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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8136284" data-attributes="member: 42582">This makes no sense to me.If I walk randomly through a town, drawing a map as I go to record where I've travelled, it makes no sense to say that I undertook a walk by following a map. Rather, I undertook a walk and in the process I created a map.By fairly close analogy: if me and my Burning Wheel GM play some BW, and at the end of the session, or of the campaign, have a record of all that happened as a result of play, it doesn't follow that play was led by that record. That record was created out of the process of play."Plot hook" is not a synonym for "interesting thing in the fiction". No one disputes, as far as I know, that the GM has a job to present interesting things. That doesn't mean the GM has a job to present "hooks" that lead into "plots" that the GM is the sole or primary author of.This makes no sense to me either. The BW mechanic and the Traveller mechanic are almost exactly the same:In Classic Traveller: I'm looking for someone who will sell me illegal guns at a good price. Referee: OK, if you make a Streetwise check at <insert throw required> you find such a person. In Burning Wheel: Is Evard's tower around here? GM: If you make a Great Masters-wise check at <insert number of successes required> then yes, it's around here.Before the action declaration, the existence of someone who will sell me illegal guns at a good price or of Evard's tower is a mere genre-appropriate possibility (we know it's genre-appropriate in Traveller because the game includes worlds with specified law levels and includes characters with abilities like Admin and Bribery and Streetwise; we know it's genre-appropriate in Burning Wheel because the game includes characters who are sorcerers and summoners and witches and augurs and they have abilities like Great Masters-wise.)And if the action is successful, in both cases it is established that there is, in a concrete sense known to the character, a person here who will sell illegal guns at a good price or Evard's tower in this general vicinity.The difference is on failure narration: Burning Wheel gives very clear guidelines and principles for the narration of failure; Traveller doesn't, leaving it all as an exercise for the GM to work out.This doesn't make sense to me either.The Traveller or Burning Wheel action declarations could instead be handled in the following way:(1) Player asks the question: can I find someone who will sell illegal guns for a good price? or Isn't Evard's tower around here? (2) The GM makes a secret roll to determine whether or not there is such a gun seller, or such a tower. (3) The player then makes a check to determine if his/her PC knows the answer. (4) If the player's check succeeds, the GM tells her the answer.(This is in fact pretty close to how Classic Traveller handles a hunt for branches of the Psionics Institute - they are not handled just by application of the general Streetwise rules.)That would not change the range of possible outcomes in play, though it would change some of the play dynamics - eg if the player rolls a success but the GM says you can't find it, the player knows that that is due to the GM's secret roll, and so knows her failure reflects knowledge on the part of her PC; whereas if the player rolls a failure and the GM says you can't find it, the player doesn't know what the GM's secret roll said.That change in dynamics is much the same as what one gets in systems that don't determine the issue of shield-blockage by reading it off a single roll by the attacking character. Eg in RuneQuest we can tell whether the PC's miss is due to being blocked by the Orc's shield (if the player rolls a hit and the GM rolls a successful shield parry for the orc) or perhaps for some other reason (if the player fails the roll to hit).So anyway, what doesn't make sense to me is that you assert that in one case it makes no difference to who rolls the randomiser, but in the other your complaint only makes sense if that does matter.I also don't really follow your remark about significant setting details. If my PC is fighting an Orc, and kills it because it fails to block with its shield, that failure seems pretty significant! And conversely, had it blocked and therefore lived to try and kill me, the significance would have been driven home even more! Evard's tower is also significant, but I don't see why it is more significant. Both get their significance from the fact that the player cares about them as elements of the shared fiction.Well, I personally think the BW game I play in is a good game. The demon seemed to be connected to Evard. After some pretty demanding exchanges, it fled the battle (Thurgon doesn't know much about demons, but conjectures that this may be due to the conditions or constraints of its summoning). It hasn't turned up again, so I don't know what that connection was. I don't know what the GM had or has in mind for it.Burning Wheel doesn't use random encounters as a device, so that possibility doesn't need to be considered.That's not really true.Robin Laws has some sample adventures in his Narrator's Book for HeroWars. They are not presented anything like H3 Pyramid of Shadows. One difference is that they don't prescript what the players have their PCs do.Greg Stafford has many Episodes in the Prince Valiant rulebook. They present situations - all standard knightly stuff - but likewise don't prescript what the players have their PCs do. The Episode Book for Prince Valiant, which is much more recent than Stafford's book, is interesting in this context because some of the Episodes it contains are similar to Stafford's in design (eg the Bone Laird episode that I mentioned upthread) and others are much closer to H3 and hence need a reasonable amount of work to be useful (eg Mark Rein*Hagen's episode). So it is a concrete illustration of the quite different ways that GM-side prep can be undertaken.</blockquote>

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