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Message: <blockquote data-quote="prabe" data-source="post: 8028161" data-attributes="member: 7016699">The rulebook I'm looking at says, "When you Go Aggro on someone, roll+hard. On a 10+, they have to choose: force your hand and suck it up, or cave and do what you want. On a 7-9, they can instead choose 1:"That tells me it's not the player choosing, it's the GM, so the player really has no control over the outcome. The example I laid out is book-legal, though it'd be horrible GMing--and I never said it was otherwise.Oh, yeah, they're different games, aiming at generating/enabling different stories, and I have no doubt that Baker played in some deeply dissatisfying games in other systems before he wrote his own.I don't think I've been unclear that published adventures, especially adventure paths, are problematic for character agency--for the characters mattering much, even--and I also don't think I've been unclear that 5E is designed to enable play through published adventures. So, it's probable that many players' experience of 5E is going to be ... less than ideal. I think, though, that there's support in the game to play differently; I don't think 5E is limited to that sort of play.The rulebook I have says "Force your hand and suck it up." BurgerMaster calls for guards and other party member attacks (tries to take him hostage). That genuinely doesn't sound all that incongruent to me. Yes, it's bad GMing in AW if any result of Go Aggro will have that result, and I've never said otherwise; I've just said it's possible to GM that way (and that the play examples in the book don't discourage it, actually seem to suggest it).Yeah, I understand the mechanics, and I understand the ... rationalization of the mechanics--how the mechanics are meant to reflect/shape the emergent story.OTOH: A 5E DM could randomly roll to determine if a door was trapped--the old school-ish random dungeons seem a likely application for this. He'd be finding out if it was trapped about the same time as the PCs. That's not my prefered playstyle, but it's not meta the same way as having it hinge on the outcome of a Perception check (or the equivalent).Yeah. The GM's job is to place obstacles in the characters' way, and to present plausible opposition. That's ... pretty close to universal (there might be edge cases but I don't think they're the focus of discussion). Without the obstacles and/or opposition, there'd be nothing to center a story around--no decisions or actions that mattered. I think my sense is that having the world exist in a more or less objective sense (to use the most-current example, that door is trapped) makes it clearer that the GM is neither the obstacle nor the opposition; that seems to be true for me as a player, as well as as GM.It's plausible I'm bouncing as much off Baker's writing as the game mechanics, but I did come to a similar conclusion about Fate (that the game needed the GM to be more antagonistic than I wanted to be), and that game is written ... more conventionally--and yes, I remember (I think) that you don't think Fate goes far enough.I wouldn't say I've ever put my players through the wringer, but I would say the Masked Ones killed Imaktis, and more the Tundra Queen seems to have drawn their ire. The players have been coming back every other week for more than two years, so it's tempting to say they're digging it. There's probably some fundamental-ish difference in how we look at the stories that emerge from play, and the elements thereof.</blockquote>

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