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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7358763" data-attributes="member: 42582">This is a strange argument for worldbuilding - it stops player's abusing their power, by removing it!What if the GM abuses his/her power?Personally I think I prefer to think about different techniques based on the play experience they are intended to deliver, rather than what happens if game participants turn bad.Yes. I've posted the above example (or variants on it) about 100 times upthread!That's a key part of what distinguishes RPGing from shared storytelling: the player doesn't have to do anything but delcare actions as his/her character. The resolution mechanics mediate the process of establishing the content of the shared fiction.Sure. That's why you just delcare actions! It's the job of the resolution system to take care of story - that's the whole point of it!If the resolution system isn't up to the job, that's a different thing (see further below).All action declaration is an attempt to author something into the fiction - a dead orc, a discovered secret door, whatever it might be. That's the point of action declaration - to change the fiction!I think [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION] posted some thoughts in response to this.My first thought is that I don't see how what you describe violates the Czege principle at all - the player is not framing his/her own conflict, the GM did that (by establishing that the enemies have beaten through the door - I am assuming that this is being established by the GM). The player is simply declaring an action that addresses the conflict - "I look for a secret door so I can run away!"Second, you are making assumptions that you have not spelled out about the significance of finding a secret door. In some systems (eg some forms of D&D), perhaps this is a "get out of jail free" card. But then in those systems so would a Passwall spell be, so whether or not finding a secret door is unbalanced depends upon how the system allocates a range of other similar action possibilities.In Cortex+ Heroic finding the secret door establishes an asset which will give a bonus die to subsequent appropriate action declarations, but doesn't constitute a "get out of jail free" card at all. In 4e, it might be part of a skill challenge, and until the challenge overall is resolved the players are not entitled to any assumption of success in escaping their enemies.More generally, I think there is a need to distignuish between abuse and unbalanced moves. The latter are a big deal in D&D (less so in nearly every other RPG I'm familiar with), but that just tells us something about a peculiarity of D&D. If D&D can't support player-driven RPGing because it's got no appropriate way of balancing moves, managing action economy, etc, again that's mostly just a fact about D&D. (I know from experience that 4e doesn't have problems along these lines, besides the niggling infelicities that can be found in many complex RPG systems with many moving parts. I wouldn't be surprised if 3E is very different in this respect, nor 5e either for that matter. And 2nd ed AD&D has its own issues that AbdulAlhazred has already mentioned at length in this thread.)</blockquote>

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