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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8016649" data-attributes="member: 42582">Two cricket teams are having to decide who fields first. Here's one way: the home side captain decides.Here's another way: a coin is tossed, and the winner of the toss decides whether that team fields first or bats first.The second is the way it's actually done. I don't think any cricket players or cricket fans would think that changing to the first way would not make a difference.A GM deciding that an action fails automatically is preventing the player from changing the fiction in a way that the player cares about (given s/he declared the action for his/her PC).A GM declining to "say 'yes'" to a declared action and therefore funnelling it into the action resolution mechanics is allowing the dice to determine whether the fiction changes as the player wants it to, or whether it changes in some other way more adverse to the PC.The first looks like a unilateral decision about the fiction. The second looks like the playing of a game in which the participants are able, via the mechanical frameworks, to change the fiction in varous ways. The idea that they are not different in respect of the capacity of various participants to influence the fiction is simply not credible.Another way to come at the same point: if the GM gets to decide everything, player input is mere suggestion. It's like a monarch and his/her courtiers and advisors. In a structure of "say 'yes' or roll the dice" either the players get their way or the issue is rolled for. Rolling (or lottery, or other randomisation) as an unbiased decision procedure, which distributes the possibility of winning the issue over multiple participants and hence respects the agency of all of them, has a long history. Applied repeatedly - as happens in RPGIng - it is a way of integrating various participants' contributions into the unfolding shared project.I'm baffled that this is the least bit contentious.But this isn't even true. For instance, in Burning Wheel my character might be unconscious, and hence not in any literal sense taking actions, but I might be able to make a Circles check to see if an acquaintance, having heard of my plight, comes to rescue me.BW is not the only game in which player moves are confined to the character's locus of control, but that locus of control is not only geographic but charismatic. Even in AD&D if my character is unconscious but I have a henchman in the neighbourhood then I can call for a Loyalty check to see if my henchman tries to help me rather than run away. A GM who declined to make that check would not be running things in the spirit of the game - given that NPCs have a loyalty rating that is affected by PC CHA and that there is a bundle of subystems intended to give effect to that PC ability, and that even have modifiers that apply if the PC is hors de combat or dead.The focus on the character is just a distracting way of trying to approach the actual question, which is can the player meaningfully affect and change the shared fiction?</blockquote>

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