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Message: <blockquote data-quote="onedtwelve" data-source="post: 5681641" data-attributes="member: 6671274">I'm seeing two main reasons people are against this: not trusting the GM and not knowing what your character can do within the game world.Not knowing what your character is capable of can be a difficult task to overcome for the GM, since he'll have to describe pretty much everything in such a way that the player knows almost certainly whether something is of too high a risk.I think it's funny to see how cautious people will get when they don't know their odds exactly. When I play with my character sheet, I always calculate everything based on percentages, no matter the system I'm playing. So I know if I have a 20% chance of success or a 27% chance or whatever. I think I'd be much more willing to risk a 20% chance of success when I know what my odds are with a number than I would be to risk a "likely chance of failure." That means that what the players do attempt will be more likely to succeed, if they're anything like me.A point I'm trying to make is that saying "your character will have a 50% chance of success" is no different than seeing your character sheet, knowing the approximate DC for doing the thing and noticing that you need to roll an 11 or higher on your d20. Which means it takes a lot away from the idea of hiding the rules. Part of the fun, in my opinion, is the mystery and the nervousness that comes from not knowing.I agree with some of the posters who said that your character should know what he or she can do within his or her world. When I see something that I've fixed a million times, I know that I can probably fix it. When I see something I've never seen before, I can estimate my odds of success based on previous encounters with similar things. I think this can be handled properly in two ways.First, you could have the GM and players list up some key words to know what their chances of success are so they know that "it'll be hard" is a lot better than "almost no chance of success" which is worse than "little chance of success." The list is just to make sure that everyone's on the same page as far as interpreting things are. Then, the GM can describe what the PC is trying to do in a way that the character can understand if he is likely capable of succeeding.The second way is to have the player decide whether he or she thinks the character should be capable of it. The player controls the character and has an idea of what the character should be like; therefore, the player should have some right to it. You take away the character sheet, but the player still maintains the control. I think that may help take away some of the fear and mistrust the player may have. So, instead of saying "there is a ten foot wide hole and you have a mild chance of jumping it." the GM can say "there is a ten foot wide hole, does your character believe he can jump it?"Distrusting the GM is something entirely different and I think boils down to only doing this with someone you know well and can trust to be honest and reasonable. Remember, the odds don't go up when you don't know them, but they appear to because, as I said, seeing a 20% chance is still a 20% chance and not a "likely chance of failure." That means, that no matter the GM the odds are the same. Not knowing the system can be tough in that regard, but that's why having a system for being able to relatively tell how successful you'll be is necessary and has nothing to do with whether the GM is trustworthy. Either way, it doesn't matter if you can see the rules or not, if you don't trust your GM to be fair, especially if you know she isn't, then why let that person run?And as far as running a game as a narrative, ignoring the rules, I wouldn't use a rule-set (except maybe a narrative rule-set) if I was gonna run like that. I would just run a narrative game, which would be very similar anyway.</blockquote>

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