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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ahnehnois" data-source="post: 6201902" data-attributes="member: 17106">Neither did he though. We both did exactly what we were supposed to do. I stated the intentions of my character, and he adjudicated the outcome.That's true, I don't and he can. Which is right there in the DMG, and is built into the DNA of the game. A DM will generally and accurately refer to the game as "my campaign", because it is. If I wanted ownership, it'd be on me to DM and to find some players. Most weeks, I do.I don't think you can invalidate something that has no validity in the first place. If a player states his intention to attack, that's where his job begins and ends. He isn't playing the axe in his hand. The DM controls every component of that action; the physics of the axe swinging, the responsiveness of the opponent, the situational factors in between them, the dramatic implications of the outcome. The player has no right to adjudicate/dictate the outcome of the attack, the negotiation, or anything else he does.Fair enough. If I was playing, and the DM said "Hey, we're switching to this new system. It's totally abandoned any notion of the rules meaning anything, metagaming is the standard way to play, and it's loaded with problems, but all the PC classes have equal ability to influence the narrative. Who's with me?", I sure wouldn't stick around to find out what that game was.Because it's fun? To counterpoint, why would I want to play Chutes and Ladders?I find that interpretation unreasonable and unlikely. It certainly contradicts the basic notion of how NPCs work; the DM controls them just like a player controls his PC.I prefer to think of things like Diplomacy as DM tools. Without that, I'd have to make a judgment about NPC behavior based solely on the persuasiveness of the player's argument and the overall situation. Diplo gives the players the language to express their character's aptitude and proclivity, which gives me a basis for comparing different characters and scenarios. I can see how persuasive characters are relative to each other. That helps me make decisions. They're still my decisions.To me, that's what the whole d20 system was about. Used to be, you'd just take the Obscure Knowledge NWP, and it wasn't really clear what that meant. How much do you know? What do you know about? Knowledge skills make that clearer. Now, you know about nature or arcana or something, which has a clearly defined scope and you have a number that says how good you are relative to other characters and the standard DCs. None of which entitles the character to know any particular fact, regardless of his roll, it just gives the DM and the player a more descriptive medium for communicating.</blockquote>

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