much more fruitful for me to reason like "Mike Pockette is a rat bastard of a GM, how is he going to specifically screw my character? Aha, there's going to be an anti-magic zone around the safe!" vs trying to yank out of my already incomplete knowledge of the scenario all the possibilities that are deemed by the GM to be most versimilitudinous and likely. And honestly? The later type of GMing is, IME not the one that actually produces the best trad results to start with, though overusing it is also going to be bad. Mike Pockette is a genius level GM, he knows exactly how far to go, and exactly how to get things to fall out the way he planned it.

You don't have to 'sell them', you simply depict doing the things that represent those skills. Of course the GM is not going to just sit around saying "yeah, great effect!" all the time. The skill is either making sure the GM knows what kind of situations you are looking for, or finding ways to avoid your weak spots, like by having another team member do that task, or using some resource, or taking some stress, or a devil's bargain, etc. Whatever it takes. I've never yet wheedled a GM in Narrativist play. I like to think I'm at least an average good player, game-wise.

I wouldn't draw the analogy too far, but my point is that most Narrativist play is much more structured in some sense as a game than the weird nebulous nothing that is non-combat play in a lot of trad games.

To be clear/fair, I think I may have started the "negotiation" semantic tangent when what I meant was how a Blades crew has a ton of mechanics they can bring to bear on a situation to affect the original Position and Effect call the GM makes prior to taking up dice (and of course, Resistance afterwards).

 

[hawkeyefan]

To be clear/fair, I think I may have started the "negotiation" semantic tangent when what I meant was how a Blades crew has a ton of mechanics they can bring to bear on a situation to affect the original Position and Effect call the GM makes prior to taking up dice (and of course, Resistance afterwards).

The book also suggests two things in regard to this.

First, if you think the Position and/or Effect should be different than what the GM has said, the book tells you to suggest that to the GM. “Wait, wouldn’t this be a Controlled situation since the guard has no idea I’m there?” and similar type things.

Second, you can try to trade Position for Effect. So let’s say it’s Risky/Limited for you to Skirmish with an armored bluecoat. You say something like “what if I go all out offense - just don’t even worry about defense and put everything into one haymaker to try and take him out… is that possible?” The GM may say “sure… you can drop your position down to Desperate and then increase Effect from Limited to Standard. That’d be enough to take him out.”

I don’t think the idea of negotiation is misplaced, given these kinds of elements.

 

[zakael19]

The book also suggests two things in regard to this.

First, if you think the Position and/or Effect should be different than what the GM has said, the book tells you to suggest that to the GM. “Wait, wouldn’t this be a Controlled situation since the guard has no idea I’m there?” and similar type things.

Second, you can try to trade Position for Effect. So let’s say it’s Risky/Limited for you to Skirmish with an armored bluecoat. You say something like “what if I go all out offense - just don’t even worry about defense and put everything into one haymaker to try and take him out… is that possible?” The GM may say “sure… you can drop your position down to Desperate and then increase Effect from Limited to Standard. That’d be enough to take him out.”

I don’t think the idea of negotiation is misplaced, given these kinds of elements.

Yeah I remembered that discussion in the rules, ok - sticking with its possibly a negotiation about the fictional space where the GM has final Say.

 

[robertsconley]

Sure! I think it is effective too.

Obviously I don't have any experience with your games, so pacing and focus are things I can't comment on except in a general sense. I grew tired of the results this tended to produce IME. Long tedious slogs of play, dollhouse type play, and excessively gritty games. Realism is boring and tedious! Endlessly trying to guestimate whether the Alarm spell adequately covers all the angles the GM brewed up somewhere behind the screen got OLD. AD&D promises action adventure, but delivers one hit kills and sniffing at doors while counting torches. It was fun back in '75, magical even, but 50 years later? Just logic me some Spielbergesque action or an actual dramatic moment most every session and keep the plausibility/logic! I never ever wish again to be, for years of play, some low level munchkin that counts iron rats.

I can address the points you made, but it will take me time to write a response that is not chapter-length to address your concerns. That said, I want to address one key point right away: your comment on realism.

Setting logic does not equal realism.

Take Discworld as an example. Its setting logic is based on narrative causality. Witches fly because people believe witches fly. That belief shapes reality on the Disc. GURPS Discworld, co-authored by Terry Pratchett, lays this out on page 7:

“Most of the operation of the Disc can be derived from three basic principles: Life Force, the Power of Metaphor and Belief, and Narrative Causality.”

These principles form the internal logic of the world. It’s not grounded in how things work in our world, but it is consistent within itself. A World in Motion campaign set in Discworld would still follow these rules, it would simulate the Discworld as it works in the novels, not our world.

I’ve run World in Motion campaigns using the logic of Middle-earth (via AiME) and also in my Majestic Fantasy Realms, which draws more from medieval fantasy from settings like Harn, Ars Magica, and Chivalry & Sorcery. In those cases, realism plays a greater role, but again, only because that’s what the setting logic demands.

If I ran a Discworld campaign using World in Motion, the result would feel like players had lived in Discworld as their characters, navigating its strange physics, cultural logic, and narrative rules while having fun adventures. But here’s the catch:

It might not feel like a Terry Pratchett novel.

The style, tone, and rhythm of Pratchett’s fiction, tight pacing, layered irony, and story beats, will not emerge automatically from using World in Motion. If the group wants to feel like they’re inside a Discworld novel, with that distinct voice and story style, World in Motion may not be the best fit. That’s where narrative-focused systems shine. They’re designed to create fiction that feels like fiction.

It all comes down to the kind of experience the group wants. World in Motion creates a consistent, reactive world. Narrative-first systems focus on creating particular types of stories. Both are valid, it’s a matter of taste and intent.

I’ll follow up soon with a more complete response to the other points you raised.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

To be clear/fair, I think I may have started the "negotiation" semantic tangent when what I meant was how a Blades crew has a ton of mechanics they can bring to bear on a situation to affect the original Position and Effect call the GM makes prior to taking up dice (and of course, Resistance afterwards).

Well, in all fairness, games like BitD and AW/DW DO say something to the effect of "If you don't like the thing that the GM said, then tell them you want to change something." It isn't delved into in much detail in DW, but if the GM declares an action triggered and the rest of the table is not cool with that, they can say so and talk about it. But those are not meant to be the play loop, they're instructions for "what happens when play gets derailed, how can we fix it?" D&D traditionally just says "rule 0, GM decrees" with the understanding that being an ass GM will not get you far.

But yes, there can be an element of, say, kind of 'bidding'. Like the GM might tell you that this thing is unexpectedly hard and you have less effect, and you might say "OK, I use dynamite, how's that?"

 

[robertsconley]

A few things in response to @pemerton's latest post, especially since he is trying to shift the framing of the discussion. My response is a clear comparison between two distinct approaches to adjudication, Torchbearer's procedural-first narrative vs. my World in Motion fiction-first adjudication. @pemerton's response attempts to reframe it as a discussion of "techniques" rather than "philosophy."

This attempt at reframing is a dishonest technique in a discussion like this. Techniques don’t exist in a vacuum. When a system consistently privileges one kind of resolution structure over another, that's not just a method. It's an expression of values and assumptions about play. That’s exactly what people mean when discussing a “philosophy of play.” If we pretend this is just a toolbox discussion, we obscure what we’re trying to analyze.

1. “Aetherial Premonition doesn’t alter fate.”

It may not strum the Skein like Destiny of Heroes, but its mechanics undeniably alter the probability space while the party is camping. It reduces the odds of bad outcomes via the camp event roll, and if something dangerous still occurs, it improves the odds of mitigating that danger with +1D to avert disaster.

Now let’s look at the narrative text of the spell that @pemerton quoted:

"The caster sets an aetherial alarm in the Otherworld to provide warning against approaching danger. . . . This spell wards a camp, house or the like. It creates the sound of a ringing bell in the event of trouble."

This narrative suggests a magical early warning system, something that alerts the party when trouble is coming. But the actual mechanics do more than that. They shape what kind of trouble can arise and how hard it will be to deal with, before the danger has even been narrated. That disconnect is important. It makes no narrative sense that an alarm spell, magical or not, would lessen the severity of the danger. It warns; it doesn’t soften the blow.

If that's what the narrative is saying, I have no issue with +1D to avert disaster as a mechanical expression of readiness or preparedness. But in this case, the mechanics overreach what the fictional description supports.

Again, the key point is that mechanics shape the fictional outcome before the fiction is even established. That’s the heart of the distinction I’m making.

2. "Torchbearer’s procedures are just like classic D&D wandering monster rolls."
On the surface, yes, both involve rolling on a schedule to determine whether an encounter occurs. But the similarity ends there.

In Torchbearer, the roll happens first. Then the fiction is constructed to explain the result. The outcome is driven by mechanics, and the GM narrates backwards to fit it.

In World in Motion, the fiction comes first. Who’s nearby, what they’re doing, and why they might intersect with the PCs is already established—whether through prep notes, faction timelines, or a location-specific random table. The roll doesn’t generate the situation; it resolves uncertainty within a situation that already exists.

That’s not a cosmetic distinction. It determines where agency, coherence, and uncertainty reside in the system. In one case, the world drives the mechanics. In the other, the mechanics produce the world. That’s the fundamental difference.

3. "This is a discussion about techniques, not philosophies."
That’s a rhetorical dodge.

The way a system resolves action, what gets rolled, when, and what comes first, directly expresses its philosophy of play. If the GM waits for player action, checks world state, and then rolls, that expresses one view of how outcomes emerge. If the system rolls first and builds fiction after, that’s another. We can call them techniques all day, but pretending they don’t embody fundamentally different assumptions about what RPGs are doing is very inaccurate.

4. "D&D does include mechanical effects, so Alarm could be more like Torchbearer."
Sure, it could, but it isn't. And that's the point.

Alarm works as a reactive trigger: something must happen in the fiction to activate it. In Torchbearer, the danger emerges from a roll, and then the fiction is adjusted accordingly. The current D&D implementation puts Alarm's usefulness in the hands of the GM’s world model. Torchbearer abstracts that entirely. Again, direction of causality matters.

5. "We both agree there's a difference in approach."
That difference runs deeper than just table technique. It shapes how risk, control, and player impact are handled at the table. If I were to silently shift from a World in Motion campaign to a Torchbearer-style camp roll resolution, my players would feel that shift immediately. That’s not a matter of just “using a different rule.” It radically shifts the feel of the campaign.

Wrapping it up.

If we’re going to have an honest discussion about what these techniques produce in play, then we need to stop pretending they’re just interchangeable tools. They reflect fundamentally different answers to how RPGs should handle fiction, uncertainty, and consequence.

Furthermore, the repeated attempts to reframe this debate and nitpick language while sidestepping core points need to stop. If this conversation is going to remain productive, the evasive tactics must end. I’m well-versed in rhetoric and debate, and I will continue to call out @pemerton’s dishonest argumentative techniques when I see them. As an academic, he should know better. Frankly, it’s disappointing that after all this time, I still have to point out this pattern of behavior.