What’s interesting to me is that the consequence being “connected” to the die roll seems to be the issue here… yet I would expect that many of those objecting to this, if not most or all, would say that in a traditional RPG paradigm, the GM can simply add something at any time.
So if the GM wants a cook to show up, or thinks it makes sense or what have you, he can just make it so.
Yet no one has an issue with that. No one is connecting this to anything the way they are with the die roll.
It’s strange.
I'm not sure it's that strange. The posters who object to connecting the consequence to a player-side dice roll take it for granted that the GM's ideas about what to do next with the fiction correlate to the actual causal pathways and trajectories that are unfolding in the fiction.
Related to this is another notion, that stuff the GM imagines, that is not yet part of any
shared fiction, nevertheless contributes to the players' fictional positions.
That second point can be illustrated in this way, which also contributes to the "ruby" discussion between
@EzekielRaiden,
@Enrahim and others:
Suppose that a player says, speaking as/for their PC, "I want to look in the safe for the ruby".
As per some actual play examples that I posted upthread, in MHRP and variants, if there is no established shared fiction that precludes this, I would resolve this as an attempt to create an Asset.
If playing Torchbearer 2e, then if there is no established shared fiction that establishes that the ruby is, or likely is in, the safe, I would resolve the lock picking as appropriate (which would depend on further context) but then tell the player that they find no ruby. This is because the player in TB2e does not have that sort of backstory authority: the fictional placement of valuable treasures is the GM's job. By default, the most the player can get by looking in random safes is a roll on the (not very generous) Loot Table 1 (this is a Scavenging Test; from memory, the base obstacle is 4). Maybe if I feel sympathetic, that could step up to Loot Table 2.
Consider, though, map-and-key resolved play. In that case, the contents of the safe are recorded (literally, or at least notionally/in principle), in a key. And the fiction set out in that key is part of the player's fictional position. It is that fictional position that determines what the character can and can't find by looking in the safe.
When we think about the
ruby, which is a special thing and not just some generic "treasure", TB2e and map-and-key can look the same. But they're actually not. We can see that their procedures are different when we consider that TB2e uses the player-generated process for triggering a roll on Loot Table 1, whereas map-and-key resolution doesn't have that. Even when the key becomes increasingly notional (due to the limitations on the possibility of actual prep) - so, for instance, the GM is rolling on random tables to create the key as they go along - the tables are substitutes for GM-side prep; they are not ways of resolving a player-declared action like the TB2e process for triggering a roll on Loot Table 1.
Finally, consider - in lieu of map-and-key play - RPGing in which "the world", the fiction, is just whatever the GM decides makes sense. It is probably some melange of notes and sourcebooks, keyed maps, ad hoc rolls, and GM imagination and intuition. Some is prepped and some is improvised. This is similar to the map-and-key approach to the fiction, but there is not even the idea of a notional key, and instead it is just
the GM who establishes fictional position, often in the actual moment of resolution.
A RPGer who prefers this sort of "the GM
is the world" approach is going to be sceptical of approaches like that of TB2e, let alone MHRP, even though - in some cases - we can see local parallels/similarities between them.
