NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7058288" data-attributes="member: 42582">I'm trying to summarise two hours (or more?) of play into a few sentences of description, to make a couple of general points: (1) "fail forward" is not, in general, the same thing as "success with complication"; (2) that a player-driven game is consistent with surprise, revelations, rich backstory, etc.I don't think anything about those points changes by eliding two checks into one in the narration. And I took it as given that, if the basic principles of play and GMing are things like "say 'yes' or roll the dice", "no failure offscreen", etc, then the evolution of the game's backstory is subject to further play.If you're curious about more details of the game I'm happy to post them, but it might be more productive if you ask it in the spirit of curiosity rather than in the context of arguing that I don't know how to manage stakes and consequences in a game about which you know nothing other than the handful of fragments I've posted in this thread.But even based on those fragments, I would have thought there would be enough to get a sense of what is going on with the mace: it is a nickel-silver mace that the PC was (before play actually commenced) crafting in the tower when the orcs attacked. The player had established, as one of his Beliefs (a BW PC has 3 Beliefs), that he would recover the mace. That goal was, as I have explained, enmeshed in a larger context of the PC's backstory in relation to his brother, plus the backstory of the assassin (who at that time was a PC) who had suffered terribly at the hands of the brother and had as her one unchanging Belief that she would flay him and send his soul to . . . [a bad place].As the GM it's my job to push the players on their Beliefs, to frame situations where they can be put to the test, and - when checks are failed - to narrate consequences that are failures, and that will force the players to make hard decisions. Because I'm GMing a party game, it's also my job to interweave the players' Beliefs - hence the discovery of the black arrows not only forces the player to reconsider his Belief about redeeming his brother, and not only escalates the situation between the PCs one of whom has sworn to save him while the other has sworn to kill him, but also brings in the elven ronin who wears, around his neck, the broken black arrow that slew his master (thus, in his backstory, precipitating his travels to human lands where he nevertheless is determined (as his most constant Belief) to always keep the elven ways.For all anyone at the table knows, the brother made the arrows under the coercion of some other power - perhaps the Balrog was threatening to possess the brother PC, and the only way for his older brother to keep him safe was to buy the Balrog off by supplying cursed arrows to his orc archers. Who knows? That's what "playing to find out" means.And as far as the mace is concerned, it's not just a "non magical mace". That's your description. That's not the conception of it at the table. If someone was playing a LotR-based game, in which recovery of the Red Book of Westmarch by some 4th Age hobbit was at stake, one might easily fail to capture the full scope of what is going on by referring to it as a "non-magical lorebook".</blockquote>

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