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I agree. We were using the terms differently. Ideally your situation is the utopia of gaming, high-trust environments work the best for everyone involved. Unfortunately you cant shape rules to control the high-trust/low-trust environment. You can have rules that work better or worse in the...

We are using the term narrative in very different context. Narrative control is not about good or bad stories or scenes...it is about who is controlling details of a situation or event (in this case the narrative) the player, dictate of the rules or the DM. DMs have been gauging challenges from...

This I think is kind of a problem in my opinion. Different game systems should affect the DM-player relationship as they should have different ways/means/levels of dispersing narrative control. Most the early games that came out pretty much did have the same set-up. DM controlled the world and...

In this case no one gains narrative power. Tools that halp a DM gauge better challenges do not give the DM better narrative control (he already has it) just gives him a tool to use it without killing the PCs. I think you are not using narrative control the way me and Peryton :heh: are...

Fiat is still there, but now it is under the umbrella that he said the jump is 20ft this time vs 100ft the next. DM consistency is always an important part of a game. What if the jump is downhill, the character is standing vs jumping etc. I feel the games work better by removing some of the...

It is used in Burning Wheel and works fine. It just means you approach combat differently. We havent used such measurements since we stopped playing Champions.

Sometimes they are the same thing. The Circles role in BW..it is a skill that the character purchases (kinda) but allows control over the introduction of new NPCs. A good example is in the Shadow of Yesterday. There is a goblin ability that allows you to to hide mundane objects and can...

Actually this is really giving power to the rules and neither the player or the DM. A system that allowed the players to pick their challenges would give power to the players.

I agree with what you wrote, I think you also made a good point that I believe (have no way of knowing) that they did it for gamist concerns and they ended up with some additional narrative benefits by accident. The only thing i would add is some of these decisions give power to the rules (not...

Whenever I see your name, i always think of the those freaky half-bird, half-deer things from the AD&D MM1 (they always freaked me out)

I am not sure that you are understanding his meaning of narrative control, which is about who is controlling events (and even setting) in the story. For instance. A character wants to buy a +1 sword from the shopkeeper: If the DM says the shopkeeper doesn't have any +1 swords, then the DM is...

This I agree with D&D has never been the best toolbox. Rolemaster was better at being a tool box and GURPS and HERO even moreso. On the other hand, I think most toolbox games tend to be very good at doing most things average and rarely anything poorly or anything really good.

I am not sure that this would mean.

Your points are definitely valid though I have some comments 1) a) Money becomes useful for other things and money would no longer be considered the point to adventuring (which is a good thing, IMO). The acquiring money to acquire magic items has been a huge problem with 3E b) I think if there...

This is where I think D&D made some errors. Distance is really not important but the difficulty. They would have been better off simplifying things such that the difficulty checks were LESS granular and were just easy, medium, hard, very difficult, crazy impossible etc. I think this is true for...

The only real way to define hitpoints is "The amount of damage a character can take before they are dead" Damage being defined as something that does removes hitpoints. A somewhat circular argument but the other definitions run into problems. They are a game abstraction with varying levels of...

I actually dislike when games don't have some sort of death spiral mechanics. Always been a big problem for me for D&D ever since I started playing Rolemaster (which actually didnt have death spiral mechanics but the criticals basically did the same thing). It made sense at first when D&D came...

This is probably the best definition. Some games actually even develop this into their mechanics. Shadow of Yesterday has a Harm tracker. Harm can be physical, mental or social. It is basically narrative damage, meaning that points on the Harm tracker prevent your character from being as...

I personally agree that it is more important the narrative and scenes are interesting then if you win or lose...but....i know many people who are unhappy if their plans dont go they way they wanted them to. I am not sure that issue can ever be rectified by mechanics (unless the mechanics are...