Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9866497" data-attributes="member: 42582">I enjoy a reasonable variety of procedures of play.But there is one that I tend to be hesitant about, and a related one that I actually dislike.I tend to be hesitant about a procedure of play that permits the GM to draw upon secret aspects of the fiction to declare that a player's declared action for their PC fails. A decade ago I might have even said that I dislike such procedures, but more recently I've GMed RPGs that include them, and haven't had such a visceral response.One simple example: in Mythic Bastionland, the GM marks Barriers on their map, on certain hex edges; and if the players have their PCs attempt to travel across that edge, the GM is entitled (and, generally, is required) to tell the players that their PCs can't cross the Barrier. (In the fiction, these are things like impassable cliffs/drop-offs, impenetrable forests, etc.)The way this is handled in Mythic Bastionland, (i) generally the stakes are low enough that the cost to the players of this unhappy revelation is not too brutal, and (ii) it feeds into the hex-exploration aspect of the game, which is a central feature of the game play.I do think that, if a game is going to feature this sort of thing, it needs to be feasible for the players to obtain the relevant information (thus rendering it non-secret) without having to deviate from the general thrust/direction of the game play. Mythic Bastionland satisfies this desideratum.The related procedure that I do dislike is one in which the GM is at liberty to introduce new secret elements into the fiction, that then determine that a player's declared action for their PC fails. In other words, I think the distinction between prepped secret fiction and spontaneous secret fiction matters.I think there are two reasons for this:(1) Spontaneous special fiction is a special case of the more general class of fiction that the players can't obtain by way of reasonable action declarations that don't deviate from the general thrust/direction of play.(2) Adherence to prep imposes a type of discipline on the GM that spontaneous generation of secret fictional "blockers" does not. So from the player point of view, it's a bit less arbitrary/Calvinball.</blockquote>

Verification