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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7086049" data-attributes="member: 42582">I'm not really interested in debating the rules and procedures of 4e with you. (1) This is not the thread for it. (2) My past experience tells me it is an unrewarding exercise.Let's suppose that you are correct, and that I have misapplied the rules of 4e. Pretend, then, that instead of telling a story about the advisor being outed, I recounted <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?530990-Into-the-North-Cortex-Plus-Heroic-Fantasy-actual-play" target="_blank">this other story</a> about how the PCs persuaded a giant chieftain to help them on their quest rather than eat them; and that, as part of that episode, the PCs had benefitted from a giant shaman advocating on their behalf (established by a player as a PC resource). That story took place in a game of Cortex+/MHRP Fantasy Hack, which does provide for finality in social resolution.If, in framing the next scene of the game, I had opened with the shaman and chieftain plotting how to capture and eat the PCs while they sleep in their beds, the players could have made exactly the same complaint: that I was wrongly ignoring their victory in the previous episode of play. And they would be right to do so.What does it even mean for a character in a fiction to have "protagonism"? Dictionary.com gives me protagonist as "the leading character, hero, or heroine of a drama or other literary work." That is not an in-fiction notion: it is a meta-notion. Protagonism is also used by some commentators on RPGs to refer to a participant role: thus, the <a href="http://-http://indie-rpgs.com/_articles/glossary.html" target="_blank">Forge provisional glossary</a> says that protagonism is "A problematic term with two possible meanings. (1) A characteristic of the main characters of stories, regardless of who produced the stories in whatever way. (2) A characteristic set of behaviors among people during role-playing, associated with Narrativist play, with a necessary unnamed equivalent in Gamist play and possibly another in Simulationist play. In the latter sense, coined by Paul Czege." That second sense also does not describe an in-fiction notion: it is a meta notion, about how certain RPG participants do their thing.I don't think the adivsor can exhibit protagonism in either sense: the NPC is, as such, not the leading character, hero or heroine of the campaign. And the GM's play of the PC cannot exhibit the characteristic behaviours of narrativist RPGing (no doubt the precise description of such behaviours is contentious, but a GM imagining the advisor to him-/herself, or narrating the advisor's actions to the players, isn't engaging in them).The difference between the player-driven and GM-driven game is who gets to determine what happens, in the fiction, if the advisor tries to reverse his defeat? If the GM is driving, then the GM does: the players' victory in the skill challenge doesn't establish anything final in respect of the fiction, as the GM can always take retries. If the players are driving, then their successes impose constraints on the content of the shared fiction.The issue has nothing to do with the powers of the advisor. It's about the powers of the participants at the table.The difference, as I've stated over probably half-a-dozen posts now, concerns who has what sort of power to determine the content of the shared fiction. The difference is pretty clearly captured by the phrases "player-driven" and "GM-driven": each phrase describes some power (to "drive" the fiction) and describes the participant who wields it.NPCs can instigate whatever they want. The advisor can blow raspberries at the PCs behind their backs, hoping that the baron will join in. The salient question is: what will become of such attempts?My answer is: the players have their victory, and so - until something takes place in the play of the game to set that back - then they are entitled to it. Hence, however hard the advisor tries, fate has decreed that he shall not get what he wants.Upthread, I gave one example of a "something" that might reopen matters settled by the skill challenge: the players set out to capture the baron's niece, and killed her in the process. This affected their relationship with the baron (he had a nervous collapse). As I said in the earlier post, this was a case of the players staking their PCs' relationship with the baron on their attempt to end the niece's murderous depredations. They took their chances, and it didn't turn out their way.Whereas, by way of contrast, the GM just deciding that all the NPCs turn on the PCs, after the players have won a skill challenge to establish the exact opposite, would be like fiating all the gold pieces recovered from Against the Giants into Fool's Gold. It would be tantamount to cheating. And it wouldn't become more acceptable just because the GM can come up with some clever ingame rationale for it (GM's can always do that; it's their stock-in-trade). The GM authoring some new fiction to undo the players' victory is not something taking place in the game to set the PCs back - self-evidently, it is just the GM authoring some new fiction that undoes the players' victory.Whether or not one enjoys playing in a fashion where the GM is bound by the players' victories, I don't think it's very mysterious how it works. It's actually pretty simple: unless something happens at the table, in the game, to reopen the matter, the GM is precluded from introducing content into the fiction that would negate the players' victories.</blockquote>

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