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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 8727441" data-attributes="member: 4937">We're probably going to have to agree to disagree.  As a GM from personal experience I know which one gives me more control over the narrative, and as I speaking from personal anecdote and experience no amount of argument on your part is going to convince me my own experience didn't happen.But in an effort to not leave it there, I'll try to make a couple of arguments as to why you are wrong.1) Rulings are public and "fudging the fiction" isn't.  This is a very powerful advantage that altering the fiction has over rulings if my intention is to maintain control over the narrative.  Whenever you publicly usurp player agency you are risking player revolt and at the very least player dissatisfaction.  You really can't afford to offer up many unfair rulings without completely losing player trust.  But you can definitely fudge the fiction as much as you want and if you aren't stupid about it the players will be none the wiser.  This is huge advantage in power level compared to rulings because I can wield the power and not be challenged on it.2) Most rulings by a good GM don't actually assert much or any sort of force over the fiction.  A lot of my rulings come down to, if you boil it down to the essentials, "The rules are vague here, flip a coin."  Leaving the result up to a fortune check is not nearly as powerful of control over the narrative as altering the fiction.  At most a ruling says, "No." to a player proposition, but again, it's a public "No" and you have to justify it in a way you don't have to justify 4 new orcs appearing from a previously unseen room to join the fight.  The only way to "check" the integrity of that is to look at my notes, and that's generally something considered out of bounds.3) Umbran said there was no way to measure fiat and strictly speaking he's right, but I think we could as D&D players measure fiat by analogy to PC spell use.  If the GM's usurpation of the narrative were a spell being used by a player to assert force over the fiction, what level spell would it be?  Like what level would you assign to a spell that was trying to do the same thing like add hit points to a target or increase the DC of a roll or summon 8 new orcs or create an entirely new previously not there passageway complete with an autolocking door that closes behind the villain as he runs away.  I think if you look at it like that with a humorous but reasoned eye you'll see on the whole just how much more narrative force you are asserting as a GM over the game when you create fiction than when you make a ruling.  Most rulings effectively only slightly alter the odds of success of a proposition, and as I said don't necessarily involve any attempt to gain narrative control at all.  All alterations of the fiction are attempts to gain narrative control.It's not necessarily against the rules to give a creature more hit points.  If I adjust the griffins hit points from 40 to 60 on the fly, that's still probably going to be within the range of normal hit points for a griffin.  However, adjusting the hit points of a monster whose hit points had be previously secretly established is not a ruling at all.  It it is however taking control of the fiction.</blockquote>

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