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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5755900" data-attributes="member: 42582">But the decision to treat it as a PC resource and not a player resource is entirely in your hands. The action economy, likewise, including opportunity and immediate actions, is a player resource and not a PC resource - if you treat it the other way round, then immersion must be impossible, and verisimilitude lost, because you'd have to immerse yourself in an absurd stop-motion, turn-based world.Has this ever happened in your game? Or anyone else's?In my game, a massively intelligent wizard has never decided to suddenly close with the fighter to attack. But the wizard (or archer, or ...) has found himself wrongfooted by the fighter, and in melee when he didn't want to be, or has tried to fall back but found no clear path and ended up next to the fighter, or . . . Again, martial dailies generally don't represent a winning tactic. They represent a luckier/cleverer move. Every attack the fighter makes, s/he intends to be a brutal strike. Once per day, the player can make his/her own luck and specify that an attack, if it hits, really will be a Brutal Strike and do 3x damage.At the metagame level - because it's about a balanced distribution of capacities.In the fiction - that's just how it plays out - no PC is ever roused by dreams of a non-warlord. It's like in HeroWars/Quest - everyone can have friends, but only those PCs with Relationship attributes will be able to get augments from those relationships.As [MENTION=3887]Mallus[/MENTION] said, and as I've said in the past - these powers often don't correspond to manoeuvres performed by the PC, but action/fate points expended by the player. They are player metagame resources, used to manipulate the fiction.Again, it's not a change in the fiction. It's a fortune-in-the-middole resolution of something as yet unsettled at the metagame level. It solidifies the fiction one way or the other.This is true if you want the game to be simulationist in its mechanics. My objection to Monte's column is that he just assumes that this is how the game should be designed without even canvassing other sorts of design. Which is just bizarre, given that he's working for a company whose flagship game uses a different, non-simulationist sort of design.Why are you interpreting what is clearly a metagame matter as if it involves ingame causation by the PC doing something?I don't see how it's stretching the fiction to say that a PC recovers because of an inspiring dream, or seeing something inspiring through half-closed eyes.And let me turn it around - how can a game like Runequest or even 3E replicate either of the scenes I mentioned - Aragorn recovering with a dream of Arwen, or a fallen fighter recovering from a wound/swoon as s/he first sees, and then hears, her leader calling upon her to get back up to her feet.</blockquote>

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