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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7327122" data-attributes="member: 42582">OK, in this respect our experiences differ.That's not to say that anyone's pre-authored setting was not rich, but rather to say that I'm pretty happy with the setting that emerges out of my gameplay. <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?484945-Session-report-the-Mausoleum-of-the-Raven-Queen" target="_blank">Here's an illustrative example, which has some discussion of how the setting was established during the play of the session.</a> (I had mapped the Mausoleum in advance and written up some stats for the hazards and the inhabitants - 4e likes maps and stats, and if these are going to have any intricacy they do need to be prepped in advance - whether in a module, or a Monster Manual, or by oneself; and I'd written a riddle for my sphinx; but all the details of the murals, statues, visions etc were established during play, relying on a mixture of imagination and the prior events of play).This keeps recurring in this thread - a misleading characterisation of action resolution procedures - and I don't get it, as I've described them many times.So to repeat (again): consider a completely ordinary encounter with a randomly encountered creature in a bog-standard D&D game. The players ask "Does it look friendly, or not?" The GM rolls on the reaction tabloe, and then answers as appropriate.The attitude of the creature was not pre-authored. The need to decide what it's attitude is is triggered by the player asking the question in response to the GM's initial framing of the situation. We could analyse it like this: the GM's initial framing of the situation tells the players that their PCs encounter a creature. But that framing is missing some point of detail that the player cares about, namely, the apparent attitude of the creature. So the player asks about that detail, and the referee then rolls to determine it. The result of that roll enriches the framing of the situation - perhaps in a way tha the player was hoping for (if the creature is friendly, one assumes - unless the player is looking for an excuse to start a fight!), perhaps not.This model of introducing fictional content is generalisable. Not only is it generalisable, but there are oodles of games, inlcuding D&D 4e, which generalise it! (For the clearest 4e example, see the example of skill challenge resolution presented in the Essentials Rules Compendium.)So, in the example of the PCs travelling down the road - presumably they are looking for something. (If they're just walking from pre-established A to pre-established B, with nothing at stake in the journey per se, then let's just call it done - "say 'yes'" - and move on!) The player asks, "OK, we've travelled out into the wilderness, is there any sign of the <whatever it is that the PCs are looking for>?" A check is made, and if it succeeds the GM answer yes (with whatever detail or embellishment is appropriate, given the group's shared understanding of the situation, of what is acceptable GM gloss on a success, etc); if it fails, the GM answers no, and imposes some suitably adverse consequence - "Your wandering is taxing you, and you're nearly out of food, and you still haven't found it - what do you do?"That is not the players deciding what's down the road; it's the players declaring actions for their PCs, on the basis of a good knowledge of what their PCs care about, and the GM adjudicating the outcomes of those action declarations in accordance with "say 'yes' or roll the dice" plus "fail forward" for the adverse consequence.(Without "fail forward", you need some other technique for dealing with retries. I had to deal with this fairly recently in my Traveller game, because it doesn't use "fail forward", and instead mostly manages retries either through it's rules for the passage of time - so if you're in your starship your life support only lasts for so many days, and so with one chance to fix the engines per day, you only get so many tries before the PCs all asphyxiate - or through a flat-out "no retries" rule. But it's mechanics for overland exploration don't have a no retries rule and don't have time constraints like starship activities do, and hence are - in my view - the weakest part of the ruleset, as they easily lead - I can report from experience - to rather boring play with dice being rolled although nothing significant is at stake.)Well, tell that to [MENTION=59082]Mercurius[/MENTION]. He was the one who said that it is the GM's story, and the players are actors - and it was that contention that I was responding to.Well, I guess all the action is in the words "We'd play out the scenario." I was wondering how, in actual practice, this would work. Eg what sorts of actions might be declared, and how would they be adjudicated?If the GM determines "how the world reacts", that seems to make the content of the story rather heavily dependent on the GM's decisions. The players can make it true that, in the fiction, some person tried to do this thing (eg tried to pick up a rock and throw it; tried to find some information about a cult's theology in a library); but that seems to be about it.An alternative approach, as I've sketched above, is to use the action resolution mechanics to determine what happens when a player declares an action for his/her PC (which might include the rather "passive" action of trying to ascertain whether a person seems friendly or hostile).As to why I care about how it is done, see my post not far upthread of this one: as a player, I want to play my character, not someone else's conception of my character; and as a GM (which is my more typical situation) I want to enjoy seeing my friends play their characters, and find out who they are and what they do. I don't want to read/tell them stuff that I already made up. The actual play post that I linked to in this post above should give you an illustration of what I mean by that.</blockquote>

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