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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7334699" data-attributes="member: 42582">This is true.My response to this is slightly round about.My own experience is that play becomes more engaged, and visceral, when the stakes reflect player buy in, rather than a GM-established McGuffin. A very large number of modules involve McGuffins ("fetch quests" are the paradigm; just today I saw a post which suggested that it is good GMing to require a PC to go on a quest to get ingredients for the magic item that s/he wants for his/her PC).I don't think that the GM establishing what the game is about has to involve McGuffins. But I think it can.If the GM buys into the players' stuff and embellishes it and works with it, I find the engagement and visceral nature of play increases. That's a mixture of aesthetic preference (    [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] upthread said he doesn't want pressure when playing; for me it's pretty vital, and McGuffins are the enemy of pressure in the relevant sense as the pressure is purely tactical/operational, not gut-wrenching) and generalization from experience. Both are prone to idiosyncrasy!It depends on the table and its function.Sticking to the Traveller example, I've used several random tables. I'll try to break them down.Some are, in effect, action resolution mechanisms:* random patron (doesn't block anything - I let the player make the roll, adding one for Carousing skill - it's a type of action resolution, the declared action being "I hang out in the TAS lounge to see if anyone wants/needs my services); * random reaction (doesn't block anything - I let the player make the roll, adding appropriate mods for skills - it's a type of action resolution, the declared action being roughly along the lines of "I want to establish a friendly connection with these people); * random starship encounters (doesn't block anything - the action declaration is "We leave the system in our ship" which triggers a check at that point and again at the point of entering the new system - I once again let the player make the roll).Then there are the random person and animal encounters. These aren't really a type of action resolution; they're more like random framing devices, for generating new content periodically. They don't block anything. Both these and the starship ones do give rise to a different issue - namely, they require some deft GMing to keep things going "where the action is" - the modest level of abstraction at which they deliver results (roughly speaking, beings but not purposes) helps here.Random world generation is similar to the random person and animal encounters - it's a way of generating framing.One bit of randomness that could block, and which I am therefore not using, is to actually generate the whole sector map via the random method the book recommends. Our starmap has been generated by me rolling up individual worlds but putting them into play, and in relation to one another, in a way that responds to the demands of action resolution and "go where the action is" framing.Another bit of randomness that could block, but which I am using, is the presence of Psionics Institute branches on worlds. The rule here is first the GM rolls randomly to see if there's one present; the player then rolls to see if s/he can find it, but can't succeed on that check if the GM's roll means there is not one there. When this rule came into play, it actually did block. And the strongest lover of Burning Wheel in my group was the one who experienced the blocking and he DIDN'T LIKE IT; he very strongly felt that it should hinge on the resolution of his action declaration (which is how a Traveller Streetwise check is handled).Why am I using a rule that goes contrary to my preferences and that has irritated one of my players? Two reasons: I want to play the game more-or-less as written, to get the "Traveller experience"; and the rule is there to make getting psionics fairly hard, and I'm happy for that part of the game experience to be delayed a bit because it will change the nature of the game once this player's PC does develop psionics.Why not just ban psionics, then? See the first of my two reasons. But then why, given that reason, am I not using sector-mappig? Because (i) I contain multitudes etc, and (ii) that would have such a ubiquitous blocking effect that it would make the game effectively unplayable for me, and so on that point Traveller has had to yield.I could have worked out an alternative Psionics Institute rule that puts it all on the player action declaration side but roughly preserves the likelihoods of finding one, but that would have required doing maths that I didn't get around to doing. And would have involved a departure from the first reason.This isn't how D&D handles combat (subject to a qualification in the next paragraph). In combat the player doesn't have to describe what the player does (other than the very generic "I attack with my sword"); and the GM doesn't decide the outcome - we roll to hit dice, and damage dice, and track hit point totals, and some (not all) of us track figures on a map, etc.I agree with you for non-combat, though, in contemporary D&D (I don't know that it was always thus, but it has been at least since 2nd ed and its NWP system). Also, GM fudging of hit point totals or monster to hit rolls or monster AC will tend to change the character of combat to being what you described. That's why upthread, in reply to   [MENTION=59082]Mercurius[/MENTION], I described this approach to player action declarations as the player making suggestions to the GM as to how the fiction might be developed.I posted a lot about this upthread. The difference I see is that in your orc example the player knows the fictional positioning - the GM has framed something, and the player has to deal with it. (If the player declared an action to sneak within dagger distance of the orc, and the GM fiated failure, that's a further matter, but I hope you're happy for me to assume that the player finds his/her PC at sub-optimal distance from the orc either as the result of a failed check, or in other circumstances where the GM was at liberty to frame the PC, and thereby the player, into adversity.)In the case of the hidden document, the player doesn't know the fictional positioning - it's secret fictional positioning, secret backstory that leads to failure.Upthread we also discussed invisible opponents, or NPCs in social encounters with hidden motivations or quirks. My view about these is that they're fair game if (i) the hidden stuff is knowable by the players within the current framing, and (ii) the hidden stuff in some sense is salient (because if not salient then, in practice, not knowable even if knowable in principle), and (iii) the failure to find the hidden stuff won't be a "rocks fall" moment.Obviously factors (ii) and (iii) in particular are highly contextual - I would take more liberties playing with friends than with strangers.My view is that the hidden document - which in this thread has served as placeholder for the generic "clue", or the generic thing that is central to the unfolding of play - violates (iii), and may well violate (ii) if the GM has decided that it's hidden in some largely arbitrary or unlikely place (my example upthread was the breadbin in the kitchen).This obviously isn't exact science, but what is motivating my comments here is that the practical result of the map being hidden in the breadbin is that quite a bit of the actual episode of play, at the table, will be the players declaring moves for their PCs that trigger the GM to narrate stuff about the rooms of the house being searched by the PCs until eventually they think to search the breadbins and the GM tells them they find the map. Because of issue (iii) the play couldn't continue without that moment taking place; because of issue (ii) it is an extended period of play; and thus a lot of time is spent on something where the players exercise little agency and the game doesn't really move forward.Contrast: there are two scroll cases in the study, one with the rune of Ioun and one with the rune of Vecna, and one of the PCs is an invoker who is affiliated with both these (mutually opposed) deities, and finding the map in one or the other would count as a big reveal. We now have (i) and (ii) both satisfied, so no risk of a type (iii) misfire because the hidden thing is going to be revealed. Personally I would be quite comfortable with this sort of framing.Between the two examples - of breadbins, and of two scroll cases on the desk - lie a range of other possibilities which differ as far as (i), (ii) and (iiii) are concerned. It's not an exact science. But I've tried to explain why I incline to one end of the spectrum, and the method I use to try and satisfy myself that that's where I am.I definitely agree with this - that is, the influence of a certain approach to D&D play and module design.</blockquote>

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