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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8923644" data-attributes="member: 82106">I'm really interested in what game you think works like this. I mean, maybe there is one, but clearly there must be a bit more to it. I mean, as straight up examples of some hypothetical "there is no limit to what the players can declare" I don't see how that would be a game at all, and it would have as much role play and story/plot development as any random improv session! Bluntly, I know of no RPG whatsoever in which either of these examples even remotely resembles any description of play. Sure, if you simply added a rule to your D&D game, straight up, "the players can just decide any old thing happens if they say so" then your D&D game will turn into story time or whatever, it won't be D&D anymore. Extrapolating that into "Any game with player-side fictional authority cannot work" is just silly. In our Blades game I described my character's new rival (I killed the old one). I just straight up described who this rival is, her relationship to my character, he motives, and in a very general way what sort of abilities she has. Why is that kind of thing a problem? In that game, BitD, at various points 'complications' can arise (mechanically there are several sources of these). The GM can, and most likely will at some point, invoke my character's rival as the source of some of the complications he faces. Given that I created the NPC as my rival, he may well simply declare during some down time that a 'clock' now exists in which said rival is manifesting as a threat, and I must either resolve the clock somehow, by a DTA or a Score, or else it will advance until 'bad thing' happens. This could also be established when I ask for a devil's bargain, or even as a result of a roll of 3 or less during some action I take if it follows from the fiction. The point is, I, as a player, was completely free to construct whatever rival I felt like, only bounded by the limits of making it fit appropriately within the milieu and genre. There is no issue with this. Heck, I could have done a very similar thing in a D&D game for that matter. I mean, BitD REQUIRES you to have a rival, its a part of the game, but you could have one in D&D. I doubt it would really matter much what sort of rival a D&D player decreed for their character. There's a lot of ways it could show up in play, the details would simply depend on the nature of the rival. A high level rival might put obstacles in your PC's path indirectly (minions or whatever) while one that was on a par with the PC might literally show up and get in your face. You could even have a weaker rival that simply appeared as a foil! I'd also note that it wouldn't be THAT helpful to a BitD player to have a plot power like "have any arbitrary resource you want." I mean, sure you could definitely create certain fictional situations with 100 coin, but it wouldn't break the game at all, fundamentally.</blockquote>

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