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="sunshadow21" data-source="post: 6743040" data-attributes="member: 6667193">And that to me is the part that renders all of what you said pointless. By not requiring players to be functional, it does render the players at least partially irrelevant. You say that I, as a player, can declare an action, but you go on to make it quite clear that I have no control over it's resolution, since that is entirely up to the DM. It is entirely up to the DM, and the player has no control over, the amount of uncertainty any particular situation contains. That is not player agency, that is not player driven action resolution; that is a player making a suggestion, and hoping that the DM recognizes it for what it was intended to do. The player has no control over the use of the game mechanics outside of combat, and therefore, and no direct control over anything outside of combat. If it's going to come down to how well I, as a player, tell a story and describe actions anyway, I am not going to bother playing D&D; I am going to actually sit around a campfire and swap stories with others where we all have the freedom to tell the precise story we want to tell. I lose a bit of interactivity, but gain a lot more by not having to worry about dice and rules and books. Player driven narrative without player driven mechanics is just a weak form of quasi interactive story telling to me, and  when I can go elsewhere and get the full story telling experience without the limits imposed by the system, not worth the effort of pulling out books, dice, and character sheet. It obviously works for a lot of people, but I expect a bit more crunch if I am going to take the effort to learn a rpg system and make up a character; simple story telling doesn't require D&D. It doesn't have to be 3.5 level of crunch, but it needs to be more than a four hour long conversation with the DM.Despite our differences, I appreciate your posts, because I think I can now answer Iserith's question of why that approach is alien to me. It's because I don't sit down at the table for narrative; I sit down at the table for the interactivity. Narrative is important, but narrative for the sake of narrative, especially if it masks legitimate game mechanics I can be using to my advantage, regardless of what side of the screen I am on, is nice, but eats a lot of what is often limited game time. If interactivity is aided by narrative great; if the narrative takes five minutes, and using a game mechanic takes 5 seconds, that narrative is going to have to do a lot more than simply be a flowery expression of the game mechanic to be worth it to me. Taking 5 seconds to tell me my character is intimidated has exactly the same effect as taking 5 minutes to describe it in great, and usually unnecessary, detail, but eats up more time and leaves a lot more room for confusion. The narrative truly is not worth that much to me; just give me the shorthand and keep the game moving. Same with quibbling over how a request for more information about what is in a room; whether it be phrased as a question or an action, I really don't care. It yields the exact same information either way. Ditto with worrying about whether something is magic or nonmagic; I make a ruling based on the effect and move on; getting picky about the source just wastes time and energy. Many here, especially Iserith, very much treat the game like a novel, and I find that if I want a novel, I will go read an actual novel; the experience may lack interactivity, but if I want a novel, interactivity isn't a concern to begin with, so I haven't really lost anything. Tabletop rpgs and novels are two different types of story telling and trying to turn one into the other is not, for me, a particularly worth while endeavor.</blockquote>

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