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<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8238012" data-attributes="member: 42582">I'm not really interested in a term, because the phenomenon is largely a spurious one.All action declarations change the fiction if they are successful. Something changes. Whether that change is the orc is dead or a secret door is discovered.The concept of &quot;narrative power&quot; rests on a premise that the second sort of change in the fiction is different from the first. But from the point of view of authorship they are no different. The difference consists partly in topic: the first is about the state of a living thing, the second about the details of the architecture. Because the latter but not the former is typically thought of as a setting element, the notion of &quot;narrative power&quot; is coined. But it rests on that thought which is particular to some specific approaches to RPGing.What is useful is to talk about action declarations, and how they are resolved. When is the GM allowed to dictate outcomes without the players having any chance to get what they want for their PCs (eg that they find a secret door)? And when is that not the case? Answering those questions won't tell us everything about differences of approach, but it will certainly capture some key differences between (to pick two sharply contrasting RPGs) Moldvay Basic and Burning Wheel.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 8238012, member: 42582"] I'm not really interested in a term, because the phenomenon is largely a spurious one. All action declarations change the fiction if they are successful. Something changes. Whether that change is [I]the orc is dead[/I] or [I]a secret door is discovered[/I]. The concept of "narrative power" rests on a premise that the second sort of change in the fiction is different from the first. But from the point of view of authorship they are no different. The difference consists partly in topic: the first is about the state of a living thing, the second about the details of the architecture. Because the latter but not the former is typically thought of as a [I]setting element[/I], the notion of "narrative power" is coined. But it rests on that thought which is particular to some specific approaches to RPGing. What is useful is to talk about action declarations, and how they are resolved. When is the GM allowed to dictate outcomes without the players having any chance to get what they want for their PCs (eg that they find a secret door)? And when is that not the case? Answering those questions won't tell us everything about differences of approach, but it will certainly capture some key differences between (to pick two sharply contrasting RPGs) Moldvay Basic and Burning Wheel. [/QUOTE]

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