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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8245070" data-attributes="member: 42582">In the post you quoted, [USER=6696971]@Manbearcat[/USER] identified 4 ways (maybe 3 ways - objective/causal, genre, "rule of cool" - plus some blend thereof as a 4th).In Burning Wheel, difficulties are to be identified the first way: objective/causal. The rulebook has lots of examples (dozens, probably 100s - I haven't counted them all - many more than any version of D&D I've read and more than Rolemaster). It is vulnerable to the problem Manbearcat identified (of GM ignorance) but there are player-side tools to mitigate obstacles ("fate points" - in 5e D&D the analogue might be a clerical Bless or Guidance or a bard's Inspiration, but under the action-declaring player's control) and there are also player-side reasons to want high difficulties (for advancement reasons). The rules that guide failure narration (failure of intent, not necessarily of task) also mean that failure is not the cost either to verisimilitude (as Manbearcat worries about) or to progress in play that it might be in some approaches to D&D.In Cortex+ Heroic/MHRP, there are no difficulties. Every check is opposed; the appropriate dice pool is determined by the context of the attempted action in the fiction - if in doubt, the Doom Pool opposes. The Doom Pool thus becomes (among other things) a pacing device. It is comparable although less straightforward then the process for stepping up difficulties until someone fails then stepping them back found in HeroQuest Revised - which I would regard as the paradigm system for "subjective" difficulties.In the bit that I've bolded, my understanding is that this hard move might be narrated so as to determine the outcome of the action declaration prior to any sort of check.So as opposed to "saying 'yes'" rather than calling for a roll of the dice, it would be saying 'no' rather than calling for a roll of the dice.In Burning Wheel the rule is "say 'yes' or roll the dice" and so this sort of saying 'no' is prima facie out-of-bounds. It is taken for granted that we are talking about an action declaration that is already well-formed with respect to the fiction. In his Adventure Burner Luke Crane elaborates on this, and how what is already well-formed (my phrase, not his) might be connected to the GM's "big picture". The emphasis is on GM transparency. The rulebooks have a lot to say about how to integrate/reconcile GM "big picture" with player-authored PC dramatic needs, with various examples. It's the closest BW gets, at least as its designer present it, to the PbtA idea of "ask question and build on the answers". So if/when this sort of "saying 'no'" occurs, if it is a shock to the player then that means something has gone wrong in the play of the game. Not necessarily fatally wrong or irrecoverably wrong, but wrong nevertheless. I think this is different from the "living world" sandbox, where the player being shocked in this way is fair game.Soft moves are standard fare for scene-framing in BW (and for me, by extrapolation given how I approach it, Classic Traveller). You drop out of jump space at Planet X. You detect many Imperial vessels about - X must be under attack or interdiction is fair game. You drop out of jump space at Planet X - you're under fire from multiple Imperial vessels is not. The former opens the door to the use of Admin, Bribery, Liaison, Leadership etc to manage interactions with the NPCs - a core part of the game system - whereas the latter is (in Traveller) an incredibly hard move. (In a Star Wars-type game of course maybe that could be a fair soft move, opening up the door to raisings of shields, evasive action, powering down the droids, etc.)Is it fair, in Classic Traveller, for the GM to frame You drop out of jump space at Planet X. You detect many Imperial vessels about - the same armada that you were previously fleeing from and that surely recognise your ship? That would be highly, highly contextual. It's like the framing being You wake to find the assassin standing over you, a knife at your throat. In a lot of context that might be an unfair hosing of the player. But in some it might not be.</blockquote>

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