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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7378678" data-attributes="member: 42582">Yes it does. At a minimum, it requires the GM to establish situations which permit the player to paint a picture of his/her character that is clear and powerful; which permit the player to express his/her PC's personality, interest and agenda.This is why, for instance, one might open a campaign with the PC in a bazaar with an angel feather being offered for sale - this permits the player to paint a clear and powerful picture of his PC, expressing the PC's interest and agenda - rather than in a "neutral" setting where the first action declaration ("I look around for a bazaar") doesn't really do any of those things at all.What does this rogue think and feel? What is his/her agenda? Why is s/he trying to get into the castle? What might s/he sacrifice to do so?The situation you describe does not involve advocacy of the sort that Eero Tuovinen talks about. As you present it, there is barely a character there at all!Eero Tuovinen distinguishes advocacy (broadly, first person inhabitation of the PC) from authorship (broadly, thining about the PC as a protagonist in a story). This has no bearing on action resolution. Nowhere does he say that players can't declare actions which might succeed!By talking about "1st level characters" you're already assuming a particular sort of RPG system.It is part and parcel of agreeing to play a D&D game (or a game with a similar level device) that story elements are, in some fashion, level-relative. In the "story now" context, this makes long-term pacing a signifcant element of play; and its workability depends upon there being appropriate ways at all levels for the players to engage their dramatic needs at al levels of play in a way that both maintains verisimilitude while not making the later levels of play redundant. This is a non-trivial design challenge. Of level-based games that I'm familiar with (which are D&D and its variants, T&T, RM and DW) I think 4e really pulls this off the best, because of its thorough integration of mechanics with cosmology via the "tiers of play". (Though I may be being unfair to DW here - I don't have the best handle on exactly how its level advancement works.)Of course not; not every move in a game is guaranteed to succeed. But failure because the GM decided that the fiction was otherwise certainly does.In your example, the rogue player's contribution is to say "I search carefully." And then to ask the GM to relate a few things that the GM has authored. That is extremely modest agency. The rogue player didn't actually establish any fiction except a few facts about mental states and bodily movements of his PC, which ended up having no impact on the actual state of the game.It may not matter to you. It is fundamental to me.Imagine we were talking about a combat between the rogue and the orc - and that you posted "The reason why the orc killed the rogue doesn't matter - maybe because the GM got lucky in the combat rolls, maybe because the GM decided on the spot that the orc was a better fighter than the rogue, maybe because the GM had written that down ahead of time." I think most RPGers would actually dispute that claim.Well, I dispute it in the case of the secret door for exactluy the same reason. Given that the principal activity of RPGing is sitting around telling one another made-up stuff, the question of who gets to make up which stuff is fundamental.I ask again, have you done it?I can tell you why I don't think it can be done with the Caves as written - because (with the possible exception of the cutlist cave) they don't engage with any dramatic needs nor express any thematic content.Maybe someone could take one of the orc caves and do the same thing to it as I've done with the cultists - turn it into the site of activity in a game in which war with the orcs is an underlying premise. But that wouldn't be to use the module in anything like the way it is is written or presented for play. (The contrast with Night's Dark Terror, by the way, is very marked here. The goblin caves in that game are very different in this respect, and lend themselves much more straightforwardly to "story now" RPGing - for a start because they are smaller, and separate, and so can be played with a thematic dynamism that doesn't risk swamping the PCs nor turning the thing into a purely operational/logistical slugfest.)Or you could read the post I linked to - then you'd actually be able to learn what happened instead of making it up!The issue is not whether the story is compelling or not. It's that what you're describing here does not fit the model.You have not identified any scenes framed to speak to your PCs' dramatic needs (a fighter who wants to test his skill and help clear the region of monsters in the hopes he'll be able to one day build his own keep, a wizard is looking for some rare ingredients and components, a cleric wants to aid his friend the fighter in his quest, and a thief who is a childhood friend looking for a way to fast riches with little work). Your chapters 1, 2 and 4 contains nothing that speaks to any of this. And nor does your chapter 3 - just one sign of this is your use of the plural pronoun ("they conceal their treasure", they lie about the caves, etc - how does lying about the caves even fit with the agenda of the fighter and cleric? and where is the mage's agenda in all this?).And that's before we get to any discussion of consequences, and how these might be established given the mechanical and fictional components of the module.To get "story now" play out of the Caves of Chaos would require a complete rewriting from the bottom up.</blockquote>

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