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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7347112" data-attributes="member: 42582">The post just upthread of this one was written this morning but only got posted now when I reacquired internet access. This post tries to pick up some more of what has gone on in the meantime.This is generally true. But, as I posted in response to [MENTION=99817]chaochou[/MENTION] upthread in our discussion of the "Czege principle", the Jabal episode in my BW game did have the same structure as his dragon example (player says "I need help from the cabal: Jabal is a leader of the cabal in Hardby, and might help me"). And I can remember another Circles check that looked like this too - when the PCs were shipwrecked following their complete failure to stop a haunted ship being sunk by ghouls (an adaptation to our BW game of the Penumbra module Maiden Voyage), the elf princess made a Circles check to see if the elven sea captain whom that player had written up while playing around with the PC gen rules was out on the ocean looking for her. This was another case where the player had written up the story element (the sea captain) and the existence of said NPC was taken as a given prior to actually making the check.I'm trying now to see if I can think of example from my 4e game. This might count as one: early in the campaign (1st or 2nd level) one of the PCs - the wizard devotee of the Raven Queen - died. I asked the player whether he wanted to stick with the character, and he did - he felt the PC's story wasn't fully told yet. So then I asked him why the Raven Queen would send him back - the death had happened fighting in the vicinity of an old Nerathi ruin, and so the PC decided that Erathis and the Raven Queen would send the character back into life to recover an important item from that ruin - the Sceptre of Erathis, also known as the Sceptre of Law, which - some time later - I decided to treat as the first stage of the Rod of Seven Parts. The player there established the need of some NPCs (Erathis and the Raven Queen) and the answer to that need (send Malstaph back into the world to restore the Sceptre of Law and thereby restore order to the land).So maybe I'm not as conservative as I thought! (But still more than [MENTION=99817]chaochou[/MENTION], I daresay.)Your last paragraph is what I was getting at quite a bit upthread, when I said that I want to play my character, rather than be driven by the GM.As far as the Vecna scenario is concerned, I'm trying to recall things from over 20 years ago (it was back when I was GMing a University club game) and so memory is not perfect. I've said some stuff in other recent posts in this thread, but to summarise: the player was playing a mage who was part of an ancient and surviving Sueloise order, and (as was often the default for this player) was seeking world domination; Vecna was introduced into the situation by me, as a member of the same order but who had gone into sleep (or lichdom or whatever - details are forgotten!) back in the time when the Suel Empire was a real thing - and when the PCs woke him he was surprised by the changes that had happened in the intervening millenium or so; the PC tracked down Vecna (I think - or at least answered an invitation) and sort an alliance; and then the whole Rel Astra thing fell out of that.I don't remember what other options were on the table at the time, but I know it was controversial with the other players that the PC should make this alliance with Vecna - especially because, while he was off doing that in the general vicinity of the Baklun lands (the west of the GH double map), the other PCs got into strife following an operation in the Wild Coast or Pomarj (middle of the double map) and felt that, had Xanthos been there, things would have worked out much better!It felt relatively agentic at the time, and I don't think my contemporary glasses are too rose-coloured, though I would guess that my handling of some of the elements of it probably wasn't quite as elegant as I would hope to be able to pull off these days. Agreed. This is not too different from what I posted just above this post, though I discussed it in terms of how I would frame it and handle narration, rather than as part of a discrete "interlude" mechanic. But like you, no check!The example [MENTION=99817]chaochou[/MENTION] posted made me think first of Dungeon World (which itself is based on Apocalypse World, but I know DW better as a system, though have only limited play experience with it): DW is a 2d6 system, and adds are generally fairly modest, and the default spread for any check is 10+, get what you want; 7 to 9 either miss out, or take what you want but get a complication to go with it; 6 or less, sucks to be you. That's the generic structure: there are a lot of detailed versions of it (eg for fighting, for searching, for avoiding dange, etc) and they put more detail into the sorts of complications or upsets the GM is empowered to establish on the results below 10.Burning Wheel (which I know better than DW, and have a lot more play experience with) has as the official rule that every check has explicit failure consequences established (the consequences of success are also explicit: the player's intention is realised). But in his GM advice book for the system - the Adventure Burner (which I think is a first rate advice book for non-BW GMs also) - Luke Crane admits that at his table he doesn't always follow the official rule. Often he just allows the consequence of failure to be implicit in the situation, relying on his players' knowledge of him as a GM plus the shared knowledge everyone has of what's going on in the game and what it is that would count - given where the play is at - as "sucks to be you". In my own BW GMing I often use a similar approach, letting the situation carry the weight of signalling consequences.Sometimes this is a bit lazy - there have been occasions when a player's check fails, and it turns out, now that we're all forced to look at it, that the situation wasn't quite as fraught in quite as clear a way as it seemed going in, and so establishing the proper consequence takes more effort and is perhaps a little more strained than it should be. But more often, I find that the adverse consequence flows pretty naturally out of the situation.So when the Circles check to meet Jabal was failed, none of the players was remotely surprised or taken aback by Athog - Jabal's hired help - turning up at the inn where they were taking lunch and telling them to move on, while looking warily at the feather that Jobe was carrying. Or when the PCs got lost in the catacombs trying to get to Jabal's tower to protect Jobe's brother from the assassin (whom they had drugged with a sleeping potion, to help make sure they were able to get there first), it was clear that a failed check was going to cause them to get lost and so lose time. And when I then told them that, as they come up to a street-level grille to try and get their bearings, they saw the assassin their looking down and taunting them, they were horrified but not (as players) shocked - when you set up your headstart, but then squander it wandering through the catacombs, well you might lose it again.One thing that I personally think is important - and I try to be much more systematic about it than I would ever have been back in the Xanthos, Xialath and Vecna days - is letting the players know what number they need to roll.In a game like BW or 4e this is absolutely crucial, so they can decide what resources to throw at the problem (action points and powers in 4e, fate points in BW, etc). In Cortex+ Heroic everything is also done in the open, but often the players have to go first and so only get to choose what target number to set the GM (everything in that system is an opposed roll, with the GM rolling the Doom Pool if there is no NPC opponent involved) - this sets my players on edge as they have to decide blind how much to spend, but I think without it the GM would win even fewer rolls!In Traveller we're doing all rolls in the open too (except for the Psionics Institute ones - a strange rule, but I'm following it). The players don't have resources to spend like in some of those other games, but I still like the feel it gives. Even treating reaction rolls as player checks to exert social influence - which is how I handle it - makes it feel like the players are driving things, if only through it being about their luck rather than mine!</blockquote>

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