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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6422845" data-attributes="member: 42582">Given that the skill is expressly about human subcultures and notes that interaction with aliens is at the referee's discretion, I'm not sure this is a sound example.Well, I find the idea that a GM would ignore the rules text and decide that Streetwise checks also have a prior "GM approval/random roll" clause one of the main "GM railroading over player creativity" things. I've seen it wreck games. I've seen it sour and crush players.Traveller is a game about, among other things, taking ridiculous quantities of weapons into places where they are illegal and then hoping you don't have to use them. The Streetwise skill is part of that. It sets the tone of the game. And, as written, it allows the player to introduce new content into the shared fiction without it being the case that the player's character is the causal origin of that new content.If you want to houserule that out in your Traveller games, that's your prerogative. But player authorship, in a limited fashion, was in RPGs back in 1977.The rules are very clear. A player can roll Streetwise without his/her PC having met a contact, and without his/her PC even knowing - at that point - that a potential contact exists. The Streetwise check resolves, through one roll, both the existence of the contact and the contact's willingness to help the PC.You also haven't answered my question - when the Traveller book says that the GM has a responsibility to introduce encounters that will further the adventure, do you think it is ruling out having regard to what the players want? I think it is not. Which is to say, I think that back in 1977 it had occurred to RPG authors that the players might have input, via requests and other expressed desires, into the referee's framing of the ingame situation. Much like the beard and box examples.The difference is that the paladin's "spell" interacts with at least one NPC - the warhorse - who is therefore deemed to exist even though the paladin didn't create it.It would be analogous to a Charm Monster spell that also guarantees that a convenient monster wanders along.Which therefore must exist. Even though the paladin didn't bring it into being. So you're seriously saying the GM can unilaterallly override the player's class ability? The paladin, at 4th level, calls for a warhorse and the GM says "No, you can't have one"? That sounds like crappy GMing to me. I don't see any warrant for it in any AD&D material that I'm familiar with (maybe it's in one of the 2nd ed books that I thankfully avoided).No. Moldvay just says that the GM should design a dungeon that gives the player's a reason to adventure. Moldvay is fairly loose on player/PC terminology, and in context I think that my interpolation is a fair reading of what he meant. There is a contrast in this respect with Gygax, who takes it for granted that the PCs will be motivated by nothing more than the desire for fortune.</blockquote>

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