Search results

Doesn't Call of Cthulhu always end badly as your sanity winds down? And if I recall correctly Paranoia is also one that doesn't tend to be very open-ended.

Which is why I say that they are similar, but still distinctly different. Only the player can hope the mechanic and roll work out to change the fiction, rather than fail and potentially turn out badly instead.

With an arrow?

The character has the ability to conjecture that they may tell a way out, but the character has neither the ability nor intent to author the fiction in such a way that the fictional reality becomes what they conjecture. The player is doing that. The player isn't really acting through the...

First, a Mad Lib isn't an RPG, so it is not a railroad. Second, in an RPG if your only choice is what the DM wants to happen, you didn't contribute jack. The DM contributed it through you.

I don't understand this. The character has the fictional ability to persuade the cleric to cast the spell. The player has no ability to persuade the cleric of anything, so deciding that the player will persuade the cleric to cast the spell doesn't make sense. The player decides that the...

I think it's more about the roleplay than about the mechanics. My clerics of Mielikki and Tempus had cure spells on their lists, but if you expected them to be healbots you were going to be sorely(very sorely depending on hit point loss) mistaken. Their memorized spells represented their...

Huh. I never did that. Once I knew what AC the enemy had, I just used an acceptable(to me) amount of my base attack based on that number. It worked out well enough. :)

At least you've finally admitted that players in a traditional RPG are contributing to the shared fiction instead of being railroaded.

I get your point, but I do have to say that I've never seen or heard of a Power Attack spreadsheet. Why would power attack need a spreadsheet?

If the player is doing something the PC isn't, he is already outside the PC. In this case the player attempted to author the meaning of the runes, but the PC didn't. Those are different decision spaces. They literally cannot be the same space, because the two are making two different...

Yes. The game is the rule set. The social contract is the social construct we are agreeing to when we sit down to play the game. One of the reasons I keep them separate is that we can agree to play Vampire, D&D, or poker and the social contract will pretty much be the same no matter which...

This strikes me as the same argument folks use to say people aren't playing D&D because of some house rule or other, instead of just saying that the rule would make it not feel like D&D to them. I've played very, very few games of Monopoly where free parking didn't have money for those who land...

What information about the dungeon? You didn't give any that I saw, though as usual, I have skipped many posts in this thread and could have missed it. Did you tell us how the player was told before getting to the dungeon that the dungeon contained many runes, some of which were directions to...

A few things. First, while you might view it as disobedience, it's still due to the social contract(and how you personally view it) and not the game itself. The DM's authority in that moment is because of the social contract in agreeing to play the game where he's the DM and you are the...

So you and the other players agree, but the DM does not. You all can imagine your PC picking his nose all you want, but it doesn't happen in the GAME'S fiction. It happens in your heads, but not the game. A DM who is going to disallow the nose picking like that isn't going to allow the game to...

I saw the words, but it doesn't say how you deceive those traps and writings to get your way. Traditionally thieves were cunning, but that doesn't make cunning applicable to everything a thief did. Cunning is for social deceptions and picking pockets where deceptions made it easier to get...

I think this sort of request has nothing to do with the game. It's a social situation and the social contract requires mutual respect. If the DM is asking for quiet so that a player can speak, it's not game authority so much as the DM reminding the players of the social contract. If I ever...

I don't see players in that light, either. If they were obedient, they wouldn't say anything if I made a bad decision or was DMing in a manner that they didn't like. As I said earlier, I have 0 authority over the players, so they are not obedient to me. I do have authority over the game, but...