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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 7637305" data-attributes="member: 29398">Ditto the GM, who in presenting the entire setting is merely making suggestions the players may or may not follow up on (in the example, the players/PCs might decide the Southtor seal isn't enough, or if the GM throws in the bit about the love letters, might decide to follow up on that instead...or ignore it; it's their choice).You're concatenating two goals into one here - a specific one (find some financial papers) and a larger overarching one (incriminate the Duke).  Even though both are mentioned in one action, there's nothing stopping you from splitting them out and reacting only to one or the other.Otherwise, to give a near-ridiculous example, success on an in-combat (vs. a single dying Orc) action declaration of "I swing my axe and kill every Orc in the world!" has just removed Orcs from the setting entirely, given that success on the action declaration has just forced this Orc to be the last one left (or that all the other Orcs elsewhere drop dead along with this one; whichever).  If only Genocide: Monster could be so easy. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />They get to throw in their cool ideas every time they put forth an action declaration, should they so desire; and even in a hard-GM-driven game the GM might on the fly decide to go with it; and even if the notes right now unalterably say 'no' there's nothing stopping that GM from filing that cool idea away for future use.It's called putting the GM into 'react' mode.Which means a player rolling a hot die can - and IME almost invariably would - have her PC bypass any and all obstacles the setting wants to throw in its way, and sail through the story/adventure/mission/whatever without any delays or frustrations or, dare I say, effort...with the one exception being any combats that are unavoidable.The setting, and by extension the GM, exist in part to oppose and-or challenge the PCs and by extension the players; meaning that whether you like it or not there's always going to be that element of adversarialness (yeah, new word there) in their relationship.  If the players are given free rein to narrate their successes then most if not all players IME would take that as license to run roughshod over the principles of the game.What's not stated in that declaration example is, again, context: why is the PC searching for 1000 g.p.?  The reason this is relevant is that the context largely defines what a success represents, and what alternate options might exist: - Is it just for the sheer wealth acquisition (in which case the ruby is a grand success - way easier to carry and hide than 1000 coin and worth just as much) - Is it specifically for the gold (e.g. I need 1000 coin-weight of gold to melt down as the heart of my stone golem, in which case finding an equal-weight golden statue would do but a ruby would not) - Is it to prove someone's on the take (e.g. finding a bag containing exactly 1000 g.p. in that location could be very incriminating but a bag of exactly 200 p.p. would serve the same ends while a ruby would likely not be of much use) - Etc.And, thus, perhaps why the thread is - yet again - hundreds of posts long: the premise it sits on is faulty.Stating an attempted action does not suggest "something to be true in the fiction - namely, that the PC performs the actin as described!", instead it suggests only that what's true in the fiction is that the PC attempts to perform the action as described.  Mechanics or GM fiat (which includes just saying 'yes') or whatever then go on to sort out what results if any then become true in the fiction.IME this is almost always the case - even the hardest of railroad GMs still take in ideas and themes from their players, sometimes without really knowing they're doing so.PI don't think it's quite as cut-and-dried as that.  Better perhaps to say that some systems better facilitate or lead toward certain experiences than others, as with a big enough shoehorn and-or the right people involved pretty much anything is possible.</blockquote>

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