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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8298072" data-attributes="member: 42582">This thread is part of the family of recent "skilled play" and related threads.It's an invitation to talk about permissible action declarations, and how different sorts of approaches - especially in respect of details required - feed into the RPG experience.<a href="http://lumpley.com/index.php/anyway/thread/456" target="_blank">Here's one starting point</a> for thinking about the question:Here's a quick resolution mechanism. 1. We each say what our characters are trying to accomplish. For instance: "My character's trying to get away." "My character's trying to shoot yours." 2. We roll dice or draw cards against one another to see which character or characters accomplish what they're trying to accomplish. For instance: "Oh no! My character doesn't get away." "Hooray! My character shoots yours." What must we establish before we roll? What our characters intend to accomplish. What does the roll decide? Whether our characters indeed accomplish what they intend. What do the rules never, ever, ever require us to say? The details of our characters' actual actions. It's like one minute both our characters are poised to act, and the next minute my character's stuck in the room and your character's shot her, but we never see my character scrambling to open the window and we never hear your character's gun go off.In systems that require the player to declare a "task" - ie what the character actually does - how detailed ought that to be? And what difference does it make in varying that detail? A lot of OSR-ish inclined RPGers don't think the declaration I search the room and its content is detailed enough. But I think it would be pretty typical, even in OSR-ish play, for a player (of a ranger, say) to say I search the woods for tracks without having to comment on individual trees let alone individual blades of grass, and without differentiating various ways a creature might leave a trail.In the RPG session I GMed on Sunday one action declaration was I speak to the hunter about the spiritual merits of not eating meat - except fish on Friday, which scripture permits; the check was successful, and so in the fiction the NPC was persuaded to vegetarianism. A follow up action by another player was to teach the (ex-)hunter about living of the leaves and fruit, in exchange for reliving him of his heavy crossbow which he will no longer need - again this succeeded, and so one action declaration established (presumably) an extensive period of teaching and demonstration. At another point, an action declaration was I shoot a magically flaming crossbow bolt at the spectral warrior. This was a moment of the fiction. One effect of this variation in the fictional scope of action declarations is a literal cinematic feel, as the action zooms in and then zooms out again.But we certainly never learned every word spoken between the PCs and the hunter.</blockquote>

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