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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8137072" data-attributes="member: 42582">Again, this goes back to [USER=82106]@AbdulAlhazred[/USER]'s point - that "the way things happened to be done by Gygax in the mid 1970s" is treated as a hard norm for RPG play.This is from <a href="http://lumpley.com/hardcore.html" target="_blank">Vincent Baker's blog</a>:When you're roleplaying, what you're doing is a) suggesting things that might be true in the game and then b) negotiating with the other participants to determine whether they're actually true or not. So you're sitting at the table and one player says, "[let's imagine that] an orc jumps out of the underbrush!" What has to happen before the group agrees that, indeed, an orc jumps out of the underbrush? 1. Sometimes, not much at all. The right participant said it, at an appropriate moment, and everybody else just incorporates it smoothly into their imaginary picture of the situation. "An orc! Yikes! Battlestations!" This is how it usually is for participants with high ownership of whatever they're talking about: GMs describing the weather or the noncombat actions of NPCs, players saying what their characters are wearing or thinking. 2. Sometimes, a little bit more. "Really? An orc?" "Yeppers." "Huh, an orc. Well, okay." Sometimes the suggesting participant has to defend the suggestion: "Really, an orc this far into Elfland?" "Yeah, cuz this thing about her tribe..." "Okay, I guess that makes sense." 3. Sometimes, mechanics. "An orc? Only if you make your having-an-orc-show-up roll. Throw down!" "Rawk! 57!" "Dude, orc it is!" The thing to notice here is that the mechanics serve the exact same purpose as the explanation about this thing about her tribe in point 2, which is to establish your credibility wrt the orc in question. 4. And sometimes, lots of mechanics and negotiation. Debate the likelihood of a lone orc in the underbrush way out here, make a having-an-orc-show-up roll, a having-an-orc-hide-in-the-underbrush roll, a having-the-orc-jump-out roll, argue about the modifiers for each of the rolls, get into a philosophical thing about the rules' modeling of orc-jump-out likelihood... all to establish one little thing. Wave a stick in a game store and every game you knock of the shelves will have a combat system that works like this.To undertake clear analysis we need to set aside assumptions about "what's normal" in RPGing, and look at who enjoys credibility/authority over some element of the fiction, how contests over this are resolved, etc. Eg in "skilled play" dungeon crawling, the GM has total authority over pre-play creation of fiction (ie drawing the map and writing up the key) but during play it is expected to be mediated through wandering monster checks (the "having-an-orc-show-up" roll).I think for some players its important to their experience that all of this (except for combat?) be concealed during actual play - so that eg the GM throws the wandering monster die in secret rather than taunting the players with it; or complications are just introduced by the GM through "free roleplay" rather than paced and constrained by check results. Because concealing something from X isn't very consistent with X exercising control over it, those concealment practices tend to push towards low-player-agency RPGing.</blockquote>

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