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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7602074" data-attributes="member: 42582">I'm not "smearing" anything - I'm enquiring about a particular aspect of the environment (namely, equipment) and who has principal authority over it.I don't think that having rope is a usurpation of GM authority. Because I think it's a clear exception to the GM's authority over establishing the environment.As for how play is going to involve friends and family consistently with the player having primary authority over the feelings of the PC: I'm waiting for the examples to illustrate. You see a person in front of you - she looks about fifty and has the bearing of a typical villager is narrating the environment. You see a person in front of you - she looks about fifty and has the bearing of a typical villager - in fact, she's your mum!, in a context where the player has a loving mum as part of his/her background, seems to be engendering and indeed coming close to dictating a particular feeling on the part of the PC.I didn't see exactly that sort of thing very often in AD&D play, but similar stuff using alignment rather than personal background as the lever was very common.Right. To me, that's what establishes the tension between GM establishes environment and player establishes character. Because if we take the backstory seriously, and take the GM's authority over environment seriously, then from time-to-time the GM will establish elements of the environment which, given the backstory, trigger a response from the character.************************Anyway, having made these posts about equipment and friends/family I found myself reading the intro pages to Burning Wheel Gold and noticed that the connection is made there too. (And maybe my drawing of the connection was triggered by having read an earlier edition of those pages sometime in the past decade.) From p 17:Let’s take a look at what comprises a character in this system: He has stats, attributes and skills; Beliefs, Instincts and traits; Resources, relationships, reputations, affiliations and Circles; and of course, he’s got his gear and stuff that he totes around with him.That's very close to the corresponding passage on p 4 of the 5e Basic PDF:Each character brings particular capabilities to the adventure in the form of ability scores and skills, class features, racial traits, equipment, and magic items.We have, in both, abilities and skills; features/traits; resources and gear. The BW character has Beliefs and Instincts - the closest analogue in 5e D&D is Ideals, Bonds and Flaws, which aren't mentioned on p 4. And then the BW character has relationships, reputations, affiliations and Circles.I don't think that the difference between objects that I bring into the game as extensions of me and persons that I bring into the game as extensions of me is self-evident. And I think that D&D itself has had features, over multiple editions, that illustrate the point: is a henchman a NPC (the official rule) or a second-tier PC (the frequent default in play which even the official rules give a pretty good nod to); what about a MU's familiar or a druid's animal friend/companion? Or even a charmed person or monster?Obviously there are ways of handling all this, and of formally or informally allocating the requisite authorities. It's been done, both at the system level and at the table level, again and again over decades of RPG design and RPG play. What I am asserting is that the GM has authority over the environment, the player authority over the character isn't enough to do this job. And if that's all a game gives you, then you're going to have to supplement it with intuitions or understandings drawn from elsewhere.That's not what I'm doing. I'm saying that you can't work out what is or isn't permitted, in the contrast between objects and people, simply by reiterating GM controls environment, player controls character. More specification - be that express or implicit - is needed. I've pointed to bits of the Basic PDF that I think do some of this, but frankly I also think it relies on some received understandings about how many RPGs, especially D&D, work.Yes, that was part of what led me to wonder about the example.I understand what you're saying here. But as I've said earlier in this post, I find it hard to see how that sort of play can (i) give all the authority around establishing those NPCs, who they are, what they're doing, etc to the GM and yet (ii) give the player all the authority to decide his/her PC's feelings.In bits of your post that I didn't quote, you talk about solving some of these issues by letting the GM override the player's account of what his/her PC believes. I assume you'd be prepared to do the same to make the sort of scenario you've described here work.</blockquote>

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