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Message: <blockquote data-quote="SweeneyTodd" data-source="post: 4329210" data-attributes="member: 9391">One way to look at it is something that some games label the "Free and clear phase", which is that time that you're all sort of kibitzing over what might happen next but it's not decided yet. (That phase doesn't formally exist in a lot of game rules, but regardless, it happens, even if it's only during the action declaration phase or somesuch.)Stuff during "free and clear" is explicitly *not* happening in the game world. It takes some kind of consensus to resolve that stuff down into "what happens". For D&D, one example is "I chop the orc's head off", roll, hit, injured but not killed, DM describes the outcome. We didn't have to do any mental gymnastics to understand that the player is attempting to attack from what he said.So what is it that locks down "what really happens"? Depends on the game, but usually it's the GM's decision. He says "The orc staggers and bleeds", okay, we can all picture that.Well, in those dirty Let's Pretend RPGs, sometimes either it's not just the GM's decision, or the "free and clear" phase is a lot more open, but it's still the GM's decision what to include. It depends on the system. (And to be honest, this kind of thing can happen informally in any game. Any time someone's listened to their players come up with theories as to what the Big Bad is up to and then thought, "Hey, I like that, I'm gonna steal it", they've done it. In that case the GM signing off on the input happened much later.)My point is that even a game where the player can describe meeting someone on the road and introduce them as a new character is still using the same basic systems as a traditional RPG, just for different purposes and in different ways. Whether or not you're comfortable with the players having narrative power is a separate issue from whether or not it's possible to do so in an RPG. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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