Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8648181" data-attributes="member: 42582">Well, you did use the adjective "big" which was the premise for my use of "smaller".Also, what exists in the world is not different from - in the sense of independent of - what the main character does.If the character looks for secret doors, and it is already established (in GM notes, or by way of other GM decision-making) that there are no secret doors, then one thing the character is doing is searching futilely for secret doors. And the GM's decision is as fundamental as the player's in making that description true.Also: the point made in the previous paragraph is pretty central to how classic D&D dungeon mapping, traps-and-tricks play works. The reason why skilled play is possible in that sort of game, and why players can beat the dungeon or fail to beat the dungeon, is precisely because what is at stake in their action declarations is not solely under their control. They have to "guess" (not necessarily randomly, but using their knowledge of the fiction as revealed so far, their knowledge of the tropes and genre, their knowledge of the GM) as to what descriptions might be true of possible actions, so as to work out which ones to take and which ones to avoid.Contrast with Cortex+ Heroic or even Apocalypse World: if an action fails, the way in which it fails or the description under which it fails is established after the dice are rolled, as part of the consequence narration. There was no prior description, flowing from GM decision-making, which already imposed a true description of the action as futile or failing.You can't have the "onion" to explore without also recognising that the GM makes decisions that determine, in advance, true descriptions of the actions the players declare for their PCs.</blockquote>

Verification