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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8742573" data-attributes="member: 82106">The statement I bolded here is HIGHLY ideological. It represents only one specific school of thought on RPG design, and arguably not even the most prevalent today (in terms of RPG designers considering it true). In fact in terms of how I think about GMing such an idea is either antithetical or irrelevant.But I have seen no evidence whatsoever that any proposal you have put forward would achieve this. I think [USER=42582]@pemerton[/USER] has quite convincingly argued that this will fall entirely to the GM in trad-like play.How will it do so? Specifically, how will it move the decision as to when a goal is accomplished from the GM's purview to that of the player (or even shift it in that direction)? I mean, your very words reveal that the GM is going to decide and has to exercise some skill in deciding what 'string of successes' should be considered sufficient! This IMHO is not player agency.What is the point of this comment? I mean, first of all you presuppose something as an axiom that is patently not even close to ever holding in real play, like by a humongous margin! And then what is the point you think follows from that? That in a state of perfect knowledge of fiction (and presumably every skill, discipline, scientific knowledge, etc. that could bear on answering questions about it) we wouldn't need dice? I utterly grant this supposition, but since it is completely unrealistic I am going to disregard it as irrelevant to any practical discussion of RPGs!I don't understand what about SCs prevent that. I mean, 4e generally leans heavily on the conceit of 'level appropriateness', so DCs are almost always close to the PC's level, and the fiction is then described in such a way as to plausibly fall within the range of 'heroic', 'paragon', or 'epic' in its scale and tone. So, at 1st level the PCs approach this SC and the bad guys are goblins, etc.Well, I would describe a GM who is the sole source of the fiction and topics of play as being 'in charge' of the game. I can only repeat what I said that you responded to, try playing some games that are not designed to work in the specific way that you seem to think is how an RPG must work. There are many more things under the Sun than you can imagine!Sure, but how many tasks must you succeed at to save the badgerhorse? The GM is going to decide that, not the player. And the GM is largely going to determine when it would be appropriate for the badgerhorse to 'die', etc.No, because the GM in your model is the complete arbiter of what the situation is which needs to be resolved! No amount of detailed specification of effects of actions matters here! Nor is such a thing practically possible anyway.And how slippery is the floor? Is it possible that the landing spot is unsafe? There are a bazillion factors which can effect what happens, and what is in the universe of things which could POSSIBLY happen. Nobody can enumerate them all. This is not really such a huge deal in terms of adjudicating actions, actually. It is a MUCH MUCH bigger deal though in terms of adjudicating fictional position and appropriate scene framing. None of that can be done objectively, at all.And you still have not explained how it is that you think any of this can happen in an objective fashion! What comes next after the character takes a certain action and the rules say "OK, you succeed, the effect is X." Now a new situation exists, what is that? Who decides what it is? Who chooses what happens when the characters go down the path to the left? Suppose they decide to bushwhack instead of going left or right? Now what? Surely the GM cannot have considered all these possibilities and there's no conceivable way that a game system can cover every possible action, including the salient facts bearing on its outcomes, that could exist.Nobody is claiming that free unstructured play isn't highly doable, it certainly is. Many gradations exist too, like hexcrawling, where there are some rules but the PCs can still do 'anything' basically. Or dungeon crawling where some structured rules exist (say in B/X) but you can still do whatever. It isn't a question of if all these can exist. The actual observation of the OP was simply about the evolution of techniques of play within the scope of SCs. So maybe we should call this side discussion to an end and get back to the main one, lol. I think we're never going to get closer to agreement than we are, although I think you have made some interesting observations on some related stuff, which I have enjoyed.</blockquote>

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