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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8215933" data-attributes="member: 42582">I want to pick up on the idea of creativity and connect it to what [USER=85870]@innerdude[/USER] has posted in the last couple of days.Imagine playing a fantasy RPG, with PCs who - as per the established fiction - are heroic in power. One of them wants to reforge a magic weapon (a bit like Siegfried in the eponymous opera by Wagner).Or imagine playing a fantasy RPG, with PCs who - as per the established fiction - are demigod-like in power. One of the PCs wants to seal the Abyss at the 66th layer, so that all the lower layers will "drain out" through the bottomless pit of entropy that is at the bottom of the whole thing. (This is not utterly different from the feat of magic performed by Ged at the end of The Farthest Shore.)How is this to be resolved?Or to put it another way, who has the power to establish (i) at the table, that this action declaration is "within bounds" rather than out-of-bounds, and (ii) of the fiction, that it includes the weapon being reforged or the Abyss being sealed.I think a standard response - which has its origins, I think, in Gygax's advice in his DMG on creating magical items - is that it is the GM's job to come up with a recipe or ritual, and it is the player's job to perform actions within a context broadly framed and adjudicated by the GM that establish (i) the PC possesses the necessary ingredients, and (ii) the PC then performs the appropriate steps with the ingredients. This locates all the creativity on the GM side.Another response - that I associate with 4e D&D and Cortex+ Heroic/MHRP - is that the player decides what is necessary in the fiction, and the GM maps those fictional requirements onto the mechanical framework, relying on a robust set of rules for establishing difficulties, the mechanical "oomph" of various player-side expenditures, etc.  This locates the bulk of the fiction-oriented creativity on the player side, while the GM's job is to manage the mechanics.Those two responses don't exhaust the possibilities (Burning Wheel would handle these sorts of action declarations differently from either of the above ways). But they show at least one way in which creativity doesn't contrast with system but rather is something that interacts with system in various ways.</blockquote>

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