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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hriston" data-source="post: 9335391" data-attributes="member: 6787503">Okay, then what's wrong with a feature like Criminal Contact "working" (i.e. you can send and receive messages to and from your contact) just those times when it's used by the player? To go back to Ravenloft, let's say it's established the party is in Barovia and the table agrees the means stated by the player of the criminal PC to get messages to and from their contact are supported by the fiction and don't violate the game's genre conventions (i.e. the game is not dysfunctional). What's wrong with it working under those conditions? Because that's seriously all I'm advocating for.It's unclear here which feature you're talking about, but assuming it's Criminal Contact, I don't know how you get from a statement that "you know the local messengers, corrupt caravan masters, and seedy sailors" to a requirement that those facts be established through gameplay independently of the feature, which is what you seem to be saying. You might as well also say the feature doesn't grant you "a reliable and trustworthy contact" unless you play through the process of cultivating one first. Basically, you're just looking at what the player's feature grants them and saying "no, you don't."It's not a prerequisite, so I haven't removed anything. It is part of the benefit of the feature, so you are the one removing something.It seems you were already in the process of responding to my post while I was still editing it to clarify what I meant by this. Here's the final version of my last paragraph with the parts missing from the text you quoted in bold:What I have tried to advocate for is the features working when, and only when, the players use them by making action declarations that invoke their features, as long as the described actions fall within the game's genre considerations and their PCs have the fictional positioning to take the described actions. If both conditions aren't met, something has gone wrong with the table's consensus on the established fiction and a discussion needs to take place to get everyone imagining pretty much the same thing. Hypothetical examples of dysfunctional play where this step is not being taken don't show there's anything wrong with these features.I hope that clarifies what I meant by dysfunctional.It's more nuanced than that. It rests on the precondition that a player is making a permissible action declaration only if it has the requisite fictional positioning and is within genre, which are matters of table consensus. As long as those conditions are met, there's no problem with the feature "working" when the player makes an action declaration that relies on it. No, dysfunctional play, as I believe I've now clarified, would be if there was such a disagreement at the table over whether the feature could be used appropriately to the situation, and play merely proceeded without a discussion to resolve the disagreement, so a player having one conception of the fiction, in which using the feature is appropriate, declares an action expecting a certain result, and the DM adjudicates the player's action using a different conception of the fiction in which it was not appropriate to use the feature. There's no example of functional play that fits what you've described, but I can give an example of what functional play looks like in the event of such a table disagreement. The player(s) and DM stop the game and come to an agreement on what the fiction actually entails, and then either the player's action is resolved in a way that honors their use of the feature, or the player revises their actions declaration to one that conforms to the agreed upon fiction.</blockquote>

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