NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 4006116" data-attributes="member: 42582">I've read that sidebar and cited it in my response to Karin's Dad (where I was asked to quote/reference, and did so).I think that the key part of that sidebar is that it is the players, not the GM, who have the prerogative to initiate adventure in a PoL, by exploring what is going on there. But when read together with the other parts of the book (which I have cited) I stand by my claim about safety.At the ingame level, I'll let someone else work out the sociological details needed to maintain verisimilitude (if anyone's is threatened). But at the metagame level, there seems to me to be a clear intention here to give a degree of narrative control to the players, by creating parts of the gameworld which only become adverse when the players choose to make them so (by investigating the thieve's guild, breaking local laws, killing the mayor, etc).This can be contrasted with (for example) The Dying Earth, where the whole point of the gameworld is that any new settlement is to be a source of adversity for the PCs. It can also be contrasted with more traditional D&D worlds, where the default assumption is that adversity can strike the PCs at any time in any place at the whim of the GM.The key point, for me being that in The Dying Earth it is the GM who gets to decide (on a whim, as it were) what counts as sticking one's nose where one oughtn't, whereas in 4e (as I read it) this is known to the players, so they can toggle off or on as they desire.What I like about this aspect of PoL is that it continues a welcome (to me) trend in 3E of shifting narrative control out of the GM's hand - because of the lack of mechanics in AD&D, and the consequent crucial role of the GM in mediating action resolution, D&D has developed a (deserved, in my view) reputation for producing abusive GMing. 3E tried to solve this on the mechanical side, and now 4e seems to be tackling it on the gameworld side. Getting rid of the alignment system (another font of abusive GMing) serves a similar purpose.Now for those who worry about the rampant gamism that can result from these weakenings of GM control, I can't offer any solace. Like 3E before it, 4e will give every gamist what s/he wants. But unlike any other edition of D&D it looks like it might also be able to support narrativist play reasonably well. And I incline to the view that the attempt to rein in gamism is doomed to fail anyway.</blockquote>

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