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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9471940" data-attributes="member: 42582">Playing White Plume Mountain or Tomb of Horrors, using classic D&D rules, is a little bit like doing a crossword puzzle.Playing Burning Wheel is nothing like doing a crossword puzzle. I've never played Ironsworn, but I am guessing that the same is true of it.So I've actually run a game in which a player looked for a lost treasure: the Falcon's Claw, a nickel-silver mace that (as per player-authored backstory) had been abandoned in the tower where the PC had been apprenticed to his older brother, when that tower was abandoned by them after being assaulted by Orcs (to re-iterate, this was all part of player-authored backstory: events in the life of the character that occurred before the character entered play as the player's PC).The PC had returned to the (now ruined) tower. And the player declared that he was looking through the ruins, hoping to find the Falcon's Claw. As per the rules of the game, because something was at stake in relation to the player's priorities for his PCs (the whole thing being intimately connected to his past with his bother) this called for a Scavenging test. I, as GM, set the obstacle in accordance with the rules of the game. The dice were rolled, and the test failed. Therefore the declared intent did not come to pass, and I as GM had to narrate something else instead. What I narrated was that, rather than the Falcon's Claw, what the PC found in the ruins was a stand of cursed Black Arrows that (apparently) his brother had been working on when the Orcs assaulted.The significance of this was that it seemed to reveal that his brother was evil before becoming possessed by a Balrog, rather than evil because he was possessed by a Balrog. Thus, it spoke to the player's priorities for his PC but also presented things in a new and unhappy light.Notice how what I've described is not like any of your examples 1, 2 or 3.</blockquote>

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