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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8928641" data-attributes="member: 42582">My assertion is that, in fact, they are functionally very different. I make this assertion based on decades of play of A&D and Rolemaster, which is - in this respect - not very different from AD&D.Here's a relevant <a href="http://www.lumpley.com/index.php/anyway/thread/456" target="_blank">quote from Vincent Baker</a>: Here's a quick resolution mechanism. 1. We each say what our characters are trying to accomplish. For instance: "My character's trying to get away." "My character's trying to shoot yours." 2. We roll dice or draw cards against one another to see which character or characters accomplish what they're trying to accomplish. For instance: "Oh no! My character doesn't get away." "Hooray! My character shoots yours." What must we establish before we roll? What our characters intend to accomplish. What does the roll decide? Whether our characters indeed accomplish what they intend. What do the rules never, ever, ever require us to say? The details of our characters' actual actions. It's like one minute both our characters are poised to act, and the next minute my character's stuck in the room and your character's shot her, but we never see my character scrambling to open the window and we never hear your character's gun go off.The player who is making the climbing check has to tell us what they are actually doing to traverse the surface (at least, assuming a model of action declaration similar to Prince Valiant or Burning Wheel or Rolemaster - declare action, which tells us which skill at what difficulty, then resolve action).The fact of the dice roll doesn't just introduce uncertainty - it makes the fiction (which underlies likely consequences of failure) salient to both declaration and resolution.Casting a fiat-type spell - Spider Climb can be an example, though sometimes it may not be (depending on further fictional details); but Rolemaster's Leaving or Long Door almost always is, as is Dimension Door - is like Vincent's example. We see the start of the scene, we see the end of the scene, we never actually see the character in action.Of course you can say, as [USER=29398]@Lanefan[/USER] does in effect in post 219, that the character-in-action is casting the spell. That's the fig leaf I mentioned. It doesn't actually require the player to engage with the fiction, to tell us anything about their character in the fiction, to put their character and the fiction into some sort of opposition that needs to be resolved.Who is the "you" here - player, or character? Obviously when we talk about scenes and how they are contextualised, we are talking about the play at the table. So we are talking about the player.For the player to "discover" something new, it must be authored by someone else. The whole point being made about playing a MU/wizard, as per my post above, is that it confers the same ability to reframe a scene as the GM would normally enjoy. So "discovery" is not apposite at all. The player is not discovering. They are stipulating. That is why it's not playing the game in the fashion in which the player who declares an action that is resolved as a Climb (or whatever) check is.I will [USER=6696971]@Manbearcat[/USER] so he can comment on whether or not I am following his thought accurately.</blockquote>

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