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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7978205" data-attributes="member: 42582">In Apocalypse World the players have no authority to narrate consequences of checks - with the handful of exceptions that I posted upthread.However, (i) there are clearly articulated principles that govern GM narration, and (ii) there are very clear rules about when the GM is expected to narrrate. Some of those rules can be player-initiated (eg making a successful check to have their PC read a situation).In the D&D case, the rules that determine when a GM is expected to narrate are less clearly stated, but are not wildly different in terms of their triggers. They tend not to have the same specificity of content as many of the AW rules (eg the player can't oblige the GM to narrate which enemy in the scene is the biggest threat), although some come close (eg use of a Wand of Enemy Detection).Even where some rules come close to AW, they are not identical. Eg in D&D the GM is typically free to specify (either expressly or perhaps notionally in his/her notes) that one particular enemy is wearing an Amulet of Proof against Scrying or has just consumed a Mind Blank potion or similar, such that even though the player has done everything right to trigger a given narration (has brought it about that his/her PC is in the right position vis-a-vis the enemy, has declared use of the Wand in circumstances where it's established in the fiction that the PC knows the password, has deducted a charge from any running tally, etc).This then leads into the question of principles. The principles that govern when it is proper or improper for a GM to make a decision like the one just described (ie that the enemy has some ability that blocks enemy detection) are pretty amorphous. Certainly for the game as a whole (eg its texts and received traditions) and even at any given table they might be pretty amorphous also. This is a special case of the general point that the principles that govern how a D&D GM should narrate consequences are far less clearly articulated than in AW,I don't feel that authority is all that helpful a framework of analysis here, in part because both AW and D&D are desgined primarily as leisure activities for friendship groups and hence rely very heavily on informal social dynamics for distributions of power. For instance, while one might say that the GM of AW has authority constrained by the stated principles in a way that itsn't the case for D&D, in the sort of informal contexts in which RPGs are typically played I don't know that texts on their own can do the sort of work that they do in (say) legal and bureaucratic contexts.What I would say is that, when one looks at the texts, the received traditions of play, and the resources that are provided to various participants, it is going to be challenging for D&D to emulate AW in the degree of constraint on the GM. I'll explain this further in relation to the Wand of Enemy Detection. In its resolution, the player-side ability that is gained when (in the fiction) a given PC has such a wand is what Jonathan Tween and Ron Edwards have called a "karma"-based ability - that is, when it is used it just works by fiat.Likewise, the Ring of Mind Shielding and similar anti-scrying devices in the fiction give rise, at the table, to karma-based resolution: they simply trump the Wand. And all these abilities - both scrying abilities and scrying defences - are a result of character fictional positioning (what items does this person have in his/her possession). So to work out whether or not the player's karma-based ability to detect enemies works, the GM has to make a decision about a NPC's fictional positioning which then determines whether or not s/he has a karma-based blocker. How can that decision be constrained by principle? How can we avoid the risk that the GM's deciion about NPC fictional positioing ends up hosing the players? (Even if the GM is well-intentioned.)I don't think we can.Contrast the AW case, where the relevant question - can I spot the most dangerous enemy? - is resolved by an open check. If the check fails, the referee is free to introduce some psychic complexity or mind twisting stuff as a complication if that fits the established fiction (AW has the world's "psychic maelstrom" as part of the setting). If the check succeeds, then one thing we know is that the most dangerous enemy didn't have any sort of illusion or anti-detection ability or the like to stop the PC learning what s/he wanted to know.This resolution framework makes it much easier to have clear principles that constrain the GM's narration.So the upshot is that I'm a little closer to Fenris-77 on terminology but I think considerably closer to Ovinomancer on the substantive issue though perhaps for slightly different reasons - namely, a close analysis of how the two systems actually work. (I've only looked at one example, but I know the mechanical structure of D&D well enough to be confident that it will generalise. The exception to that generalisation is D&D 4e, because it's skill challenge system is closer to AW in some of these key respects - to begin with, it's check-based (what Tweet and Edwards call "fortune"-based rather than karma-based.)</blockquote>

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