Recent content by Xetheral

Thanks for elaborating! And it's awesome that you encountered a situation in which a timber hitch was called for. To this day I've never needed that knot in real life or in an RPG. :) I acknowledge that shaping what skill is tested is a form of risk mitigation, but on its own it's not the same...

I don't disagree with your assesment of many of the posts in this thread. My response was intended to be limited to your specific complaint that it's exhausting when GMs who favor traditional styles "outright reject" incorporating techniques to avoid "nothing happens" outcomes in their...

I'd be ok with the more-specific emphasis on preventing a game stall. I'm curious, though, if that's too specific a purpose from the perspective of the posters advocating for the adoption of fail forward techniques in traditional games? In terms of the language regarding undermining PC choices...

Rather than characterize Fail Forward as a "recommendable principle in traditional play - with a lower priority than the principle of allowing risk mitigation" (and I greatly appreciate the inclusion of that final caveat, by the way!), what would you think about recharacterizing your proposed...

Very true! But I don't think that's pertinent to my argument. A subsequent roll to avoid alerting Thoth doesn't have "nothing happens" as a possibile outcome on a failure in the first place, so there's no need to apply Fail Forward techniques to avoid such an outcome.

Your examples indeeed aren't quite what I had in mind. The archetypical situation I'm thinking of is where the players proactively strategize to advance one of their goals, and have identified one or more potential points of failure (i.e. points where the plan will likely require some sort of...

It's overly simplistic, but I'm nevertheless a fan of the general principle in modeling that similar things should be modeled similarly and different things should be modeled differently. That way the imprecision inherent in any model is less likely to map similar inputs to wildly different...

In the abstract, avoiding having "nothing happen" is a good thing because it has the decided benefit of helping prevent play bogging down. Game mechanics and/or GMing techniques that prevent a "nothing happens" outcome, however, do work at cross purposes with the players' in-character efforts...

Illusions can indeed be tricky. At my table I've expanded upon the ambiguous points and rough edges of the illusion rules as follows: "physical interaction" means personally touching the illusion (either with a body part or with an object one is wearing or holding) and automatically makes the...

I entirely agree. But that's orthogonal to my purpose in providing the example, which was to respond to @hawkeyefan's request for an example of where a DM exercising control isn't "about" the control. The DM exercising control to try to provide an experience desired by the players doesn't become...

I was responding to your request for an example of how DMs exercising control can be about something other than the control--in this case, providing an experience sought by the players. The example is just as valid regardless of your opinion on the experience sought and whether other approaches...

One example is that the DM exercising control can be "about" providing the experience their players seek. (Assuming, of course, a table with aligned playstyle preferences.) I can expand on that example from personal experience. As a player, the experience I seek is one where (among other...

Exercising control is not necessarily about control. At the most basic level, exercising control can be secondary to some other purpose, in which case exercising control is "about" whatever that purpose is. More broadly, as I pointed out previously, the concept of control is freighted with...

(Bold emphasis added in both quotations.) The answer to the bolded question above is that the connotation of "the desire for control" is unusually dependent on context. I see it as entirely reasonable and consistent for someone to espouse a preference for a DMing style that features maintaining...

Actually, it looks like I misunderstood what you meant by "trappings". Coming after your discussion of RPGs narratively tying character advancement to story, I thought you were saying that RPGs took from fiction the idea of fictional characters advancing/evolving in a fictional world, and then...