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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8472586" data-attributes="member: 42582">I take arbitrary to mean something like unconstrained by reason.You seem to be using it to mean something like not admitting of a unique answer.Prince Valiant doesn't have rules for underwater combat. It does have an Agility skill (p 15):Agility - how agile and well-trained as an athlete the character is: how well he runs, swims, jumps, dodges, climbs, swings on ropes, and so on. . . . Agility plus Brawn is used when a character tries to move quickly or make a sudden action. . . . It is not used in normal combat, but can be attempted as a throw versus a Difficulty Factor to try a special tactic . . .A PC was in the water, trying to fight a "dragon" (actually a giant crocodile). The player had a Storyteller Certificate permitting one use of Kill a Foe in Combat  as Special Effect. The rules for that include the following (pp 44-46):The player should not know what Special Effects [NPCs] have, but they should be logical ones for the characters. For example, a beautiful girl is more likely to have the Effects of Incite Lust or Inspire Individual to Greatness than she would be to have Hide or Kill a Foe in Combat. . . . The user states that he is putting into action a Special Effect and reads it into the plot. . . . The Storyteller must create a reasonable explanation for the way in which the Effect takes place, in terms of the current situation. . . . The character must be in combat with the chosen foe at the moment [that Kill a Foe in Combat is used], and not in a disadvantageous situation (surrounded by enemies, injured, his back turned to the enemy). The selected character makes an attack, and the attack is miraculously successful, killing the foe instantly.What is required for it to be accepted, as part of the fiction, that the PC in question is in combat with the dragon and not in a disadvantageous situation, such that the Storyteller can create a reasonable explanation for the way in which the Effect takes place?There is no unique answer to this question. But it's not immune to reason. Here's how it played out at our table:And here is what happened to the other PC knights during the fight against the dragon:The difference between Sir Morgath swimming beneath the dragon to try and stab it in its soft underbelly, and Sir Gerren standing on the deck of the ship using his spear, was more than just flavour. It mattered to the framing and the resolution of the players' declared actions for their PCs. But it didn't depend on complex combat mechanics - it depended on using the very simple mechanics while having regard to the fictional positioning and fictional consequences.I agree with [USER=177]@Umbran[/USER] that different people might reasonably extrapolate in different ways, but it's not unconstrained, and the constraints are not invisible to the players. The player of Sir Morgath, for instance, had deliberately invested in his PC's Agility skill over multiple sessions, in order to compensate for his PC having lower Brawn than a typical knight. He was aware that this gave his PC a capacity to tackle the dragon that the other PCs lacked, and he was able to trade on that to establish the necessary fictional positioning to use his Storyteller Certificate. I think that's sufficient to show that the role of the fiction in action resolution wasn't arbitrary.</blockquote>

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