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Message: <blockquote data-quote="N'raac" data-source="post: 6240641" data-attributes="member: 6681948">Emphasis added.  I don’t see how this in any way makes “weather sense” more valuable. The player can choose whenever the choice is irrelevant anyway, and if it is important, the GM will determine the weather and the roll is only to see whether the PC gets to know in advance what weather the GM has chosen.I think pemerton’s vision is that the player, with a successful roll, gets to dictate the weather, even if the GM had different weather in mind.If the character has the skill “Weather Sense”, and he gets to determine the weather only when his “Weather Sense” roll is successful, then the mechanics sure feel like the character is dictating the weather. Alternatively, we could have a “skill” completely divorced from the character, possessed by the player, which permits the player to dictate what the weather will be.  An array of such abilities, providing authorial control to the players over various aspects of the game, could easily be envisioned.We could even have both.  With a successful Dictate Weather roll and a failed Weather Sense roll, the player gets the weather desired, but the character either cannot determine the weather, or misinterprets it and predicts wrongly. A failed Dictate Weather roll and a sucessful Weather Sense roll would mean the player does not get the weather he wanted, and the character knows what the undesired weather will be.Regardless of the playstyle, if my character’s skill is determinative of the results, then the feel, to me, is that the character is influencing those results.  If a good Survival roll means there is game in the woods and a failed roll means there is not, then my character is somehow influencing whether there is game in the woods, rather than whether he is successful at finding whatever game is there.  Here again, a “player skill” that allows me as player to dictate the amount of game in the woods, which then influences the DC for any PC with Survival (more game makes it easier to locate; none means no hunt can succeed) would be preferable if the goal is to grant such control to the player.In all D&D editions to and including 3.5 (I’m not well versed in 4e), there is no such authority delegated to players.  The GM determines, based on story considerations, personal whim or random chance, the extent of game in the woods.Actually, I was initially going to say Piergeron Paladinson, but I figured I’d butcher the spelling (and I expect I did).  The point is not that Khelben overwhelms Conan because he is a spellcaster,  but that the assumptions of the Forgotten Realms are vastly different from those of Hyperborea.  Will Conan have the expected magical loot of a fighter of his level?  I expect he will not – how many magic items did he accumulate over his long career?  Would he go out and recruit an arcane and a divine spellcaster before venturing forth on a quest, or would he expect no such personage would step forward even if one were within 1,000 miles, and if they did they would likely be black-hearted villains, not trustworthy boon companions?Conan could be pretty useful as well – especially if we gear him up with standard WBL in magical items!  You’re quite correct, however – different settings result in characters that fit together poorly. A D&D character inspired by any of these would work well, but Conan the D&D Character will be quite different from Conan the Fictional Character, or Conan the RPG’s build for the character.  The setting assumptions do not match.First the martial characters cannot impact on fictional positioning, then they can and now they again suck wind. Your experience differs a lot from mine. I find characters at a level where Teleport is viable tend to rely on the Wizard providing that for everyone’s convenience, much like the Cleric is expected to stock up on healing spells, making some of the spellcaster resources party resources instead.   And, again, I’m still waiting for the actual scrying spells that allow low risk teleportation to an unknown (pre-scrying) location when we reasonably read the parameters of both spells.And, again, if it is a PC skill rolled to dictate the weather, that feels to me like the PC is dictating the weather.Perhaps I am alone in envisioning a high Diplomacy roll representing the PC having the skills to persuade others to his way of thinking, not retroactively causing them to have shared his views all along.  Perhaps.   But I doubt it!Emphasis added – thank you, as this exchange has helped me put my finger on my issue with this approach.  By having the PLAYER dictate the weather (to keep to that example) by virtue of a CHARACTER skill, I find that player and character resources and abilities are conflated, rather than distinguished.  A separate set of resources for players to control the game setting would distinguish the two.To me, Weather Sense differs from the others. It is detecting and predicting something the character cannot control. Diplomacy and Streetwise are active efforts to cause a change in the situation (persuade an NPC or ferret out information), weather sense only allows me to determine facts outside my control. Just as I might use Knowledge: Nobility to determine who I should be using my Diplomacy to persuade. My character does not feel like a highly persuasive, charismatic leader of men if the people he talks to turn out to share his views.  He feels persuasive when he is able to change those views, turning a stubborn unfriendly rival into a staunch supporter or even ally.So in Burning Wheel, the magical will also override the mundane?  I thought the whole point was leveling the playing field between spellcasters and non-spellcasters, but this seems to indicate the caster still wins because “it’s magic”.  That seems no improvement over any issue believed to exist in D&D.</blockquote>

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