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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6200402" data-attributes="member: 42582">They may be, but this raises extra complexities. For instance, it would be fine for a player to build a PC whose principal nemesis is his vampire sister. But the player can't also insist that the sister have all the standard vampire vulnerabilities; or that the sister has only one coffin, whose location is in the family manor. The GM has the prerogative to set obstacles that the player does not anticipated, at least in my preferred style.Achieving fidelity to the player's conception while also providing a challenge is one of the challenge's of this sort of GMing. This is still not making sense to me.As GM, I say - "OK, you want to play a dragon quest, that's fine, let's roll up some 11th level PCs." You are positing that the players reply "No, we want to be 1st level dragon hunters". Even though everyone knows that D&D just doesn't work like that.I don't know what I do at that point - look for more rational players? - but we are in the realm of absurdities that TwoSix talked about upthread. The sort of game I enjoy presupposes that GM and players are on the same page as to what the game is to be about, and what sorts of fiction the mechanics support.In D&D that potential is called "being 11th level". But for some reason you are supposing that the players don't want that. This is part of why I don't really understand the example,This is confused too, for similar reasons. If I want to run a 1st level game and my players want to play and 11th level game we have a problem that has nothing to do with GM force over scene-framing, backstory or action resolution!I don't understand how you envisage this all unfolding. How have the players forced themselves into this situation? If you mean the PCs, is there some fundamental mismatch between the game the players want - one where their PCs are movers and shakers at court - and the game the GM is running? In a situation in which the GM is framing scenes which the players don't care for, or the players are trying to force their PCs into scenes that the GM does not want to run, we have a problem that is not connected to issues of authority over backstory, scene-framing and the like. We have a basic problem about the group not agreeing on what sort of fiction they want the game to involve.Here is some apposite <a href="http://www.indie-rpgs.com/archive/index.php?topic=20791.0" target="_blank">advice from Ron Edwards</a>:I think [your group's problem] has nothing at all to do with distributed authority, but rather with the group members' shared trust that situational authority [ie authority over scene framing] is going to get exerted for maximal enjoyment among everyone. If, for example, we are playing a game in which I, alone, have full situational authority, and if everyone is confident that I will use that authority to get to stuff they want (for example, taking suggestions), then all is well. . . It's not the distributed or not-distributed aspect of situational authority you're concerned with, it's your trust at the table, as a group, that your situations in the S[hared] I[maginary] S[pace] are worth anyone's time. Bluntly, you guys ought to work on that. Your imagined scenarios in which the group can't agree on what level of PCs they should be playing to play a dragon hunting game, or in which the players and GM can't agree on what sort of Chamberlain situation is interesting to engage with (the players want their PCs to be able to persuade the Chamberlain, but the GM will not frame such a scene), seem to me to exhibit similar dysfunction.I'm not sure what "linear" means here - all RPG play unfolds linearly, in time, doesn't it? But I certainly do think that what happens should reflect the focus of the moment. It shouldn't reflect someone's (especially the GM's) decision at an earlier moment. That's why Ron Edwards calls this sort of play "story now".Of course things can happen that the playes weren't expecting? Was the player in my game expecting a duergar to drop him a potion from a cleft in the roof? Were they expecting dinner with the baron to end up in a fight with their nemesis? The whole point of playing in my preferred style is to have events occur which no one was expecting. The purpose of the mechanics is to make it easy for this to happen.Saying yes is not deciding the outcome - it is agreeing with the player's choice of outcome. Deciding that a credibiity requirement for framing action resolution has been met is not deciding the outcome. It is opening the door to the participants collectively deciding the outcome via the mechanics.I am not the one who decided that the PCs would goad their nemesis into attacking them in front of the baron. The players decided that.This is what people mean when they talk about "the maths" of 4e (or a similar game). Bonuses correlate to level; the DCs on the DC chart are level-dependent. The basic design principle in 4e is to ensure a 60%-ish chance of success for a thematically suitable PC against a level-appropriate challenge.When people complain about feat taxes, or problems with the differences in skill bonuses across different builds, in 4e, they are complaining that, in practice, the build mechanics don't always deliver these promised mathematical results, and therefore cause the game's sceneframing and adjudication techniquest to break down. Those are legitimate criticisms of a game setting out to support the sort of play 4e seems to be aimed at.</blockquote>

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