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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8145422" data-attributes="member: 42582">Charm and dominate effectsIn the Burning Wheel game I GM, one of the PCs encountered a Dark Naga which cast Force of Will on it.Here is the spell's effect (Revised Character Burner, p 178):This spell allows the mage to implant forceful commands into the victim's mind. The words of the mage becomes thoughts - as if the victim had formulated them himself. This is a very powerful spell - the words of the sorcerer are permanently embedded and resonate against the character's personality for the rest of his days.The way we handled this, in mechanical terms, was that I required the player to rewrite one of his PC's Belief to reflect the commands of the Naga. We worked out the details together.To go back to [USER=99817]@chaochou[/USER] and [USER=16586]@Campbell[/USER]'s account of agency (setting the PC's goal) this is a limit on agency: I as GM had a significant say over what is, by default, a part of the PC build that is sacrosanct to the player.But it certainly doesn't limit the player's ability to declare actions for his PC. Those action declarations and their resolution still influenced the shared fiction in significant ways.Foraging in a desolate wastelandIf there is nothing to eat, that is part of the framing and should follow naturally from that established fiction. As [USER=82106]@AbdulAlhazred[/USER] has said, there may well be no need to make a check at all.There's a further question as to whether such a framing is a good one. That's an issue of judgement, and context.Suppose the ranger PC has a Foraging or Survival ability that is in the realm of human maximum, whether that's read off the mechanical bonus on a PC sheet (as would be the case in, say, Prince Valiant), or off the fiction and mechanics together (as would be the case in, say, 4e or Cortex+ Heroic). This is a person who can find sustenance in the harshest and most difficult circumstances. So is it good GMing to frame the wilderness as literal wasteland? Or is it better to set a difficulty that is appropriately high?Now if we're in a more gonzo fantasy game, perhaps we're not talking about an earthly desert but some barren layer of the Abyss. But then we may also be talking about a ranger who is a gonzo personality! And as AbdulAlhzard said, the outcome of a successful check might be something pretty gonzo too.</blockquote>

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