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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 7100097" data-attributes="member: 29398">And, of course, as with so many things that are designed primarily in objecton to something he went far too far the other way.I can't speak to Vincent Baker as I've not seen any of his stuff to know it, but the other two names you give - Ron Edwards and Robin Laws - are on their own enough to send me running for the hills: their main focus seems to be to try and overlay pompous ivory-tower theorizing onto an activity best done with dice or pencil in one hand and a beer in the other.This Eero Tuovinen - whose name I'd not heard until this thread - seems from what you and others have quoted here to just be another such.First off, "Sorry, there's no vessel" is a poor response.  Better would be "You look around and don't see any", to allow for there in fact being a vessel that the searcher has simply missed.That said, "choices leading to consequences [leading] to further choices" sounds like a quick way down some bizarre rabbit holes, and also at face value never allows the party to in effect go the wrong way to an eventual - or immediate - dead end.  Realism demands that sometimes the consequence(s) don't give any choices other than to retrace your steps and try something different.In the vessel example there's already other action going on, which the searcher can join in with; or the searcher can try to think up another way to catch some blood.  In the secret door example, a flat failure means only that it's down to the players (as their characters) to go and find some action elsewhere because as far as they can tell there's none here.True in all systems.  A DM using a canned module, for example, is in good faith bound to use that module as the basis for narration (e.g. look at the map, see there's a secret door right where the PCs are searching, then use the relevant game mechanics to determine success or failure in the search).And is one way of sidestepping what would otherwise have been a TPK.Sometimes these things just naturally arise out of the run of play, without any prompting or framing by the DM and without any forethought by the player.  Seems fine to me.There's a rather large gulf between:- these changes or developments being more or less constantly quasi-forced upon the characters as a central aspect of play, and - these changes or developments arising spontaneously and naturally out of play which is otherwise centered on something else (in this particular case, a wandering owlbear).See the difference?Lanefan</blockquote>

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