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Message: <blockquote data-quote="prabe" data-source="post: 8012971" data-attributes="member: 7016699">In context with "The GM Decides"--and (I thought) specifically talking about action resolution--I thought it was clear, but I'll try to be clearer.Talking specifically about action resolution:"The GM Decides" is the GM deciding that there is no doubt about the outcome of an action; either it cannot succeed or it cannot fail."The Dice Decide" is the outcome is in doubt and the dice determine the outcome.I do not believe there has to be any difference in player agency between the two systems. I'll admit the GM has more authority in the first, and more room for asshattery, but I at least am not talking about good GMing/bad GMing.It's the difference between trying to do something you cannot do, and trying to do something you can.The PCs are in a world. They are not the first characters in that world, nor will they be the last. I try to keep the world consistent and occasionally have things happen that are unrelated to the PCs. I don't go to the lengths that say [USER=29398]@Lanefan[/USER] does, but I try to make the world feel at least a little lived-in.The setting is a place for the PC's stories to happen in. I don't see how using an established fictional world impinges on player agency any more than using the real world does. If a game is set in the real world, there are going to be things the PCs won't be able to do, and some of those things will be impossible because of the GM's understanding of the real world, which might be different from how the real world objectively works. I put real effort into not wrong-footing the players by having the world be different from their expectations, both in considering how I write up the world and in how (and when) I present that information to the players. I answer questions about the world whenever asked. What you're describing sounds like at least a mild-ish case of bad-faith GMing--not telling the players about world facts until they interfere with what they want their characters to do; that's very different, I think, from establishing before character creation that the world has no gods (while making it clear that the mechanics for clerics are otherwise unchanged).They're two different things. "Flailing" references uncertainty about the next step. "Making mistakes" means exactly that, though more often on a level closer to tactical than strategic. If the PCs don't know what to do next, I give them space to decide--almost always without further consequence; if the PCs make poor choice in spite of having adequate information, I let that play out--if I think the mistake is going to kill them, I'll probably try to find a way to get them more information to justify reconsidering the decision, but choices have consequences (or they don't really matter).And when I DM, the story goes interesting places. I have nearly 800 pages of game notes from two campaigns I can pull from, if you want. Sometimes what looks like a mistake leads to an interesting story-thread; I'd miss that if they never made mistakes, wouldn't I?</blockquote>

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