Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="SteveC" data-source="post: 9076606" data-attributes="member: 9053">This is getting to be a pretty nuanced discussion about how to resolve actions. I find it fascinating! I am a "tell me your intent and method" person, but I want to do this in as natural a way as possible, where you just have a conversation with the GM. With that said, I think I have a couple of comments that I hope can be helpful:The most common reason for problems with the GM not resolving an action in a way that makes sense for the player comes from a misunderstanding about what the circumstances and the exact situation looked like. As the GM you have a picture of what the world looks like in your head. It is very difficult to link that up with what the players think the situation looks like without a lot of practice and group familiarity. The way I resolve that is (and I'm going to use a PbtA term here, please forgive me...) by being a fan of the characters. When a player tells me what they want their character to do, I want to translate it so that it looks as close to what they want to do in what I consider to be the actual picture of the situation. If I can't do that because it's way off, I tell them.I have played in many games (thankfully not for a long time) where you had "gotcha" moments where the GM interpreted everything literally to the point where you'd fall in a pit if you didn't mention you were looking down. That's not interesting to me in any way, and it results in characters making torturously exact statements about what they want to do that slow the game to a crawl. That was not fun.The second and related point is to assume the things the characters are good at the things they have created characters to be good at. How do you search for traps? How do you convince the prince to help you out? How do you attack the ogre? I'll be honest, I don't know the answer to any of those questions. Yes, I have some skill in all three of those areas, but I'm also not an expert in them and also not in a potentially life threatening situation.The real answer to each of those questions is "the best way my character thinks they can do it." But at the same time, we play rpgs to be more interactive than just saying that every time we need a decision (followed by a die roll). If a player proceeds tell me they are taking an odd approach to something their character is good at, I'll tend to roll with it and see what kind of a check they give. Maybe being rude to the prince can work out. I know someone who's amazingly persuasive and I've seen stranger things work in real life. And also, maybe precisely measuring out the weight of a statue and swapping it with a bag of the same weight won't work (just ask Indy about that).Those are some ideas I've brought to running games like D&D or Pathfinder from the world of more narrative games.</blockquote>

Verification