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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5586264" data-attributes="member: 54877">I'm saying the player because that is the default at our table, but it really isn't central to my point, and could just as easily be the DM. Or for that matter, it could be another player. What we go with in actual play is that the person who seems to have the "hot hand" in narration for the particular moment is allowed to run with it, agency be damned. Note that this cuts both ways. I roll for some kind of monster check, out in the open same as with every other roll. A player may jump in and describe what happened, if they have a good idea. OTOH, I keep a very firm hand on the decision points. The key here is that narration is fluid. The same fluidness that allows any player to take over narration, even mid-sentence, allows me to take it back when a decision point is approached. It helps that the goal of our narration is to entertain the table, rather to gain any particular advantage. No one is out to screw over a character, any character--but we don't hesitate to do so if that is where the narration takes us. Likewise, we don't hesitate to give a character an advantage, if that is what comes out of the narration. It is almost a separate reward cycle: Entertain table, get appreciation of peers, keep groove going that causes everyone to want to entertain table. (Reduce anyone to speechlessness or rolling on the floor, get an action point, automatic.) This is not improvization style narration, either. If a player narrates something that is counter to my notes for the situation, or that I had decided and acted upon earlier in the scene, then I'll stop, let them know that won't work, and someone will run with this new information.  This is getting rather far afield from the original topic, but I think it should be somewhat apparent why the 4E skill system works fairly well for us in this regard. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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