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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6239880" data-attributes="member: 42582">I don't think anyone has said that the wizard has such abilities within his/her exclusive purview. It's just that the wizard has a far greater and more reliable range of such abilities: for instance, compare Transmute Rock to Mud with the mundane equivalent (hammers, chisels, water and time); or Teleport to the mundane equivalent (walking); or Scryng to the mundane equivalent (walking then looking). Does it also influence whether or not the enemy makes a bad move, or leaves a careless opening? (And if the answer to this is "yes", than Come and Get It suddenly doesn't look very radical.)Minor point: isn't what counts as "snow blocking off a mountain pass" in part relative to skill (at moving through or around snow, fighting an alternative trail, etc) and endurance?Main point: the player's Streetwise or Gather Information or Dipomacy or whatever check is not causing a wizard to spring into existence. In [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION]'s example the existence of the wizard in the town had been established by the GM as part of the overall backstory. The player's roll is resolving the immediate question - is the wizard at home and inclined to buy? This difference between backstory and immediate situation is fairly important to some (not all) playstyles. When you say "we could envision" and "that would require", what parameters are you working within?For instance, I can certainly envision a game in which things "fall into place" more reliably for high level PCs: namely, D&D. In the version of D&D I play (4e) this is a function both of level and of specific skills. A skill is first and foremost a player resource: for instance, having a high Diplomacy skill (which is in part a function of level) means "When I declare Diplomatic actions for my PC, things are more likely to go right."And an alternative both to GM decision and to randomly rolling is for the player to decide (eg as part of the resolution of a successful skill roll). For instance, here is the Burning Wheel text for the Weather Sense ability (Gold edition, p 353):Unless the GM plays with strict house weather rules - I don't - the Weather Sense in essence gives the player the ability to dictate the weather. Why else would a player pick this trait unless he were concerned about having the right weather for something or other? Anyway, I say let him predict it based on the Perception obstacles below - and let his predictions come true.This text recognises both the "objective random roll approach" and the "indie" approach, and advocates for the indie approach: if the player's check succeeds, s/he gets to stipulate what the weather is in the fiction; if s/he fails then of course the weather is different from what s/he wanted. Notice that both in the rules paragraph and in my paragraph it is the player, not the PC, who is dictating the weather. For a character to dictate the weather would require some sort of weather summoning magic.There is no reason why the Survival skill in 3E (and Knowledge skills, and other similar skills) couldn't be handled this way in 3E. That would be one way of giving players of martial PCs (eg rangers, barbarians) the same sort of influence over the narration of the weather as the players of spellcaster PCs.</blockquote>

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