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="Ovinomancer" data-source="post: 8496616" data-attributes="member: 16814">This is... not quite right.  There appears to be a strange assumption that in games that feature "say yes or roll the dice" that the players have the ability to know things about the world at all times.  This is, in fact, opposite to the intent of play.  The intent of play here is for everyone at the table to discover things about the world at the same time.    Let's take the nearly canonical example of "say yes or roll the dice," the secret door.  PCs are in a situation where, for whatever reason (canonically being chased by guards), have decided to look for a secret door.  The GM, in this approach, doesn't know if there's a secret door here as much as the players do not know if there's a secret door here.  If there's no narrative stakes, then the GM can "say yes" and there's a secret door. This would be because there's nothing at stake here -- the existence of this door is pure flavor and not anything of any heft in play.  If this isn't true, and the canonical example say it's not due to being chased by guards (a clear narrative stake), then the dice are used.  A success here would mean that there is, indeed, a secret door.  A failure would mean that the GM can establish whatever fiction they want -- they may establish that there is indeed a secret door, but opening it reveals that the guards know that too and have used it to outflank the PCs and are now coming out of said door.  Or that there isn't a door, and now the guards have arrived.  Or there is a door, but it creates a completely different danger to the guards, thus stacking up the challenge.  At no point here do the players know more about the setting or world than a D&D player would, they just have the understanding that success means that their intent follows and cannot be blocked by the GM consulting notes or their preferences and just saying "nope, no door."The idea that their isn't ambiguity or mystery involved in approaches that use "say yes or roll the dice" is deeply flawed.  I mean, I'm currently playing in an PbtA game (that generally features a "say yes or roll the dice" approach) that focuses on mysteries!  (The game is The Between.)  So, this cannot be an actual feature of this kind of approach to play and is actually counter to the entire conception.All that said, the mostly right part of the above is that the standard approaches to D&D are very much that the play is finding out what the GM's conception of the fiction is.  This isn't a bad thing at all -- it can be quite fun. It can also be something that people can dislike, as [USER=42582]@pemerton[/USER] does.  It's just a feature, and you can like or dislike the feature according to your preference.  How it works isn't changed by that preference, though.</blockquote>

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