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Which sounds OK in itself, but doesn't seem to square with the idea of characters having medium-to-long-term goals or beliefs or ideals that they're working toward in the fiction (and thus which the player, if playing the character true, is working toward in play). If for example my...

Sometimes as DM, once you've got the ball rolling and the players have their PCs interacting with each other (sometimes over banalities, more often IME over planning) you just gotta sit back, put your feet up, crack open a beer, and say "If and when any action comes out of all this, please let...

Depends on one's threshold for boredom, I suppose. If the "lows" are still interesting enough then you can still have a range of lows and highs. Same as a hockey game - they're going to play three 20-minute periods no matter what; a true fan will watch the whole game including its lows, highs...

The characters in the fiction and the players at the table, in lockstep. Sure. Does every moment of play have to be exciting, though?

The poster to whom I was replying specifically said (paraphrased from memory) if there's no consequences for failure, just give them the success rather than roll for it. And yet sometimes the true consequence of failure is simply that you didn't succeed - it's the success that has consequences...

I'm fine with degrees of failure/success as long as underneath it all a fail ultimately remains a fail and a success ultimately remains a success. Often, though, it seems those who promote fail-forward are looking to mitigate the effects of a 'fail' roll such that the player still gets...

I don't mind a marginal success roll getting a complication tacked on, but the odds of failure are often already low enough there's no reason whatsoever to make outright failure even less common. The cynical side of me suggests another reason that fail-forward has become popular, but I seem to...

Why should I just give success when the fiction (or the rules) dictates success isn't guaranteed? That's why we roll: to see if they succeed. No retries in my game unless you do something differently. Even then, "nothing happens" is a common result of a failure. Yes it's frustrating. That's...

Agreed as to what you say in the literal sense, however in a lot of countries (including the one I'm in) "conservative" carries almost overwhelming political baggage and thus isn't often a term friends apply to friends.

To the two bolded bits: what's the difference? IME what players tend to best accept is that which makes reasonable sense. On a failure, in probably the majority of in-fiction situations, what makes the greatest amount of reasonable sense is that simply nothing happens or nothing changes...

Perhaps more to the point, and despite narrative games' insistence to the contrary, there is nothing wrong with "nothing happens" being the narrated result of an attempted action that fails. As in: Players: "We search the west wall for a secret door." DM: <rolls in secret knowing there's no...

The question is whether a) play is specifically intended to actively create and maintain a coherent narrative, whether pre-planned or spontaneous, or b) whether play just happens on a one-thing-leads-to-the-next basis and any coherence to the narrative really only becomes clear after the fact...

AW is the major leagues while 5e is high school ball? Yeah, like that's not going to put some noses out of joint...

You've also several times suggested that the DM could or even should adjust the threats in a given location to suit the party level, which IMO fights against the idea of a setting independent of the PCs. In an independent setting what's there is what's there, without regard to whether it's a...

Or I just let them sink or swim as oddities in a strange land. :) My current campaign started exactly this way, in faux-ancient Greece, only I ruled their first characters had to be Human; other species would (and very quickly did, even during their first adventure) become available once they...

Question: if you don't use maps then how do the players know or remember what is where in relation to what? For example, is Karnos (city) north or west of Torcha (another city), what type of terrain lies between them, and how long does it likely take to get from one to the other? Or do the...

IME a long-term campaign tends to end up being some of both: the players' decisions in a sandbox might lead them into a several-adventure storypath, after which they're back out in the sandbox and can go and-or do whatever. My current campaign is in theory a sandbox. in practice, however, the...

Except the way I read it, the question is whether a nat 1 or 20 gives the DM more latitude for narration of what happened. The player still doesn't get to narrate anything unless the DM cedes over that right.

Not quite. A nat 20 in combat could hit a range of ACs considerably beyond just "one-more than a nat 19 would hit".

Though they each didn't want to play a Viking (at least to start with), how interested were those players in playing in a Norse-based setting and culture? Maybe the setting appealed more than the actual playing of a Viking character. Or, is it possible each thought the others would all be...