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="prabe" data-source="post: 8014705" data-attributes="member: 7016699">Sticking with the river example, if you'll allow a slight modification: There's a McGuffin that you have come to believe is on the other side of the river; whether this is a conclusion you've drawn as a player or information you've obtained through other in-character actions doesn't seem super-relevant (though I'm not committed to its irrelevance). If the GM has decided, for whatever reason--this is a decision that can be made with good intentions--that you'll find the McGuffin whether or not you swim across the river, you haven't really changed the state of the fiction, so you haven't really exerted agency. If the GM decides after you fail to swim across the river that the McGuffin is on the side of the river you're on, the agency you exerted in the decision to swim across the river has been negated. There might be another way to find the McGuffin, but doing so requires the state of the fiction to change more, in different ways. I don't mind there being multiple paths to the McGuffin, but any path should require actual decisions and actual fiction-changes; and if there is an action resolution that fails--or if the player or character choose a path that doesn't lead to the McGuffin (as in, it goes away from where it has been established the McGuffin is)--that should matter.I get the joke, and I understand my viewpoint on this is ... strange. I quit a Call of Cthulhu campaign when we (the PCs) screwed up and the world didn't end, because it felt as though we hadn't been playing for any stakes, ever, so in spite of all the eldritch monstrosities it didn't matter; and that was worse than the world ending. That left enough of a bad taste in my mouth that I haven't wanted to play Call of Cthulhu since.</blockquote>

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