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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7358302" data-attributes="member: 42582">I was treating it as equivalent to "I look about for a vessel in the room that would allow me to catch the mage's blood.""I find a vessel . . ." I think is a valid action declaraiton only if (i) it's already established that the room is full of vessels, or (ii) the player is allowed to exercise fiat authorship.The standard approach to resolution under the "standard narrativistic model" is "say 'yes' or roll the dice".What "roll the dice" looks like is system-dependent. Some systems don't have a "roll the dice" option for a range of standard action declarations (eg spell casting in D&D) which can create some challenges - 4e tries to circumvent this issue by having the fiat authorship of a ritual or a daily power count as only one success in a skill challenge, leaving dice to be rolled for other actions within the context of the skill challenge.Your (1) is saying "yes". Your (3) is rolling the dice. Your (2) looks like a version of establishing notional (rather than literal) notes. Part of the difference between (2) and (3) is that (3) allows player decision-making (eg build decisions; resource expenditure, such as fate points in some systems) to manifest.When this actually came up in my Burning Wheel game, I followed the rules of the game - say "yes" when nothing is at stake, and otherwise frame a check - and jhence framed a Perception check.Of systems that I am currently GMing, the one that most strongly elides the contrast between (2) and (3) is Classic Traveller, because it has very little player control over PC build, and very few player-side resources (nothing like fate points, and nothing like fiat-authorship spells/rituals either). My principal response to this is to turn the (2)s into (3)s - eg the players roll the reaction checks (which thereby become influence checks), roll the encounter checks (which thereby become "avoid attention" checks), etc. Because each player is running 2 PCs, the most important player-side resouce allocation actually becomes which PC(s) to use in a particular context (eg which PC is going down in the shuttle?).This relative lack of player-side resources, combined with a very high degree of dice-driven content-introduction, is what prompted me to start a thread a little while ago about Classic Traveller being a dice-driven game.(All that said, there are bits of CT that are mildly incoherent - eg there are suggestions in the rules that floor plans should be drawn up in advance, and the published adventures tend to reinforce this; but I think the encounter rules work better if the details are established in response to the roll for encounter range - in other words, the "dice driven" elements are more powerful than other parts of the rules seem to give them credit for.)Again, it looks like action declaration.The details would be system-dependent. For the systems I'm currently GMing:* In 4e it looks like an Arcana check - depending how the player elaborates as the GM teases it out, either for knowledge or for doing.* In Cortex+ Heroic it looks like colour + fictional positioning - the player explains what is going in in making a Sorcery check to establish either a complication (Poisoned by Toxic Food) or physical stress on an opponent.* In Burning Wheel, depending on how the player elaborates as the GM teases it out, it could be an Enchanting check, or an Aura-Reading check (to learn the properties of the blood), or even a Sorcery check (if that particular game is using free-form sorcery - mine doesn't).I think that this formulation tends to elide some matters that, at the table, matter - you can see this in the XP for your post! Because what counts as "really advocating" is up for grabs.</blockquote>

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