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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5577559" data-attributes="member: 42582">I can see why you see the risk.I have got this sort of thing happening in games with the sort of mechanics you refer to here - the paladin story I mentioned upthread, which happened in RM, is an example. I'm a big fan of vanilla narrativism - I was a vanilla narrativist before I was a FoRE, and part of what made me a FoRE was finding someone who could coherently interpret my play experience to me - but I think I see more thematic play in a system that is a bit more forgiving of inexpedience.A big consideration, in my view, is what happens to that player if his(?) PC is killed by the Cardinal's Guards? If he's staking "winning or losing" the game on the roll that's one thing; if by taking the challenge he "wins" whatever happens (even if winning here just means something like "earns group approval, so that if his PC dies he will be able to bring into play one of his PCs offsiders as his new PC") then there's a sense in which the informal table rules have supported his choice.4e is more forgiving than RM even without such informal table rules, because the nexus between expedience and mechanical success is much looser than in a more purist-for-system game like RM. But as I said earlier, it pushes less hard in this sort of way than many other modern games.It's very hard to tell when you're comparing techniques and play experiences over the internet, but I think the main way that I GM differently from you is this: you have a rich backstory with random tables to generate coincidences that the players must then exploit; whereas I have a loose backstory and make self-conscious choices to create situations that the players must then exploit (and at the same time thereby firming up the backstory).I don't know if you looked at Raven Crowking's blog where he talked about the importance of mundane animal encounters, but that is close to the opposite of my approach, which focuses only on the "relevant" details. I'm not sure whether or not my players experience immersion, but I don't think they could experience "I'm really in this fantasy world" immersion (unless they're doing all the heavy lifting themselves) - if they're relying on me, it would have to be some sort of "emotional investment" immersion.I don't know how much you use fine points of detail to draw your players into the world - it would seem to me to fit with the idea of a detailed backstory and detailed random tables - but if you do a lot of that then that would be another difference between our approaches. From my impression of your game, I could see your players asking "What would my guy do?", whereas for my players I think it is more often "What should (I have) my guy do?".Of course, in cases like your player whose PC took the fire from the Cardinal's Guards, or my player whose paladin took the punches from the demon, these two questions can merge into one.</blockquote>

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