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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8167506" data-attributes="member: 42582">I dislike GM fiat for action resolution. Framing a scene is not action resolution.And to requote myself:As I believe I already posted a way upthread, and reiterated not far at all upthread, avoiding the forest or avoiding encountering the Bone Laird and his men is not a goal of play.The orientation of play in no way resembles a traditional dungeon crawl, in which the goal is to explore and thus loot the dungeon while taking the minimum losses to encounters.The nearest analogue to XP in Prince Valiant is fame, which is earned primarily by performing "notably successful" deeds and can also be earned for doing notable things even if they don't succeed. Unlike a classic dungeon crawl, though, it doesn't really require skill as a player to earn fame, or certainly not the sort of skill that is involved in successfully taking loot from a dungeon. As long as you play your character in a way that conforms to or evokes stereotypes of romantic, Arthurian-style fantasy - anywhere between Excalibur and A Knight's tale will do - then you should find yourself earning fame for your PC.There is no point in the players trying to avoid encountering the Bone Laird. That would be the same as avoiding playing the game; it's analogue in Moldvay Basic play would be not entering the dungeon and instead returning to the village to work the fields of one's farm. (Of course, once the PCs have encountered the Bone Laird and his fellow ghosts they might try and sneak or parley past them. Two of the PCs in fact did that. But that takes place in the domain of action resolution, not scene-framing.)If the players think that the Bone Laird is a poorly-conceived situation, Prince Valiant doesn't give them the same mechanical resources as BW players have (and in relation to which I quoted the relevant principles upthread). They would have to use out-of-game devices - eg conversation - to indicate what they want to do. Of course those devices are available even if the players don't think a scenario is poorly conceived. It's precisely because the players, via out-of-game conversation, indicated that they wanted to take their order on Crusade that the action of the game has moved from Britain to France to Italy to Dacia to Anatolia and now to Cyprus. But none of that geographical change has depended upon action resolution except for one or two occasions when I've called for Brawn checks to determine whether and to what extent the characters are suffering from fatigue.</blockquote>

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