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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6862770" data-attributes="member: 42582">This is the second time in this thread that posters other than me have equated impact the fiction with do stuff that the GM normally does. (It happened earlier upthread, with [MENTION=6801328]Elfcrusher[/MENTION].)It seems pretty clear to me that [MENTION=59096]thecasualoblivion[/MENTION] wants to impact the fiction, but as a player, not as a GM. He (? I hope I've got this right) wants to be able to confidently declare actions for his PC, with a robust sense of how those action declarations will be adjudicated, and what the outcomes will be of rolling high or rolling low. And he wants to be able to bend the fiction to his will - eg when (as is PC) he desires that a monster or NPC be dead, he wants to have a robust mechanical capability to make this so, in the fiction. Hence the significance of DPR.This sort of desire to be able, as a player, to confidently engage with the fiction and shape it, has nothing to do with "using the powers of the DM". But, as I posted upthread, in many of the posts on this thread there is an implicit suggestion that wanting to impact the fiction in this sort of way is not a virtuous way to engage a RPG.Which is why I was reminded of Ron Edwards's point about "moving the planchette". He is not saying anything about who has authority over backstory (what, on ENworld, is often called "narrative mechanics"). He is referring to an approach to RPGing which effaces, rather than acknowledges, that the game proceeds by way of participants making moves that shape the fiction. If we think it is a virtue to ignore the ability to make such moves in building PCs; and to ignore that we are making such moves in declaring actions for PCs; then we are - it seems - trying to maintain a pretence that the planchette moves itself.In practice, what this tends to mean I think - at least for D&D - is that the GM does most of the moving. As we see in the suggestion that it is good RPing to choose a low-damage weapon for your fighter, which choice the GM will then make up for by throwing you a bone. Why not just let the player move the planchette him-/herself?</blockquote>

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