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Very good point, yeah. And of course it depends on each player -- I know that some of my players for instance love systems with advantages/disadvantages (like GURPS or FATE and such), because they use these traits and rolls as a support for their roleplay, but I know that some of my other...

But surely, even if it's "mechanically unmediated" (because the impulse is entirely player driven[1]), the mechanics play a role in both the ongoing events, and in their outcome? As the player pursue their character goals, they do so, by definition, by using the mechanics of the game. And every...

I'm not quite sure what the OP is looking for... of course a bunch of random nerds semi-improvising a story where there's no clear main protagonist and half the time they're busy looking up rules is not going to come remotely close to a carefully and professionally crafted novel, at least in...

lol yes totally! I was wondering if anybody picked up on that! :)

FATE shows up twice? Even though the first occurrence seems to specify that this is "all versions" of FATE? Funny there's a few ones I never heart about (Anima? Tormenta? Lancer? Ironsworn?). And the "joke" French game Donjon de Naheulbeuk is getting more plays than DCC? Wow. Although I don't...

I think RQ is mostly trying to model the brutal aspect of combat which you can find in many Bronze-Age treatments like Conan, 300, and so on. The side-effect is that it does indeed make some players avoid combat more than they should, but I'm not sure it can be helped. It's the same thing with...

It's not so different. Encounters are made of NPCs. We established that NPCs can (and should!) react to what's going on in the world. Therefore encounters can move. Same thing for objects: NPCs can move them. You can justify a lot of stuff in category 1 by using category 2. It's all completely...

What I understood from their posts is that they don't want the GM to rob them of their agency (which I totally agree is an important thing). If there's a choice between going left or going right, it shouldn't lead to the same thing: the players' choice should matter. But this has nothing to do...

You make it sound like I'm asking a stupid question but I don't think I am. We are talking about players who apparently get mad if the treasure chest is in the first room instead of the second room (because the book said it was the second room), but are OK if the Lich King makes an alliance with...

Yes, and that’s what I mean here: the GM is moving stuff around behind the scenes, making NPCs act in ways that aren’t necessarily mentioned in the adventure text.

I also wonder if the refusal of "moving" things also includes events. Typically for investigation-based scenarios (like in CoC, for example), the GM/scenario only prepares a bunch of NPCs, factions, and places (a restaurant, a secret cult room, etc.), but what they do after the initial scene is...

I wonder if people's head would explode if they realized that an adventure/module is occasionally written from the start explicitly with "dynamic" content: "the key will be in the second closet the PCs inspect in this room", "if they fail to get the information from the blacksmith, the GM can...

I think @hawkeyefan was mostly talking about the fact that, given a situation where the adventure is at an impasse somehow, if the choices are "stay neutral, let the PCs get out of it even if it means an hour of painfully boring and frustrating play" and "fudge a thing or two, get back to...

Of course, of course, I was just being facetious.

But some people like fudging. And it's worth trying to understand them better too :D :D

I guess it's very similar to the people who also don't like GMs fudging dice rolls behind the screen. They're less interested in being part of telling an awesome story of drama and heroics, and more interested in "beating the level", so to speak, so that they feel like they owned said drama and...

I think everybody likes consistency, and a feeling that an adventure's locations, NPCs, politics, agendas, and events all paint a believable world. That has nothing to do with whether these locations and NPCs and so on were added or changed on the fly, or whether they were in the adventure or...

I mean what's the advantage of having a human GM compared to playing the same adventure in video game or book form (if it existed). How do you even know if you have such picky players at the table? Do you typically ask "are you OK with improvisation" as part of your session 0? Or do they...

Sure, but are you finding it fun to GM if you're only allowed to stick to what the adventure book says? What's your added value, as a player at the table, in that case? Also, what if you were the one who wrote the adventure? What's the difference between you changing something 30 seconds ago vs...

Make sure they don't find out about it then :D :D :D Assuming there are players that are really as strict and picky as you make it sound, I would either recommend to make expectations clear (a sign that says "the GM is always free to improvise" sounds superfluous to me but apparently not?), or...