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: 7058731" data-attributes="member: 42582">That what it means for a player to impose his/her will on the fiction. Rob Kuntz wants to change the fiction: to have the gods be freed. And it happens, because he declares actions for his PC, and Gygax (as GM) resolves them.The relevant feature for current purposes is that there is no secret backstory, no NPC with a character arc, that restores the status quo, or blocks Robilar's action, or otherwise prevents the action declaration from having the consequences its player intended it to have. The fate of the 12 gods is not "in motion" in some metaplot-driven fashion wherein Robilar's action just become a small cog in the big wheel of Gygax's authoring of the unfolding history of his campaign world.It's player-driven. (In terms of [MENTION=16586]Campbell[/MENTION]'s classification upthread, around post 70-something, it's a version of "free kriegspiel".)It shows the PCs returning to people they'd dealt with before - the duergar, some of the drow - and how developments can be handled without the GM just extrapolating behind the scenes by reference to his/her conception of how things would "naturally" unfold.So eg you can see the player of the paladin making the duergar's diabolic connection salient; then the framing of a check, to see whether or not they've learned their lesson; and how this unfolded into them switching allegiance to Levistus instead.It illustrates the workings of a "living, breathing" world without the need for the GM to do anything besides frame situations and resolve checks by reference to that framing. (Ie no secret backstory)The imp doesn't have its own action economy - in mechanical terms its a feature of the PC. Mechanically, the player is spending an AP to add +2 to a failed check (thereby making it a success). In the fiction, this takes the form of the imp speaking.</blockquote>

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