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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5587413" data-attributes="member: 42582">Cool.A good example.Not wanting to derail your example too much, but I've actually GMed the game you describe. In a narrativist fashion. Using that paradigm of purist-for-system play, namely, Rolemaster.How did it work?Well, the drug in question was a trance-inducing intoxicant that greatly enhanced spell point recovery, so the player always had a reason to have his PC fall off the wagon.And the Rolemaster spell+ritual system (the latter from RMC3) means that a typical mid-to-high level party has sufficient magical capability to exercise control over the results of those random rolls if they really want to, so when the player decided that he would have his PC fall off the wagon (either because he needed some spell points now!, to do some important thing, or because he decided that his PC couldn't cope anymore with the emptiness of his existence) and then eventually failed an addiction check, the players could still, between them, exercise control over how this played out. (In the end, another PC took control of the drug-using one and got him magically cleaned up - this was the culmination of a sort of drug-induced-decrepitude-meets-complete-subordination-to-the-will-of-my-wizardly-better-companion plot line, and was the springboard for a new approach to the redemption issue as the now-sober PC had to try and rebuild a dignified life beginning from such an unpromising position.)I'll try and draw a general corollary - when ProfCirno, and Kamikaze Midget, and others, in those various wizards vs warrior threads a few months ago, were talking about high level spells conferring narrative power on a player, they were right. The existence of that sort of magic is what allowed my group to drift Rolemaster into narrativist play. I think it would be much harder, for example, in a system like Runequest, which doesn't provide players with the same sort of resources to take control of the narrative and override the random rolls.(I think that RM has some other features that support drifting to narrativism also, but that would derail your example even more. And of course, as you say, you could just use a system that doesn't require drifting at all!)</blockquote>

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