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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6152929" data-attributes="member: 42582">The main connection that Ron Edwards draws between FitM and narrativst play is that, in narrativist play, FitM preserves the player's conception of his/her PC - eg if you miss an attack, rather than narrating that as "I suck" - which you have to in RQ, say, because you can't narrate it as a parry by your enemy if the processing of the resolution never got to the parry stage - you can narrate it as "My powerful flurry of blows is parried by their equally awesome sword skills" - now instead of sucking my guy is so awesome that I'm in a duel with the best duelist in the country.4e uses FitM to allow theme to emerge - eg when a PC goes down, we don't know yet what the "0 hp" means, because we don't know yet whether or not there will be a heroic recovery (from a warlord's inspiration, or a 20+ on the death save, or whatever). So the FitM allows the 0 hp to act as a prelude to/foreshadowing of either heroic recovery or tragic failure. I think that's another narrativst-ish deployment of FitM.Ron Edwards identifies FitM as a common aspect of gamist play too - "the point is, <a href="http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/21/" target="_blank">he says</a>, "that Exploration as such can be deferred, rather than established at every point during play in a linear fashion." My feeling is that in a lot of Gygaxian play with pawn stance players, much of the exploration may never be established ie we don't really care exactly what happened in that 1 minute combat round, just about the outcome (ie just as you, Doug, said in your post).Sure, but that seems only to confirm my point. The influence of alignment choice on player activity is itself an expression of "actor stance" RPing. The fact that much play was pawn stance, and that some saw this as a problem that didn't fit well with the game's alignment system, is shown by the effort that writers of the time (eg Lewis Pulsipher in White Dwarf, Gygax in parts of the PHB and DMG) to insist that alignment matters in ways that go beyond clerical spell selection and interacting with intelligent swords.Every time I see a poster in a paladin thread saying "Paladins have to be restricted by mechanical alignment or else paladin players will have their PCs kidnapping and torturing villagers at the drop of a hat" I see someone who has encountered pawn stance players, doesn't like them, but can't see any way of resolving the issue other than by wielding the stick of mechanical alignment against them.I think this is the same distinction that I've drawn in these threads between "scene framing" and "action resolution"."You see some orcs." "OK - I attack them." That's action resolution."You see some orcs." "OK - I polymorph them into chickens." That's scene-reframing.The borderline can be murky, and depends heavily on tropes, mechanics and group expectations. For instance, in MHRP "You see some Skrulls." "OK, I teleport to another planet to get away from them." can be part of action resolution, because the game has mechanics to handle that sort of change of geographic location as part of the resolution of a single scene. On the other hand, in D&D "You see some demons." "OK, I Plane Shift to the Seven Heavens to get away from them." is scene re-framing rather than action resolution, both because the game lacks the mechanics to handle that sort of change of geographic location as part of the resolution of a single scene, and because the game lacks robust mechanics to regulate how much pressure the GM can place on a LG PC who Plane Shifts to the Seven Heavens, meaning that it can look like Viking Hat GMing to treat this as anything other than a "get out of jail free card", at least in the immediate term.I think that's too strong a claim. A D&D wizard's teleport often requires a die roll. So does polymorphing the orcs into chickens (they get saves).And not all action resolution requires dice rolls. Cast Cure Light Wounds in Basic D&D to unparalyse your ally who's been paralysed by a ghoul doesn't require a die roll; likewise a 4e paladin using Lay on Hands in the middle of combat. But both are action resolution rather than scene-reframing.For at least some of those who are interested in "narrative otions" for non-spellcasters I think this somewhat misses the point. (I use the word "think" deliberately. It may be that I've not probably grasped your on-point point.)I think everyone acknowledges that when a wizard uses polymorph to turn the orcs into chickens, that doesn't retcon the shared fiction (there's no denial, in your sense of that word). In the fiction, the orcs were orcs that got magically transformed into chickens. The point is that, at the table, the player didn't actually engage with the situation involving the orcs. That situation was not explored. Rather, in practical terms it was rewritten. (In a movie, this would be a moment of light relief, as what looks like a threatening situation actually reveals itself to not be one at all.)The analogue for a fighter would be a token, or a "kill em all dead kwik" skill roll, that allowed the player of a fighter to equally simply, in mechanical terms, declare "Nope, no orcs here. I've killed them all!"There are RPG designs that exploit this contrast between engaging a scene and rewriting it. For instance, Burning Wheel and HeroWars/Quest (and probably other systems too) have simple resolution, in which a single roll from a player (whether of caster, or non-caster) resolves a scene and obliged the GM to frame a new one. The general advice in those systems is to use simple resolution to keep up your pacing and not get bogged down until something that really matters comes along - then you switch to the complex resolution systems and we're not longer talking about rapid movement from scene to scene but the players actually engaging a scene that the GM has framed.D&D seems unlikely to have this sort of simple resolution mechanic any time soon, given that 4e didn't fully embrace it despite coming the closest to these sorts of design sensibilities. The idea of a hit point threshold on spells like polymorph in early versions of D&Dnext seemed designed to make those spells lack their scene-reframing character - they become "closers" that you can only use after having engaged the scene for a bit and found out what it's about. But I think that's mostly gone now, hasn't it?</blockquote>

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