NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9081198" data-attributes="member: 42582">There seems to be a conflation, here, of events and probabilities in the real world, and events and probabilities in the fiction.What is the likelihood, in the fiction, that some person should go through all these adventures and grow in power from irrelevance to superhero or demigod? Near enough to zero. What is the likelihood, in the real world, that a 5e D&D PC will go through many adventures and grow in power from irrelevance to superhero or demigod? Quite good - the game is designed and its many adventure paths written to produce just that outcome.What is the likelihood, in the fiction, that some cupboard or other will have a magic sword in it? Near enough to zero.What is the likelihood, in the real world, that the imagined events in a RPG will reflect the preferences of the participants? Reasonably high. What about the player participants? Reasonably high, if those players have agency. In a game with high player agency, if the player is hoping and expecting that their PC might find a sword in a cupboard, then there is a good chance that such a thing will come to pass in the fiction.The answer to this question is fairly straightforward:In Burning Wheel, it is the job of the GM "to challenge and engage the players" by "introducing complications to the story and consequences to the players' choices" (Revised p 268; the same text is found in Gold). And as pp 12-13 explain,players take on the roles of characters . . .  represented by a series of numbers . . . and a list of player-determined priorities. . . . Manipulating these numbers and priorities within situations presented by the game master (GM) is what the game is all about. . . . The conflicts of the characters' aforementioned priorities creates (sic) situations for the players to resolve, and resolving conflicts (and creating new ones) is what play is all about.So we shouldn't even be hearing about a cupboard, or a pickler called Horace, or the possibility of a magic sword, unless it somehow pertains to a player-authored priority, and hence is part of a situation in which challenges to those priorities, and/or conflicts, complications or consequences resulting from them, are present.The only time a player declared a Scavenging test to find a magic item, in my play, was when the PCs, after being marooned in the Bright Desert, had successfully made their way north to the Abor-Alz, and to the tower where the sorcerer PCs had studied with his brother (as per his backstory, which included two Rogue Wizard lifepaths; a hostile relationship with his brother, with the hostility pertaining to the reasons why they had been driven out of their tower; an affiliation with a sorcerous cabal, and a reputation as a minor illusionist; his PC sheet also included a picture of the tower, a photo of an Indian castle taken from the interwebs).At the start of the session where the PCs had returned to the tower, the player announced an additional bit of backstory - prior to being driven out of the tower, his PC had been crafting a nickel-silver mace (the Falcon's Claw) in anticipation of enchanting it. This did not violate any credibility test, and in fact seemed rather consonant with the already-established character and backstory. The PC therefore searched through the ruined tower, looking for the Falcon's Claw. A Scavenging check was called for, and failed. Thus the PC did not find what he was looking for: instead, he found something unlooked for - cursed black arrows in what had been his brother's workroom, which were significant because they seemed to indicate that his brother had been evil before the downfall of their tower, whereas the PC's plans for reconciliation with his brother had all rested on a premise that it was only afterwards that his brother had been corrupted.This is an example of how searching is framed and resolved in a game that relies on player agency rather than GM notes to handle such things.</blockquote>

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