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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 4014472" data-attributes="member: 42582">The above statement is more-or-less self-contradictory - as your following remarks condedes:Which is to say, the GM has primary control over the narrative, by deciding what is or isn't possible in the gameworld. First, you'll note that a lot of the posters in this thread say that it's up to the GM what actions are permitted (eg by controlling or limiting class or race seleciton, magic items, spell availability, money availability, equipment availability,etc).Second, if the CHOICE involves getting NPCs involved, nearly every poster criticising Reynard also thinks that it's up to the GM to determine what NPCs there are in the world, how they respond to the PCs, whether or not they'll help, and if so how much and by what means.So the narrative control you're talking about is the players' choice of solutions from a list defined by the GM (and/or the game designers), in order to resolve a problem or challenge decided by the GM (and/or the game designers, in the case of a module), with the consequences of success or failure also decided by the GM (and/or the game designers, in the case of a module).I guess no RPG can strip away that degree of control without becoming a novel, or a railroad so blatant no one would play it.What I'm talking about is mechanics that shift the narrative control to the players in all sorts of ways that AD&D never did, and 3E does only partially. To the list I gave above, I'll add an additional feature pointed out by Reynard:*players, not the GM alone, get to determine the circumstances of adversity, and its consequences (by way of the Quest mechanics).The principal difference between Reynard and me is that he thinks these changes are bad, whereas I think they're good.That's not to say that AD&D was a bad game. But it made assumptions about play that are simply no longer true for most D&D players:*that the unit of meaningful adventure is the dungeon expedition; *hence, that getting into a hostile encounter is already a type of failure (because avoidance or ambush is the order of the day); *that players control multiple characters (PCs plus henchmen and hirelings) and thus are not de-protagonised by stun, paralysis etc of their PC *that successful expedition preperation and execution (party composition, hirellings, equipment, mapping etc, plus resolving the sort of wacky puzzles one finds in a module like White Plume Mountain) is the main skill of play; *hence, that (as Reynard notes) the GM has a special role to play, largely unmediated by game mechanics, in adjudicating the success or failure of that operational activity.Like 4e, this approach implies a setting and can produce fun play for those willing to work within those presumptions. But since about the mid-1980s (ie when AD&D started to go down a non-dungeoneering, simulationist/world-building path) they have not held very widely across the gaming community.EDIT: Apoptosis, you beat me to it on the narrative control thing! Do you have an opinion on whether my analysis of 4e, and it's difference from earlier editions, is right?Btw, the name is just my yahoo email address, which I cut and pasted when I made an account here: my real name is Patrick Emerton. And I've got no resemblance to an Peryton living or dead!It also requires players to have a lot of trust in their GM. Often that trust will be misplaced. This is why, IMO, AD&D has a unique reputation among RPGs for producing abusive GMing.</blockquote>

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