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Message: <blockquote data-quote="BryonD" data-source="post: 5499471" data-attributes="member: 957">No.  I'm not saying that at all.  I think you really don't grasp the root point of where I am coming from.  At first THERE ARE NO DICE.  I don't follow them.  I don't ignore them.  They don't exist.When I read the Lord of the Rings, I don't imagine dice.  Do you?The very idea of thinking about dice while reading great fantasy literature is bizarre to me and I'm going to presume that it is for you as well.And really the same thing applies to reality.  When I drive my car there is a chance my trip could be delayed by a School Bus or I could have a drunk driver swerve in front of me.  There is a vast array of potential happenings which range from minor but generally good diversions (school bus) to potentially deadly threats (drunk driver) and a million others in between.  When I think about safely and efficiently getting to my destination I am aware of this collection of unknowns.  But I don't think in terms of dice or encounter tables.  There are no dice in reality.There are no dice when I read fiction for the same reason.Now, if I wrote some lame fan fiction piece set in Middle Earth, I'm going to be in the exact same mindset.  I'm still picturing Middle Earth exactly the same way as I was when I was reading the Lord of the Rings.  So the dice still don't exist.  And I doubt anyone thinks of Tolkein as having consulted dice to help craft his story.  The very idea of dice is still bizarre at this point.But something has changed because now that I am the author, I control what happens.  So the characters might meet a giant spider or an orc.  Or, no matter how unlikely, they may find a ring in a cave.  And if I have them encounter Greedo or a Cyclon then I have gotten Middle Earth "wrong".  (It might still be a great story.)  The concept of the setting exists and there are parameters around what it does and does not contain, but the concept of dice apply to it as well as ice skates do to cobras.  The introduction of a deterministic authorial control does nothing to change that because the concept of the setting existed before I ever started thinking about writing.But now we take another step.  Rather than writing a story, I am involving other people as active participants in the creative process.  And, yet another step, rather than just writing a collaborative work of fiction, we go beyond just inserting a Mary Jane into our fiction and we insert our own selves into the shoes of the characters.  And part of what we want to experience is being characters in the moment of the story, with no certain knowledge of the future, be it whether or not this arrow will hit in the next two seconds, or what new adventure we will encounter when we cross the mountain next month.  So we have gone from conceptual parameters to authorial determinism, now we a stuck needing a way to surrender that power of determinism.  Otherwise there is no experience in the illusion of achievement or failure if we don't feel we have faced the prospect of both without any more certainty of the outcome than we imagine the protagonist of a great story having.  The audience may know, but part of a great story is (usually) that the characters don’t.  We want to be the characters; therefore we need to not know.It is now a game.  And we use dice to help with that.But go back up to the very beginning and every bit of that still applies.  The same parameters of the setting are in place.  The setting exists and there are no dice.  So the challenge becomes to introduce dice and make it still FEEL like there are no dice.  The dice provide a model of the setting that we try to make both as perfect and as invisible as possible.  Sacrifice will enter the picture here. But the idea of the setting has no dice.  And any time anyone is really aware of the dice, Greedo is peeking around a tree. The dice might “say” the party gets lost.  And if the model was set up well then great, we now know that the party gets lost and that is part of the story.  But, this completely misses the point that the potential results dictated by the dice are FIRST dictated by that original “I’m reading a story” narrative pseudo-reality.  The dice are completely a slave to the narrative definition.  And the DM has absolute control over that.  Once a good model is in place the DM willingly and eagerly concedes control to the dice.  But the dice only have control because the DM provided it and a good DM will have established valuable parameters on what those dice may dictate.It all starts with a diceless setting and a DM.  When you say the DM has zero control you are exactly 100% wrong.  When you say my approach involves ignoring or fudging dice, you are again 100% wrong.It is about being inside the story and the game should be invisible.  It is highly clear to me that for some people “the game” is vastly more an important part of the experience for them than it is for me.  So we end up talking past each other.  That is cool.  It is not my intent to say that 4E isn’t fun.  It is partly to say it is different, but mostly to say that you statement about DM control in 3E is wrong.  Because your statement about DM control in 3E is wrong.(I actually DO fudge dice infrequently, part of the job description of a good DM is knowing when the mechanics, including but not limited to dice rolls, failed to anticipate the events at hand and represent them well.  This is, as I said, infrequent.  But I don’t want to be accused of double talk when in some later thread I heartily endorse fudging.  Fudging dice is completely unrelated to my point here.)</blockquote>

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