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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7336419" data-attributes="member: 42582">From what you've said, I'm going to try a conjecture. Hopefully it does not misfire too badly!It sounds like the player interest in the shades led you (perhaps also informed by your own interest/enthusiasm?) to make up some internal details about the shades, which you were then able to use as elements of framing as the PCs dealt with the shades.Comparing that to my own 4e game, it reminds me a bit of when the PCs arrived in the stronghold of the duergar, I came up with the idea for two factions among the duergar, with different attitudes towards the PCs' desire to take the duergar's fragment of the Rod of Seven Parts. A possible point of difference (again, conjecture at best) is that my framing made it reasonably clear that there were two fractins: by the way the PCs were housed (some were treated well; others, deemed too chaotic, were under house arrest); by the way NPCs approached the PCs; etc.With resolution, it sounds like the players engaged with the situation and thereby learned some of this stuff that you had worked out; and then declared actions that traded on those ascertained elements. It sounds as if the framing of the action declarations relied rather heavily on an implicit sense, among the participants, of what might be at stake; and left it to the GM to work out the details for successes as well as failure.To pull back to some analysis, and without prejudging but trying to use some comparators that the thread has given us: [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] gave us an example, upthread (the scuffle, the charming of the NPC, the resultant attempt on the Duke's life) where the GM works out all the details behind the scenes in a way that is not transparent to the players and gives them little agency.Alternatively, I can imagine the use of action resolution to - in effect - establish some elements of situation/framing: so the players know, roughly at least, what is going on (unlike Lanefan's example), and declare actions to try and establish new elements of the framing (eg the Shade ambassador meets with us and willingly accepts our gift). But then the actual unfolding of the situation is left to the GM's free narrations, extrapolating from the change in the situation resulting from the action declaration. The players might input loosely/informally into this, but in a formal sense the GM is doing it. However, that informal element of player input can give this some flavour, at least, of the GM saying "yes".I think the approach I've just described manifests player agency; personally, I think it can be a bit "weak" in the sense that the players don't quite have to lay it all on the line, because at the ultimate moment of crunch the GM is making the decisions about extrapolation.I think that, if the players are aware of what's going on in the fiction (unlike Lanefan's example) and have a sense of what might be a bit "weak" in what I've described, the pressure can emerge to drift resolution more, and more often, towards player action declarations that don't just try and add elements to the framing but triest to generate concrete outcomes directly (eg having accepted our gift, the Shade ambassador agrees to our proposal). That's what I would think of as outcomes fully driven by action resolution. (In 3E one problem with this would be the broken maths of the Diplomacy skill; I'm assuming that the system's underlying maths works.) One force that pushes towards this is that, as the game unfolds, the stakes get higher and the sense that the GM can simply extrapolate the situation in a fair way from the established elements of framing reduces. (Back when I used to GM Rolemaster, this sort of development in play was not uncommon. It also accompanied an evolving sense, in the campaign, of how social resolution worked: RM has social skills, but the resolution is wonky enough that the table needs to establish a shared understanding of how they can be deployed and resolved; the rules themselves won't give that indpenedently of some sort of concrete table consensus.)Of the three approaches I've described - no player agency; player agency but GM carries the weight for the "crunch"; full player agency with resolution determining outcomes - my sense is that the play you described may have been (roughly) in the second category; my prediction is that, if that was so, it will have generated internal pressure in the game to drift towards the third category. If anything I've said is remotely on target, I'd be interested in knowing if my conjecture and prediction are at all right, and (if so) how you felt the game play may have evolved as stakes and player investment stepped up.</blockquote>

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