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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8155720" data-attributes="member: 42582">I'm not sure what you think follows from this point.I can say what I think follows from it: RPGing, at least in the context of a "living, breathing world" involves collectively establishing a fiction. We can also call that authorship. The game is set up so that there are competing visions of the fiction - that's a fundamental part of the design. One role of random number generation is to manage these competing visions.Roughly speaking, the players have the job of portraying and advocating for their PCs - so through their action declarations they are pushing to author fiction that runs in favour of their PCs. (Be that defeating the attacking Orc, or finding Evard's tower, or whatever else the PCs might be hoping to achieve.)The GM's role is to establish fiction - by presenting situations in which the PCs find themselves - in which achieving those goals is not guaranteed. In the fiction this manifests itself as obstacles or challenges - eg the Orc is defending itself or the location of Evard's tower is not common knowledge. Sometimes the obstacles are implicit, sometimes they are expressly called out and made a big deal of.Because of the obstacles/challenges, there is a plausible fiction in which the PCs don't get what they want. In which their declared actions fail.How do we decide which vision of the fiction becomes the "true", shared one? That's what the mechanics are for. Sometimes those mechanics are fiat mechanics: in Prince Valiant, for example, the GM may have access to special effects which allow the imposition of a consequence onto a PC without the player having a chance to prevent it - this is how, in my game, Sir Morgath became infatuated with Lady Lorette of Lothian and Toulouse. Players may also have access to fiat mechanics: many traditional D&D spells take this form, and in Prince Valiant players can gain access to special effects via Storyteller Certificates: this is how the player of Sir Gerran brought it about that Sir Gerran's wife, whom he married for political reasons, fell in love with him; and this is how Sir Morgath was able to defeat Sir Lionheart, "the greatest knight in Britain" (perhaps exaggerated, but far the superior of Sir Morgath) in a joust.But more often the mechanics involve random number generation. Depending on the details of the system, the output may be that the player gets to author in accordance with the declared action; or that the player gets partial but not full authorship; perhaps the GM may also get some partial authorship (eg "success with a complication"); in some cases, like a 6- result in AW, the GM gets full authorship ("make as hard and direct a move as you like").As I think I already mentioned upthread, different mechanics - with their varying probabilities, and their varying allocations of full or partial authorship to participants - help determine not only whose vision for the fiction is realised and to what degree, but other things like pacing, the dynamics of success vs failure, etc.I take it that you don't think that random number generation is a good way to manage these matters - ie whose vision becomes part of the fiction, pacing and "story" dynamics, and the like. Do you have a preferred method?</blockquote>

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