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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 4035629" data-attributes="member: 2067">The issue is that for my character, this distinction does not exist, and thus in playing the role of my character, I cannot allow this distinction to exist in thier mind (or else I feel like I'm metagaming too much and it removes me from the game). This means that my character has to fear the mundane more than the epic, that a fall from a horse, to my character, is more deadly than the jaws of the great wyrm Galgathraxas, because an old country nag can succeed where Galgrathaxas has failed. This doesn't match with the expectations for a heroic game (Frodo most definately is not the same sort of hobbit as the rest of the Shire). It shatters my suspension of disbelief in an RPG when it doesn't in other media because an RPG is a game, and is thus interactive, whereas a story or a movie is passive, and thus is beyond my reach of affecting. In an RPG, there aren't really protagonists as much as there are PC's, which must succceed or fail by the rules to have any meaningful success or failure to me. And if the DM doesn't play by the rules, then it means less when my PC does. It shattered my suspension of disbelief when Aeris died, too, and that's one of the huge and frequently accurate criticisms of a lot of single-player CRPG's: they're a 30-hour long movie you press buttons to advance through. I'm not interested in gaining that at the gaming table.Because playing the game is not, for me, about narrative control. There is, essentially, no real narrative to control. The narrative is a framing device, not a goal, not a tool, it is an excuse to roll dice, not an end in and of itself, so I wouldn't request such a thing, and I'd only grudgingly consent to it in a limited degree, because it feels empty to me, devoid of meaning in a context where meaning is defined by the roll of a die, not the progress of a plot (which is what stories and movies gain meaning from, but not where D&D gains meaning from, for me). The hinge is how it happens.Does it happen because I talk with the GM in a metagame context? This is unsatisfying to me: "Can I do X? Can I do Y? Can I do Z?"Or does it happen because I roll some dice and make it happen, and the GM gives me rules by which I can do that? This is satisfying to me: "I roll X. I attack for Y. I get Z, is that enough?"The solution, for me, is to use or create a rule where this happens, not to violate the rules to force it to happen.For instance, a mechanic to gain BAB without gaining HP that is available to all players as well as NPC's would be fine. In my own games, I just largely accepted that skill at swordplay was relative. A 1st level warrior or even fighter, in comparison to 90% of the world, would be quite skilled at swordplay, though I could still buy his death by horse-fall. He wouldn't be skilled in comparison to the PC's, but do I just want him to be known as skilled (vs. the general rest of the world), or do I expect him to be trading blows with my 15th level heroes?Breaking the rules means that my confidence in the DM, and my ability to believe his world, and my trust that the game is in my hands in a way that is meanignful to me, is also fairly well broken.I'd also like to assert that this isn't about simulation for me. Indeed, it is about as purely a gamist argument as you can get: all the players obey the rules of the game at all times. The narrativist, in this case, is the one who wants to ignore the game for a good story. I'm not happy with Amber Diceless, nor am I happy with Harnworld.</blockquote>

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