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GM fiat - an illustration
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<blockquote data-quote="Guest&nbsp; 85555" data-source="post: 9640679"><p>No, you aren’t directing play. The players still have a say in what they do. You might tell them what is in the town when they arrive. But your description of the town will grow around their questions and all this does anyways is establish what is there. The players still act and push on things. You can tell them that Eagle Fang Karate has a sect headquarters there. But if they go and talk to sensei Lawrence and discuss forming an alliance to defeat Miyagi-Do, the players are moving things in a direction the Gm wasn’t planning. And the GMs choices do matter here. The GM needs to decide what Johnny Lawrence says in response but I would personally base that reaction on things like what the players offer, what impression they make and what Johnny currently wants. That is very different from the Gm just directing play in my opinion because so much of what he is doing is reacting and taking seriously the actions the players propose (and he is taking the goals of factions and NPCs seriously, not simply deciding based on where he wants things to go)</p><p></p><p>I use dice all the time for unknowns. But I don’t think you solve much by giving GMs orders on when this has to be. Obviously some mechanics will prompt dice rolls. But when you are GMing things like the actions of a faction, I think allowing for flexibility is very important. The dice are a tool. So how I might use them in this example is I might give Johnny an empathy and it detect roll (especially if they are being deceptive but I am unclear how good a job they did at it) to size up the players before he makes his decision if I feel he’d be on the fence. And if Johnny agreed but was suspicious, I might have him send a spy, which would mean players get regular detect against the guy’s stealth and he probably has to make survival rolls to keep up with and follow the party. If I decide Johnny wants to learn more about the players after they leave, I am probably going to assign him an information network dice pool (in this case let’s say 2d10) and roll that against a target number (and would base what I for he gets on whether the roll fails, succeeds or gets a 10 result).</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Guest 85555, post: 9640679"] No, you aren’t directing play. The players still have a say in what they do. You might tell them what is in the town when they arrive. But your description of the town will grow around their questions and all this does anyways is establish what is there. The players still act and push on things. You can tell them that Eagle Fang Karate has a sect headquarters there. But if they go and talk to sensei Lawrence and discuss forming an alliance to defeat Miyagi-Do, the players are moving things in a direction the Gm wasn’t planning. And the GMs choices do matter here. The GM needs to decide what Johnny Lawrence says in response but I would personally base that reaction on things like what the players offer, what impression they make and what Johnny currently wants. That is very different from the Gm just directing play in my opinion because so much of what he is doing is reacting and taking seriously the actions the players propose (and he is taking the goals of factions and NPCs seriously, not simply deciding based on where he wants things to go) I use dice all the time for unknowns. But I don’t think you solve much by giving GMs orders on when this has to be. Obviously some mechanics will prompt dice rolls. But when you are GMing things like the actions of a faction, I think allowing for flexibility is very important. The dice are a tool. So how I might use them in this example is I might give Johnny an empathy and it detect roll (especially if they are being deceptive but I am unclear how good a job they did at it) to size up the players before he makes his decision if I feel he’d be on the fence. And if Johnny agreed but was suspicious, I might have him send a spy, which would mean players get regular detect against the guy’s stealth and he probably has to make survival rolls to keep up with and follow the party. If I decide Johnny wants to learn more about the players after they leave, I am probably going to assign him an information network dice pool (in this case let’s say 2d10) and roll that against a target number (and would base what I for he gets on whether the roll fails, succeeds or gets a 10 result). [/QUOTE]
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