Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8018900" data-attributes="member: 42582">Not table consensus. I think that makes for weak play.I prefer an approach where it is the GM's job to establish the consequenes of failure. That way players don't have to manage deciding what bad things happen to their PCs: someone else has that job.The Burning Wheel rulebooks gives very clear guidance around this, as powerful consequences on failure are one of the main thinga that drive BW play.Also your description of the check framing is not quite right either. The player declares that he is reading the Aura to identify it's angelic, Balrog-fighting properties. The action is declared before the dice are rolled. That way we know what is happening in the ficiton, and what character abilities are relevant (eg given that he took an augment from Ancient History, he must have established something about the history of angels in the Bright Desert to get that in).If the player succeeds, his action succeeds: the feather has Balrog-fighting properties. (I believe, from memory, that the player was happy for me to fill in the details based on my greater familiarity with the system and hence the ways one might express Balrog-fighting properties of an angel feather. That said, it seems like that I confirmed that he was happy with Resistance to FIre as such a thing.)The negative part is accurate. The positive part not quite. The test determines whether the players intent and task come true (ie I read the angel feather's aura to learn how it will be useful in confronting a balrog) or not. The check failed, so the intent and task didn't come true - the task succeeded (the character read the feather's aura) - but the intent did not - as well of learning how it will be useful in confronting a balrog, the character also learned that it is cursed.Two things to note:(1) This system doesn't support making Perception or Aura-readoing or Knowledge checks just to provoke more exposition from the GM. The player has to say what it is that the character is looking for or hoping to discover. Ie it needs intent as well as task.(2) Had the check succeeded, no curse would have been detected. That doesn't in itself establish that the feather is not cursed, although - given the degree of success would be such-and-such - it does establish that the feather has no curse detectable by such-and-such a degree of successful aura reading.The practical significance of this second thing is that, in a system played this way (which is pretty much how I like to play RPGs, though individual systems all have their own distinguishing quirks; RPGs that can't be played like this aren't ones I play) the GM has to balance honouring success and introducing adversity, particularly on failed checks. One example: the PCs successfullly drugged a rival so she would fall asleep and not be able to follow them to a wizard's tower. Then the PCs chose to go to the tower not through the streets (where they knew the way) but via the catacombs (so as to sneak in from below). I called for a Catacombs-wise check. This failed. Hence I narrated that the PCs got lost and hence lost time. Their rival awoke, and the race was on: it turned into Speed vs Speed (the PCs lost and so the rival got to the tower first). In the abstract I can't say what sort of failure, in the context of a successful reading of the feather's aura, might have licenced revealing it to be cursed - off the top of my head a failed Ancient History check, perhaps, if it pertained to the Bright Desert and its artefacts.I think Vincent Baker in Apocalypse World is pretty good on this sort of stuff, although he encourages pushing the players maybe just a bit harder than I default to.That would depend on what the point of the GM's decision is.But if the players are expected to work it out in order to progress things, then yes - I would call that RPG-as-puzzle.The OP seemss a good example: it seems that the players are expected to work out that the Burgomaster will go ape at them if they try and intimidate him, and to factor that into their attempt to progress matters.Apocalpse World is, again, probably the best RPGing text I know of that explains how to use "off screen thinking" without making things into RPG-as-puzzle. The BW rulebook is not as good on it, but some of the subsequent commentary (eg in the Adventure Burner and Codex) is good. For instance, the GM might decide that some feature of the NPCs in the scene is a result of XYZ, which is something offscreen. Later on  - ie in some subeqent moment of framing or resolution - that can be used as a reveal.But there was no moment of play prior to the revel where the players were expected to work out the XYZ thing. Of course they may have done so even though they didn't have to - in which case in this sort of RPGing the GM would follow their lead.Or the players may have conjectured that the connection is not XYZ at all but ABC, in which case - if they succeed on appropirate checks - the GM will go along with it (honouring success) but if they fail then the GM has the chance to reveal that they were wrong all along, and it was really XYZ!This is the sort of dynamic of play I have in mind when I'm talking about a relatively high degree of player agency over the shared fiction.</blockquote>

Verification