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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8286059" data-attributes="member: 42582">As has already been posted upthread, this is a complete red herring.For instance, any RPG in which the result of a failed check is not simply nothing happens except the falling of sandgrains through the hourglass will require someone to narrate the consequence of any such failure. That is a classic example of a GM function.It doesn't follow that the GM must, or can do nothing but, narrate the failure having regard to desired future states of the fiction.Here's a concrete example: in Classic Traveller, an attempt to perform a non-ordinary manoeuvre (such as running or jumping) while wearing a vacc suit requires a check. If the check fails, some sort of dangerous situation results. The GM has to decide what that is. When I've had to do this GMing Traveller over the past few years, I've not had regard to what would make for a good story; I've had regard to the fictional situation and hence trying to think up something that would make sense within that context. Most recently, the non-ordinary manoeuvre was a pair of PCs wearing vacc suits on the surface of an ice-world trying to break into a ship via its airlock. Neither PC had vacc suit skill. The checks failed, and the danger I narrated (as best I recall) was an inability to manage the regulation of the internal suit temperature. I know I wasn't thinking about what would make for a good story: I was just trying to think of what might go wrong in that sort of situation!The upshot was that the PCs were captured. The leader of the captors had Leader-1 skill. The system's rules for influencing NPCs say that NPCs will tend to obey the general orders of the character with the highest Leader expertise: Leader-1 is required to control a group of seven or more NPCs, while Leader-3 will allow soldiers to obey orders without hesitation. The player decided that his character would switch allegiances, to side with this NPC. That decision was driven by the fact that the NPC had Leadership ability, and that the character in question had a history of making bad choices under the influence of others. It wasn't driven by an idea of what "the story" should be.There's nothing special about what happened in the session I've just described. I think compared to the sort of play [USER=16586]@Campbell[/USER] prefers it was probably not super-engaged or engaging. I put it forward simply to illustrate that, in fact, it is possible for both GMs and players to make decisions based on a sense of fidelity to the established fiction rather than story curation.</blockquote>

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