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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7836833" data-attributes="member: 4937">I think we are moving on into a slightly different topic, which is, "Does the player get to adjudicate the results?"  And I think in D&D and most other fortune in the middle procedural systems and even most fortune at the end systems the answer is a definitive, "No."   I'm not a pushover.  People on the boards have this sense of my play that since I'm so accommodating to propositions that I'm relinquishing authority over adjudication, or else that because I assume so much authority by the GM that I'm hostile to player propositions and both of those views of how I run games and how I encourage newer players to run games are based on stereotypes where the players and the GM are in competition and not cooperation.   There are only a very limited number of situations where player can take over adjudication, simply because as a rule it's not fun to introduce a problem and the solution to it as well. While it can suck if a GM isn't open enough to creative solutions, if a GM is too open to creative solutions that can suck even worse. (See my discussion in the 'stunt' thread I linked to.) In most cases, you are absolutely right.  And it's very important to communicate roughly how hard something that the players propose is so that they understand what they are risking.   In a FitM game they don't have to know the full stakes, but the player should have the same understanding as their character.   If the player has pictured in their head that the broken span of the chasm is just 5' wide, and in your head it's 50' wide, the player needs to understand both what that gulf looks like to you the GM and also what sort of distance his character has reason to believe he can jump.   Yes, there might be a PC that can jump a 50' gulf, but does this PC have reasonable grounds for believing that?A really good case in point. In this case, the PC needs to understand what their character sheet means. Just how fast is a base move of 60 feet or 120 feet per round anyway? The player understands that in some sense he is supernaturally fast - a speedster. But is he fast as a Cheetah, or as fast as the Flash, and if the Flash, then which Flash - faster than a train Flash or faster than the speed of light Flash? That is part of communicating the fictional situation to the player so that he can make well informed decisions. Can the monk use his speed to create a whirlwind? Probably not. Would I allow that monk to literally run on water for a short distance as if the pool were not difficult terrain? Maybe so, give me a balance check.</blockquote>

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