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="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8503469" data-attributes="member: 82106">Right, as a D&D history aside there was an old school technique, the 'everything is hidden' technique. Its most extreme form would have the GM do ALL the bookkeeping of anything that meta-game whatsoever, including the PC's hit points and perhaps even the exact values of their ability scores, AC, etc. The purpose of this technique is VERY CLEAR, it serves to force the players and the GM back to the fiction, making it impossible for a player to live purely in the world of the mechanics, or even carry out any reasoning on the basis of mechanics at all! This is very well explained via the 'cloud and boxes' model. When this technique is employed the GM MUST provide a usable fictional description of each change in the game state, because the players can ONLY formulate their responses based on that, since the boxes are hidden from them. This causes the fiction to subsume the role of representing the state of the world to the players, so the typical combat with notations of the results of rolls and hits and damage and such gains necessary leftward arrows as the GM must describe the effect of the hit on the goblin in enough detail that the player can make some useful judgment of what options he should choose on his next turn. I'd also note that this type of play was particularly espoused by those wanting 'more role-play', though more limited forms of it also have had adherents wanting to use it to shut down informational side-channels (in this case it usually takes the form of hidden rolls). In any case the point is to shift more to the cloud as the source of information and thus enrich the fiction, or at least encourage it or make it more plausible in some sense.</blockquote>

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