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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9490680" data-attributes="member: 42582">I get that, and am not meaning to impute any bad faith.But I'm focusing on the issue (hopefully without harping on it too much!) because I think it picks up a key issue that, although it recurs in discussion, seems often to be ignored - or not to have its full significance recognised.I was thinking of another (imaginary) example cycling home this afternoon: think of the example of play from Moldvay's Basic rulebook (B28, following on from B60 despite the lack of sequentiality), when the Hobgoblins turn up (due to a wandering monster role by the GM) and Silverleaf's player says thatSilverleaf steps forward with both hands empty in a token of friendship, and says "Greetings, noble dwellers of deep caverns, can we help you?"The example goes on:The DM decides that Silverleaf's open hands and words in the hobgoblins' language are worth +1 when checking for reaction. Unfortunately the DM rolls a 4 (on 2d6) which, even adjusted to 5, is not a good reaction.Suppose that the GM had decided that open outreached hands are taken as an insult by hobgoblins, and so had applied a penalty to the roll. I think that would be pretty outrageous! Whereas suppose the GM had introduced that fiction to explain the poor reaction result, then that would be integrating the unfolding fiction, plus the result of the roll, in a way that produces something interesting, has the sort of surprise you talked about (albeit for a gesture rather than an item, but hopefully you can see the point nevertheless), but doesn't involve the GM just springing a hosing on the players.The more general point is this, I think: declaring actions for their character is the most common and important sort of "move" that players make when playing a RPG. Having the GM just decide that things fail will tend to be a let down, or even experienced as adversarial. Whereas in a game that uses luck (ie dice rolls) to help determine whether moves succeed or fail, losing because you rolled badly is part of the game.I haven't quite thought through how this would work in the context of a magic item - the obvious way would be for use of the item to require a roll, and then to build up the fiction around failed rolls, but that may not work for D&D.Still, I hope you can see what I'm getting at, in contrasting play of the game with storytelling.</blockquote>

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