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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7341683" data-attributes="member: 42582">Well, in some systems player intention is - by the rules of the game - key to establishing what the action is and what it might accomplish.If the players declare actions intended to minimise strife, including (say) propaganda efforts, then as I said that can be factored into the check and the resolution.I don't see the agreement here. The "fictional positioning" is something that the GM has established, ie over which s/he has control. By drawing upon unrevealed/hidden/secret elements of the setting and backstory to adjudicate the consequences, the GM absolutely is exercising control. Whether that's a good or bad thing is orthogonal at this point - I'm just trying to get the analysis clear. No. I mean, there are games that actually work more-or-less as I've described, and they have GMs.Two things the GM does that are relevant to the current discussion are (i) establishing the framing and (ii) establishing and narrating the consequences of failure.Of course if the game is going to continue (ie assassinating the king isn't itself the endgame of the campaign) then new opposition has to emerge.  My view is that this new set of obstacles should not invalidate whatever success the players had in action declaration.So if, for instance, as part of the assassination resolution (be that skill challenge, or something else), the players have brought it about that the major houses have all entered into cooperation agreements with their PCs, then the obstacles that emerge should not (in my view) include the major houses turning on the PCs.Applying the general principle that you stated upthread, that there is no in-principle limit on the amount of opposition/obstacles I can think up for my game, I don't think it costs anything (from the point of view of the game going on) to honour the players' successes in establishing certain elements within the fiction. And this is - as I understand it - my point of disagreement with [MENTION=93444]shidaku[/MENTION]. I don't think resolving an assassination attempt against a king is, in principle, any different from resolving a negotiation with a baker over the price of a loaf of bread: if the check is framed, and the player succeeds, then it is established that the fiction is as the player wanted, be that that the baker will sell the loaf for a good price, or that the noble houses are allied with the PCs, and so won't just turn on them when the king is assassinated.A further comment: I think it is a very big deal in GMing to know when it is OK to put some settled bit of the fiction back into play. If you never do it, the game can lack depth and drama; but if you do it all the time, then (as I have just been describing) resolution lacks finality and the players' successes aren't being honoured. Burning Wheel has rules that deal with this, and GM advice to accompany those rules. Here are some of the things that, in BW, are considered to re-open a result which was hitherto final:discovering new information, being deceived or being betrayed; losing your vehicle, being lost, being found, or the weather taking a sudden, horrific turn for the worse; your finery being covered in filth or losing your precious possessions; learning a new spell, discovering a powerful artefact or earning a new trait; a miracle happening.Conversely, simply failing subsequent checks, or taking wounds, are not considered not to disturb finality of resolution.BW also has a more general principle that the consequences of failure should be known, either expressly stated before the dice are rolled or implicit in the situation. Combining that general principle with the above, and we can see that finality is not going to be disturbed unless the players have taken action which they know has the potential to generate some big deal consequence that might affect finality.A system like 4e or Cortex+ Heroic doesn't have such strict rules/guidelines around finality, but similar ideas can be used. So in the assassination example, it seems to me to be fair game to have the alliance between the PCs and the noble houses be disturbed if the players fail in action declarations intended to keep the PCs' roles in the assassination secret. It's implicit in being caught out as the assassin that previous allies might turn against you.But I don't think it should be fair game for the (hypothesised) alliance to fail just because the king has been killed and so times have become more tumultuous.The previous two paragraphs also illustrate my views about secret backstory: in the first of them, there's no secret backstory at work - it's the players's own failure (ie the PCs role in the assassination becomes known) that leads to them losing their alliance; in the second of them, I don't favour an approach where the GM relies on secret backstory (whether in the notes, or whether generated by the sort of "GM only play" that [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] argues for) to conclude that the noble houses would sever their alliances with the PCs to try and exploit the tumult.And to draw once again on what [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION] said about obstacles and their ubiquity - if the GM thinks it is interesting to make that alliance, and the stress that must be placed on it by the king's murder, a focus of play, well it's really easy to do that by way of framing, and then seeing what the players do in response. This could be as easy as a delegate from one of the allied houses coming to visit the PCs and proposing that they join together to find out who organised the assassination. If the players (as their PCs) refuse to cooperate, or try to persuade the allied house to let the matter go, well now we have some action declarations in which the players are clearly staking their alliance on the outcome of the appropriate social checks that would be needed to resolve such courses of action.</blockquote>

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