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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6306774" data-attributes="member: 42582">"Sharing of narrative control" is a very broad, even sweepingly broad, generalisation.There absolutely is textual basis in many versions of D&D for sharing of narrative control in the following sense: if a PC is bitten by a giant spider, and hence (potentially) poisoned, and the player rolls a successful saving throw, then the GM is obliged to narrate the bite and its poison in such a way as to make sense of the PC's survival. (Gygax discusses this on pp 80-81 of his DMG, written in the later 1970s, and so somewhat predating Ron Edwards and other more contemporary commentators.)I agree that the default, in D&D, is for the GM to fill in the details of the narrative. But the constraints on that - which is what I referred to in the passage to which you are replying - are established by the action resolution mechanics, in which the players participate as much as the GM does.In the actual play report that I posted, the players' experienced uncertainty. So did I as GM. My point was, in part, that there are other ways of achieving uncertainty then using hidden backstory as an element in resolution.That's not to say that there are no things that can't be done in my preferred RPGing approach. I think the descent into insanity that exemplifies CoC one-shots is one of those things. But the notion of "player uncertainy" or even "mystery" is not precise enough to capture what can't be done. It's a very particular experience, based on a very specific sort of application of GM force. Which is also to say, it's a long way from being the "typical" or "generic" or "default" RPG experience.The 4e rulebooks don't answer this question directly. By implication, from a wide range of passages spread throughout the PHB and DMG, it seems to be taken for granted that the table will work it out. It also seems to be assumed that many experienced RPGers will default to GM authority, and some reasons are explicitly given why other approaches might sometimes produce a better play experience.I didn't say an adverse outcome can't happen. I said it's not fore-ordained. Whether it happens or not depends upon the mechanics which, at least in 4e, is typically a check of some sort.I find this hard to interpret. The things that have hit points and saving throws are game constructs - and the role of those mechanical properties is to contribute to resolution of "moves" in the game. If the rules say that sometimes you do it this way and sometimes this other way (whether that be Survival skill, or an AD&D assassin' chance to assassinate, or the rule that victims of a Sleep spell can be killed even by a 1st level MU at the rate of 1 per round, or by framing a situation as a skill challenge rather than a combat) then there is no cheating.On the other hand, the thing that has free will is an imaginary being in an imaginary world. The way that we in the real world work out what it does with its free will is (or at least includes) the action resolution mechanics. Doing so isn't depriving the imaginary thing of its free will - its precisely a way of determining the content of the fiction which consists, among other things, in that free will's exercise.</blockquote>

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