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: 9086106" data-attributes="member: 42582">In general, when playing a game there is a big difference between losing on a roll of the dice and having the other participants decide, by fiat, that I lose. I think this is obvious. It's also one basic premise from which the regulation of casinos flows.In the context of RPGing, what the dice rolls do, primarily, is establish the constraints around establishing new fiction - who gets to say it, and what they get to say. Just as, in craps, the dice are a mechanism for the allocation of money, so in RPGing the dice are a mechanism for the allocation of responsibility and constraints around who gets to say what.When I agree to play the game, I agree to the rules. Why do I want to play a RPG, which has rules that constrain what I and my friends can say about what happens next? Because it makes the resulting fiction more compelling, as per the quotes from Vincent Baker that I discussed in <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/why-do-rpgs-have-rules.697430/" target="_blank">this recent thread</a>.As I've posted, and as I've illustrated with multiple examples from actual play, the GM frames scenes and narrates consequences (especially consequences that flow from failure).A game in which the same participants frame the scenes, describe the actions of the protagonists, and say what happens next, is not a RPG (at least in the mainstream sense) - it's just coooperative storytelling. RPGing is more exciting than cooperative storytelling, because of the role division - for instance, it's more exciting for the players to have someone else work out, following a failed roll, how whatever it is that they've staked is lost. It's more exciting to respond to an external prompt than to your own imagining about what might go wrong.Eg - when I described Megloss conjuring up the Flames of the Shroud and incinerating Gerda, this prompted the player of the Dwarf PC to impassioned action (Megloss had just murdered the PC's friend). We saw this at the table through his grim face, the tone of his action declaration (thoroughly declarative, not at all tentative) and his expenditure of player resources (a Persona point spent to channel his Avenging Grudges Nature) to build a huge dice pool.This is what makes RPGing fun.</blockquote>

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