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<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7345733" data-attributes="member: 42582">I agree that the player moves not being limited except by the shared fiction is a significant part of what distinguishes a RPG from a boardgame.But with bricking up the hobgoblins we also start to see possible limits. The players have an infinite number of ways of provoking the GM to tell them new stuff. But if it is the GM who is deciding what all that stuff is, I'm not sure that there is a lot of player agency there.Systems like reaction rolls, morale checks etc help fill the gap here, but you can see them breaking down even in Gygax's DMG, as he gives advice on how different sorts of dungeon inhabitants will respond to incursions with that advice being largely divorced from the game's social mechanics, and relying very heavily on GM extrapolation of the fiction. I can accept that free kriegsspiel is a thing, but once we're at the level of bricking up hobgoblin tunnels, or assassinating kings, I feel that we've moved beyond a referee model - an independent narrator of knowable consequences of player moves - to a situation of one party (the &quot;storyteller&quot;?) having the authority to establish the content of the fiction that results from action declarations.In my view, this is the impetus behind systems like skill challenges, or &quot;stakes&quot;-type approaches to resolution, which try to reintroduce finality of outcome into these sorts of situations. And of course there are less perfect systems too - I've used RM's rather feeble social mechanics to establish finality in social resolution, and I'm sure there's a way of using reaction and morale mechanics to adjudicate the hobgoblin's response to the wall.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 7345733, member: 42582"] I agree that the player moves not being limited except by the shared fiction is a significant part of what distinguishes a RPG from a boardgame. But with bricking up the hobgoblins we also start to see possible limits. The players have an infinite number of ways of provoking the GM to tell them new stuff. But if it is the GM who is deciding what all that stuff is, I'm not sure that there is a lot of player agency there. Systems like reaction rolls, morale checks etc help fill the gap here, but you can see them breaking down even in Gygax's DMG, as he gives advice on how different sorts of dungeon inhabitants will respond to incursions with that advice being largely divorced from the game's social mechanics, and relying very heavily on GM extrapolation of the fiction. I can accept that free kriegsspiel is a thing, but once we're at the level of bricking up hobgoblin tunnels, or assassinating kings, I feel that we've moved beyond a referee model - an independent narrator of knowable consequences of player moves - to a situation of one party (the "storyteller"?) having the authority to establish the content of the fiction that results from action declarations. In my view, this is the impetus behind systems like skill challenges, or "stakes"-type approaches to resolution, which try to reintroduce finality of outcome into these sorts of situations. And of course there are less perfect systems too - I've used RM's rather feeble social mechanics to establish finality in social resolution, and I'm sure there's a way of using reaction and morale mechanics to adjudicate the hobgoblin's response to the wall. [/QUOTE]

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