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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7360737" data-attributes="member: 42582">This just reiterates my point that the issue is not player freedom to make action declarations that are then resolved via the mechanics; but rather that balancing moves is a bigger deal in D&D than in most other RPGs. The concern you raise here isn't about the player's "authorship" role, but about the fact that the move is too powerful relative to other available moves.(Though personally I'm not sure this is true in a game with fiat secret doors via Passwall.)There are any number of reasons, probably starting with the list approach (spells, magic items) to PC abilities in combination with large swathes of dramatically fiction-altering fiat magic. But I think a full discussion is beyond the scope of this thread.Absolutely it can. A combat can be part of a skill challenge (eg defeating the monster generates 1 success). Or a skill challenge can unfold within, or parallel to, a combat.There is a good recent thread in the <5e editions sub-forum about skill challenges in combat contexts.In AD&D there are pursuit rules. In BW there are pursuit rules, and they are only activiated if first you satisfy the disengagement requirements.In Cortex+ Heroic finding the secret door might support an action to impose a "I Escaped" complication on the enemy, but that is no easier or harder than imposing a "You're dead!" result on them - so finding the secret door changes the fiction, and thus may change what abilities the oppponents can bring to bear, but doesn't change the mechanical difficulty in any in-principle sense.Everything you describe here is just GM authorship of fiction.You are saying that by framing the PCs as being at the reliquary I am denying the players the chance to rescue the slave. But by framing the players into a scene with a doorway and beyond that a beating of a slave, you are denying the players the chance to meet the Modron that some other GM might have decided to mention in his/her possible framing. Or whatever.Every moment of framing means that some other framing wasn't established. Every moment of play spent doing X means that we have less time to do Y.By spending time framing situations about slaves and intersecting passages you don't increase the scope for agency. You just spend more time on the stuff that you think is interesting and less time (or delay the arrival at) the stuff the players have flagged as interesting to them.This takes us back to the point that fiction is imaginary.From the point of view of "interacting" with fiction, there's no difference between authoring that an (already mentioned) orc is dead, and authoring that an (already mentioned) wall contains a secret door.You have to introduce other constraints - eg the player's authorship is constrained to things that, in the fiction, might be causal results of his/her PC's actions. I know that plenty of people like such constraints, but RPGs that don't adhere to them aren't in any sense abandoning the idea of "interacting with the fiction", and aren't in any sense more "unrealistic" or "Schroedingerish".</blockquote>

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