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Message: <blockquote data-quote="SteveC" data-source="post: 5080089" data-attributes="member: 9053">Interesting topic. I find this issue comes up a lot in situations where you don't know the GM very well, in a new game or at a con, but I still see it with some of my friends who GM after knowing them for a decade or more!I tend to break it down like this: when you attempt an action, you're taking into account the rules set, the genre, and most importantly, how your GM views both of those things. I really prefer transparent rules sets or those with universal mechanics as a result...so I have a good idea what to expect when I want to try something.I find that a lot of times in extremely rules light systems you end up "roleplaying the GM" to get your actions across, in that if what you want to do fits in with their worldview, you're golden...if not, it's just not going to happen.In the last few years I've been strongly influenced by some indie games, namely The Shadow of Yesterday and Burning Wheel when I'm running my own games: I like to cut through the chatter of what's" realistic" or "in genre" or what have you by clearly setting the stakes and defining what success or failure mean before rolling the dice. It's helped me get away from a lot of conflict that I was having from the end of my 3x days.My game of choice is 4E at the moment, and I found that once I started to say "what do you want to accomplish," followed by getting the player buy-in as far as the skill or other check we'd use to determine success, I got some very good roleplay out of both combat and non combat environments. It's to the point that when I ask people what they want to do, I get a chorus of "here's what I want, and here's how I think we should resolve it." That tends to make my group a lot happier with the results.</blockquote>

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