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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6203045" data-attributes="member: 42582">My experience is that the participants' power is not infinite. Their desire is to have a pleasant time playing a fantasy RPG; and their power to do that is confined by such things as their knowledge of the rules, their good relationships with other players and the GM, etc.Players who (for instance) have their PCs go nuts, kill everyone in the village and rob them are no different from GMs who have 1st level PCs enter towers guarded by ancient dragons, or who declare "Rocks fall, everyone dies." They're not contributing very much to the play experience, and either leave the game or correct themselves.I'm not sure I agree with you with respect to the fiction: negotiation is sometimes seen as morally harder than combat, because it requires forsaking honour and vengeance, but I'm not sure it's actually harder.Nor am I sure that combat "succeeds reliably" in fantasy fiction. For everyone but Conan in the Conan stories, combat seems a pretty bad choice. Even in LotR, combat doesn't really succeed reliably. For instance, the Battle of Pelenor Fields was only one because Aragorn brought the Army of the Dead, and that was a diplomatic victory.As was discussed in <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?301282-Actual-play-examples-balance-between-fiction-and-mechanics" target="_blank">this thread</a>, I prefer that the choice of peaceful or violent means reflect the players' views, in their play of their PCs, as to whether or not violence is morally warranted, than that they reflect choices about mechanical efficacy within the game. (See especially around post 23.)First, I don't run modules in that way. So I see no difference between GM and module-writer - as I play, it is the GM who is taking material and ideas from the module and actually putting them into play. To put it more bluntly, if the module writer authors a crap scene or a railroad and the GM then implements that, the upshot is on the GM.As to mystery, I discussed this a bit upthread:I have also talked about my concerns around secret backstory changing the fictional positioning in ways the players can't anticipate. I'm not a big fan of this. Typical examples are things like the Chamberlain secretly hates clerics of St Cuthbert, one of the PCs is wearing a holy symbol of St Cuthbert, and so the Chamberlain is hostile for no reason that the players can easily fathom. (The example of the duke who can't be intimidated, that I discussed 5 or 10 posts back is another instance of this.)I don't regard this as completely out of bounds, but I think (i) that the presence of the secret backstory creating fictional positioning that the players are unaware should not be determinative of the scene's outcome in-and-of itself (so the Chamberlain shouldn't just walk away because of his Cuthbert-hatred); and (ii) that the players should have the chance to uncover the secret backstory, and therefore potentially change their PCs fictional positioning in response to it, via the ordinary action resolution mechanics as they are engaged in dealing with the scene (in the duke example we see the possibility of an Insight check - not the most sophisticated way there ever was of handling this sort of thing, but better than nothing).The three threads linked in the quote above give examples of secret backstory being used in play, and how I handle the balance between "big reveals" and giving the players the information they need to meaningfully and effectively engage the scene.</blockquote>

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