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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7571314" data-attributes="member: 42582">This goes right back to the issue    [MENTION=85870]innerdude[/MENTION] was concerned with in the OP on the other thread, namely how do framing, player-chosen stakes, and adjudication/resolution interact? And as    [MENTION=99817]chaochou[/MENTION] noted, we can't talk about these things meaningfully without attending to differences between systems.Upthread,    [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION] and    [MENTION=16814]Ovinomancer[/MENTION], in reply to    [MENTION=6972053]Numidius[/MENTION], explored this in the context of Dungeon World. Their point was that, although in DW all backstory authority rests with the GM, the principles of the game oblige the GM (i) to have regard to player-chosen stakes in (ii) adjudication - eg establishing the outcomes of an attempt to Spout Lore or Discern Realities - and (iii) framing. In respect of the lattermost, the GM is obliged to build on the fiction that was established via adjudication. Thus (i) feeds into (ii) feeds into (iii), and so even though players don't have backstory authority, their choices as to what matters - looking for secret doors, swearing oaths to drive foes away in terror, whatever it might be - ought to feed directly into the GM's authorship of the shared fiction.It would be incredibly bad DW GMing to simply frame the PC who has sworn the terror oath into a conflict with a fear-immune death knight, full stop and end of story. Such a thing might be one way of the GM establishing adverse consequences for failed checks; but in that case it wouldn't come from nowhere, and wouldn't be a case simply of GM decides.Other RPGs take different approaches to content introduction, which affects what can feasibly be put at stake in those games. In Classic Traveller - which as I have said is a <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?605171-Classic-Traveller-a-dice-driven-game" target="_blank">dice-driven game</a> - every time the PC enter or leave a system in their starship, a check for a starship encounter has to be made. This is determined by rolling on a table, but as the rules say (Book 2 original ed, p 36), "This result may, and should, be superseded by the referee in specific situations, especially if a newly entered system is in military or civil turmoil, or involves other circumstances." Ie the referee is expected to have regard to the fiction in determining starship encounters.This means that if you're playing Traveller by the rules, then it won't support a player making an encounter with some specific sort of ship a matter of significance. In fact, it works best when what the players care about, in the play of their PCs is something that can be furthered, built upon or otherwise played with whatever sort of starship might be encountered. Thankfully, the overall orientation of the game, and the implicit backstory of an Imperium loosely ruling a confederation of highly-varied but often noble-ruled worlds, tends to make this fairly easy.D&D is, proceduarlly, very relaxed about content-introduction except perhaps in its most austere, dungeon-crawling, wandering-monster table form: but in this latter case it is highly random and (in my experience) doesn't make integration of thematic focus fairly easy in the way that Traveller does. For instance, the game presents many types of PCs who might swear all sorts of oaths that orient them in particular ways to particlar foes (fighters, paladins, rangers, clerics, monks, even druids and perhaps even assassins) but the random tables won't make it easy for these oaths to play out in any narratively satisfying way; and if its Gm decides then it's all on the GM to handle these aspects of content introduction. The possibilities of unsatisfactory play experiences in either case aren't addressed at all by saying "It's OK to fail".</blockquote>

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