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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6812411" data-attributes="member: 42582">It can be. But the more that fiction is authored in advance, and then used - as secret backstory - to determine consequences of players' action declarations for their PCs, then the more the play dynamic moves away from that which I prefer.I don't think that (4) is a particularly large or common category, although some of the suggested random rolls to see if climbing PCs drop gear would be an example. The only person in this thread who has mentioned the version of (4) that consists in a room's occupant being rolled for randomly (eg 70% chance the orcs are sleeping, 30% chance they are down the hall brawling with the kobolds) is me, so I assume that that sort of design is not all that common these days.I don't think any actual examples of (2) have been given in this thread, have they? And are we talking about (a) pre-authoring for purposes of scene-framing, or (b) pre-authoring for purposes of narrating consequences?(a) is something that I do myself - I will think, in advance, about the way I want to open a session. But (a) is not really feasible for later events in the session, because they have to reflect what has come before, and so can't be written in advance of that actual play.(b) is what I take to have been the main focus of discussion in a thread on "fail forward". This is one way of negating player agency - for instance, if the GM has already decided that if the PCs look for the mace they won't find it, then (in my view, and given my preferences) action declarations of searching for the mace have been rendered somewhat futile. Or if the GM has already decided that the waterhole near the foothills has been fouled by a dark elf, then - in effect - the players can't fully succeed on a navigation/survival check. Again, by my lights this is a limit on player agency.A lot of instances of (b) will be the result of pre-authoring secret backstory which is then used as part of the process of adjudicating action resolution. The mace not being in the tower, for example, is an instance of secret backstory that leads to an instance of (b). Another common example might be deciding that an NPC can't be persuaded of XYZ, so that attempts at social interaction by the PCs have a pre-determined outcome (of non-cooperation).Of course, if the GM changes the notionally pre-authored consequences to reflect player action declarations for their PCs, and whether or not those checks succeed, then we don't have an instance of (2) at all. We have a version of (3).</blockquote>

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