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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9773242" data-attributes="member: 42582">[USER=7034611]@mamba[/USER], I've quoted a series of your posts. And am trying to work out what your position is.At some points, you seemed to be talking about players' power: to declare actions, to avoid a narrow theme, etc.Now, you seem to be talking about a GM's power to decide what happens next without regard to mechanics or other rules.I don't see how all this is connected, or consistent. And that's before getting to its accuracy!My view is that, in classic D&D - OD&D, Gygax's AD&D, B/X - resolution is not all or even predominantly GM fiat. For instance, if the players declare that their PCs move X distance down a corridor; or that they open a door; then the game tells the GM how to say what happens next: in the first case, consult the map-and-key and tell the players what their PCs see and hear as they move through the dungeon; in the second case, call for an appropriate roll to open the door, and then consult the dungeon key to tell the PCs what they see and hear, and what (if anything happens), when they open the door.If the key contains secret information - like a pit trap half-way down the corridor, or a locked door - then the GM will draw on that information to tell the players what happens as the PCs do their things. But the GM is not at liberty to just make this stuff up! Eg the GM can't just decide it would be fun to have a pit here, and so narrate a PC triggering a pit trap. The GM has to be faithful to their map-and-key.These constraints on the GM, that arise from their fidelity to their map-and-key and to the associated rules for how to resolve actions like PCs moving, listening, opening doors, etc, are what makes "skilled play", of the sort that Gygax describes in his PHB, possible.The rules in AW are pretty different in their content from the classic D&D ones. They don't reference a map-and-key for resolution. They give the GM pretty different instructions about what prep to do. But these rules also constrain what the GM can say happens next. And whereas in classic D&D, players exercise control by (i) performing low-stakes actions (mapping, listening, etc) as preparation for then (ii) choosing which scenes to "trigger" by opening doors; in AW they exercise control by declaring actions that will trigger certain moves, that can oblige and constrain the GM in various ways. While the players are declaring actions that don't trigger moves, the GM has much more liberty to say what happens next, consistent with the general principles for making soft and hard moves.I agree that there is an approach to D&D, or actually a couple of approaches, that do give the GM a lot of freedom to just make up, or stipulate, what happens next. One of those is the GM-as-storyteller, more-or-less in the style of Dragonlance. The other is GM-as-world-mediator, where the players declared actions for their PCs serve as prompts for the GM to reveal and to extrapolate from bits of the "world". But while these seem to be popular approaches, they are only one possible way of approaching RPG play, and they don't even cover the field of D&D play.</blockquote>

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