Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="prabe" data-source="post: 8028037" data-attributes="member: 7016699">So, how exactly does the player control which choice the GM makes, or even know what the GM's options are? The GM in AW doesn't seem to me (as someone who's just read the rules a couple times) to be all that much more constrained than the DM in 5E.So, I'll let pass that by the DM deciding what happens, that's technically going to mechanics.So, the AW player Goes Aggro and rolls. 10+ The BurgerMaster sucks it up (breaks) and calls for the guards. On a 7-9, the BurgerMaster "barricades himself securely in" and calls for the guards. On a miss, the BurgerMaster calls for the guards. A bad-faith GM can work inside AW just as easily--maybe more so, if the players believe otherwise--as a bad-faith DM in 5E. And the vibe I get from the book seems to me to encourage bad-faith (or at least dickish) GMing.I don't see how the character's success/failure on a resolution determining whether the door is trapped--meaning literally that the trap is present on one result and not on another--can be anything other than meta. If doors are only ever trapped if you look for traps, why would you ever look for traps? That's probably not the best example ... Anyway, I actually do understand the playstyle, and I even see the appeal of something like Gumshoe where you always find what's there to be found but you might not understand it correctly (and I realize that Gumshoe might not be exactly the right style of play, where the declaration "I open the box, looking for the Crown of Revel" is an action-declaration that can be resolved, which on a result favoring the player means the Crown of Revel is in the box--I can see the appeal of that, too-- finding the Crown of Revel isn't the point, figuring out what to do with it is). Meta elements don't always need to detract from focus on the characters, but focus on the characters doesn't mean the player or the character has agency. While the player might have used the game's mechanics to put the Crown of Revel in the box, there's no in-fiction way for the character to have done so; I find that mechanics like that push me out of character rather than pulling me in. Those mechanics to me feel far more focused on story than on character/s.Describing things in-the-fiction is good GMing, I agree. I don't think of it as "misdirecting," though. There is a fair amount of explicitly-encouraged jerking-around of the PCs by the GM, it seems. But I've been pretty clear for a while (at least in my head) that I'm not antagonistic enough as a GM to run any of these sorts of games. I'm happy to instigate, but after that I'm very hands-off.</blockquote>

Verification