NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8284062" data-attributes="member: 42582">To build on my post just upthread: whether skilled play and satisfying story are in opposition, or rather are on the same side, depends on game design and techniques.In traditional D&D they are in opposition, because the players are given levers to manipulate - that include scene-framing levers and resource recovery levers - which encourage them to make decisions that undercut satisfying stories. While I don't think that RM is a full-on "skilled play" game in the Gygaxian sense, I agree with [USER=16814]@Ovinomancer[/USER] that it does exhibit this particular trait, and even more than D&D encourages it (because the relative benefits of nova-ing in RM are even greater than in D&D, mostly due to the way its crit rules work).If the GM then resorts to his/her control over the fiction to meet the storytelling imperatives, this tends to negate/"dishonour" the significance of the players' skilled play.On the other hand, some of those other systems I mentioned just upthread (D&D 4e; Burning Wheel) handle the tension more systematically by way of a clearer allocation of authority over different parts of the fiction. They make it much clearer that the players can't use their (PCs') resources and abilities to manage fundamentals of recovery and scene-framing; so there the GM has open authority to have regard to storytelling concerns. On the other hand, these systems also make it clearer that when players' declared actions are being resolved, it is "skilled play" - ie the working out of those action declarations via faithful and sincere application of the rules and principles - that rules the day, and no participant has any authority to block any of that by reference to storytelling concerns. A cost of those systems is that - as far as I can tell - many RPGers don't like their avowed repudiation of "naturalism" in framing scenes, establishing the parameters and the outcomes of action declaration, etc. But of course embracing that naturalism leads the OP tension to re-emerge! (As it does in 5e D&D in a way that it didn't in 4e D&D.)A system that is even less naturalistic than Burning Wheel or 4e D&D is Marvel Heroic RP/Cortex+ Heroic: it more tightly regulates the GM's ability to introduce opposition/challenges via its use of the Doom Pool. The OP tension doesn't really arise in this system at all, because so much is dictated by the system rather than relying on participant decision-making. (The GM still has authority over recovery, via deciding when to move to another Action Scene rather than a Transition Scene; but this does not produce any tension, because there is no skilled play the players can engage in to try and manage this.) 13th Age, with its rule of to rest before 4 standard encounters, suck up a campaign loss! is also quite non-naturalistic.Again, I think the non-naturalism of these systems will be disliked by many RPGers; hence for those RPGers who like "naturalism" and dislike these more rigid procedures and allocations of authority, the OP tension will still be there.</blockquote>

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