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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ovinomancer" data-source="post: 7978366" data-attributes="member: 16814">Well, said.  However, I'll take a small issue with your first sentence.  In AW, players do not have the authority to narrate consequences, but they DO have the authority to BIND how the GM narrates consequences.  This doesn't exist in D&D.Thank you, as well, for bringing up spells and magic items -- those parts of D&D that have discrete packets of rules attached.  I had, at one point, thought to talk about that but had forgotten.  As you note, spells and magic items come closest in D&D to binding GMs in resolving actions using them.  And, as you note, although I dislike the term 'karma' to describe it, these actions don't involve checks for success failure (usually) but instead have their own discrete counter rules to defeat them.  In good faith play, the deployment of a spell during an action by a character does bind the GM into either narrating through the result according to the packet or narrating a failure through one of the discrete counters.  Thus, deploying spells (and magic items) do afford the player some binding authority over the GM's narration.That being said, I think you treated well the discussion that the GM is free, in the moment, to ad hoc determine that one of those counters is present.  There is even some loose guidance, scattered throughout the editions, to do so, in dramatically appropriate moments, if it would prevent an important challenge from being too easily circumvented.  Thankfully, this guidance doesn't appear in 5e, but neither is it expressly discouraged -- it exists still under the general aegis of GM decides.  So the player declaring an action deploying a spell does gain some authority, but it's immediately eroded in that there are ways to prevent success that are entirely under the GM decides umbrella.  Ultimately, while the authority limits the ways in which success or failure can be narrated, GM decides is still the order of the day, in 5e, for success or failure.   Further eroding this is that the GM is under no requirement to explicitly explain a failure, so a player may have no good understanding of why an action failed.  This is true even in the good faith play assumption due to the nature of how secret fiction works.AW, as you note, is different, in that once dice are rolled, the outcome is absolutely binding on all participants and further will be transparently so.  AW doesn't just accomplish this via the way checks work, though, and an AW scene is usually not analogous to a D&D scene.  AW requires the GM to frame a scene into a dramatic moment with consequential outcomes.  There is no, for instance, scene in AW where you're at a junction in a dungeon (or ruin, genre adapt as you like), and the choice of great consequence is left or right.  This means (and I know you know this [USER=42582]@pemerton[/USER]), that when you play in AW, it's going to be for the marbles all the time.  This is why AW doesn't allow "no" responses from the GM except in narrow circumstances (inappropriate to genre or established fiction action declarations, frex), and why AW can allow player sided introductions more easily -- each scene directly builds on the last, but doesn't generate a wealth of small details that are easy to lose.  D&D, on the other hand, with it's strong focus on exploration, has many small decision point that may or may not build into a climax.  The nature of this exploration means there needs to be many choice points outside of a dramatic scene, and that those choice points will usually be detail determined -- is this door locked, trapped, has bad guys on the other side, etc..  This means that, in D&D, the GM does need to both deploy some kind of secret fiction to be explored AND be able to say no, usually often, to action declarations. Fundamentally, you're telling two different kinds of tales using these systems, and in different ways.  This is why I keep trying to drive at what D&D does, and how, and who has authority.  It's not an attempt to denigrate D&D -- I'm running again in a few day, so I clearly enjoy the system -- but rather to establish that D&D is, indeed, a limited game and note the limitations of it.  There's a wealth of fun inside the limitations -- a huge expanse of things you can do and stories to find -- but there are definite limits and they're closer than one might think they are.  D&D isn't terribly flexible, though.  And, that's fine, because it does D&D so very well that one can have plenty of fun without having to flex.  Honestly, PbtA games and, my favorite, BitD are even less flexible games -- Blades especially.  They have more narrow focus, but, because of that, can really dig into that focus and do it very, very well.  Even if you consider the Dungeon World vs D&D, which are very thematically similar and deal with the same tropes and concepts, the outcomes of these games are very different, entirely because of both where and how the rulesets focus.  You cannot generate a DW game in D&D, just as you cannot generate a D&D game in DW, but there will be many similarities in theme in the stories they produce.</blockquote>

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