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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8118474" data-attributes="member: 42582">[USER=6790260]@EzekielRaiden[/USER], that's a thoughtful reply.I have nothing against mechanical rigour, nor consistent fiction. But I'm not persuaded that classic D&D (4e is not an instance of classic D&D, I think almost self-evidently; DW is not an instance of D&D at all) has the relevant rigour.For instance, classic D&D modules often have encounters with NPCs in "dungeons".  Those NPCs are frequently armoured - they have to be, if their combat stats are to be mechanically adequate - in ways and contexts that would be quite incongruous in the real world. So how should they respond to armoured, and/or dirty/shabby, PCs? In my view it's very hard to extrapolate.Gygax's PHB has a full page worth of equipment lists, including a heading "Clothing", but "finery" or its equivalent appears nowhere on it. (Rather, the list breaks out four categories of footwear.)The contrast with (to pick two systems I know fairly well) Prince Valiant and Burning Wheel is very marked. Prince Valiant has an explicit category of modifiers for prestige, which are based in part on Fame (in Prince Valiant this is an amalgam of an XP number and a reputation number) and in part on fancy gear. The Burning Wheel equipment lists include a category of "finery", and in the rules commentary in the Adventure Burner/Codex, loss of or damage to finery is expressly flagged as a potentially significant event.4e's equipment list does include "Fine clothing" (6 lb, 30 gp) but there is no elaboration in the item descriptions. And 4e has the same issue as classic D&D with the ubiquity of armour in order to make the system mechanics work should combat break out.In my experience - both in play and in engaging with D&D game texts - it is very rare for issues of faith or conviction to be put into play. Gygax's DMG frames the religious fidelity of clerics in terms of adherence to norms (whether alignment norms or more specific religious norms) and commands/wishes of the deity; and their has been little change. The 4e PHB and DMG give us the precepts of deities, but don't anywhere investigate the notion of faith or conviction.The contrast here with Burning Wheel is incredibly stark. And even with our Prince Valiant game. In our 4e game there were players who tried to make the resolution of their PCs a thing in the fiction, but it is quite hard (as a GM) to make this actually count because a cleric or paladin gets his/her Nth level limited-use power regardless of conviction. It did come into play from time-to-time, as a component of fictional positioning; but I suspect (based eg on how ENworld posters responded to my accounts of those episodes of play, and on the fact that I've never seen anyone else post about anything similar) that what was happening in our game was quite atypical.Outside of the 4e context I don't really see how it would be done, because there isn't the same support for looseness of GM interpolation between these various components of fictional positioning and the general mechanical framework. (For instance: in my 4e game the paladin of the Raven Queen's unswerving conviction underpinned his use of a Religion check to determine the consequence - namely, combat advantage - of his speaking of a prayer against a wight with which he was in combat. This move from fictional positioning to mechanical process and outcome is possible because of the consistent action economy and player resource economy. No other version of D&D has these same features.)Sure, the persuade vs intimidate approach is not never relevant. But far from always - eg the reaction rules in AD&D or B/X, including their incorporation of CHA modifiers, don't draw the distinction between approaches. And this also goes to the issue of player knowledge - the same approach to play which makes acquiring knowledge via mapping highly salient does not lend itself so well to establishing whether it is better to persuade or to terrorise, and what might result from one or the other approach.Both Investigation (as you describe it here) and knowledge/academic skills are, in my view, an attempt to make a game of the sort you described in your earlier post (ie players acquire knowledge of the shared fiction and make action declarations on the basis of that) compatible with a shared fiction that has richness beyond that of the early dungeons and modules.They are essentially mechanical devices that oblige the GM to share additional fiction with the players although the players have not put their PCs into a fictional position whereby the GM would share that fiction "organically".I think this is why they are sources of controversy, because of this way they undercut the importance of fictional positioning.There's a lot going on here.Consider two contrasting real-world scenarios:(1) A group is using 5e D&D to resolve a murder mystery involving the Duchess and Baron as you describe. This requires interrogating suspects, searching areas (eg rooms in a castle or palace) that are almost infinitely more rich in their contents and context than the dungeon rooms found in Keep on the Borderlands, extrapolating from motives that are revealed only via GM narration, etc. In my view the solving of this mystery, using the 5e mechanics, is overwhelmingly dependent on GM decision-making. When does a suspect break under interrogation, or how long will s/he stonewall? How many red herring letters are there in the same folder as the one containing the revelation, and how salient are those red herrings to the players? How many people might have seen the suspect leaving the scene of the murder, and how might those people be tracked down, and how much did they notice, and how willing are they to share it?All that is under the GM's control.(2) A group is playing Apocalypse World, and the GM decides - in making a move as hard and direct as s/he likes - that one of the NPCs present in the situation has turned on (one or more of) the PCs, and so is no longer an ally and is now a traitor. There are various ways this might become known by a player - eg as a result of Reading a Charged Situation, or because of something the GM narrates when everyone looks at him/her to see what happens next.I think the players in the AW game have more control over the content and direction of play than the players in the D&D game. This is because of the differences of system. My view is that, once the fiction moves beyond some of the canonical examples I mentioned - architecture, maps, etc - D&D generally doesn't have the systems to manage  "wider scope" and more dynamic fiction (no Circles checks, nothing analogous to a BW wise check or an AW read a situation check, etc). 4e skill challenges come closer to this but even they have clear limits (eg at least canonically, there's no straightforward way for a check in a skill challenge pertaining to a PC here-and-now can generate a result of a consequence "over there" or "back then").</blockquote>

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