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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6113321" data-attributes="member: 42582">That seems fair to me. In some other recent posts I've started to talk about "joint creation" of the fiction. Which is (I think) gesturing in the same direction as you.I don't think that's what [MENTION=1210]the Jester[/MENTION] meant. It's not what I meant.You've framed it in ingame terms - the "I" in your sentence is spoken by the PC, talking about the PC's success or failure with the PC's actions.But narrative control isn't an ingame thing. It's a metagame thing. It's about who gets to determine the content of the shared fiction. Different rules can distribute this power in different ways among the participants. 4e does it differently from (say) 3E, or 2nd ed AD&D, and gives more of that power to the players.That has no real bearing on the ingame question of whether or not the PCs achieve their goals. It's perfectly possible to have a game with a high degree of player narrative control yet a high degree of PC failure (I've GMed a Rolemaster game that had this feature; I think quite a bit of Burning Wheel could go this way too.But only once per encounter. That is, the mechanism of limitation is different. So provided you need to trip twice per encounter, you'll still be in danger, and might even lose.There's no battle; at least not at my table. There's a distribution of roles.This.That seems fair to me.The technical term I use for your second approach (which I learned at The Forge) is "fortune in the middle" ie in the middle of the narration - your (4) captures that, because we resolve first and narrate second. The phrase I learnd from [MENTION=54877]Crazy Jerome[/MENTION] to describe your first approach is "process simulation".One rationale of fortune-in-the-middle is to give the player a bigger role in creating the fiction around their character - instead of "trying", and perhaps having the resolution make them look like a chump, we resolve first and then retrofit the narrative around that - so the reason for success or failure can be narrated afterwards, and preserve the players' authorship of his her character (eg I didn't miss becaue I suck - I missed because I'm so awesome, that I'm duelling with someone who's even more awesome than me, and therefore beat me!)You also correctly note that it can be a weakness of a fortune in the middle approach that it may not actually force us to finish off the narration, and thus the fiction becomes "gappy" and we potentially degenerate into a boardgame rather than RPG. That's why I think getting the role of keywords, p 42 etc right is pretty important. And why I think the sometimes-derided 4e battlemat is actually pretty signifcant for providing an anchor to the fiction that 4e is really responsive to (like position, terrain etc). Another technique I use, as a GM, to make sure we push through with the narration is to have the responses of the NPCs/monsters to reflect (even if it's just in their witty dialogue) the after-the-dice-roll narration of what happened.</blockquote>

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