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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 7404400" data-attributes="member: 29398">Whether the story or drama or whatever is player-created or DM-created or a combination; in all these cases conflict and oppositon and challenges - the things that makes the game "fundamentally oppositional", to use your term - have to come from somewhere.If the players author these themselves and then also author the means to overcome them you've just said hello to Czege; so that can't work.Now it could, I suppose, turn out that players are authoring challenges and conflicts for other players; but given the general anti-PvP stance around here I somehow don't see this happening very often.Which leaves the DM to author them.  She authors the challenges and conflicts (whether this is done by pre-authorship or by story-now action failure narration is for this point irrelevant) and the players try to author solutions through the actions of their PCs.  Thus, unless you're doing full-on shared storytelling (which none here are, from what I can see) the game is always going to be somewhat oppositional between the players and the DM. And on an even more meta scale, it's the DM's job to set and enforce limits via one or more of the game system rules, house rules, and spot rulings; all of which have in theory been agreed to by the players.  It's up to the players to test and push those limits, should they so desire; which not all do.  But for those that do, this testing and enforcing of limits - regardless of game system in use - adds another oppositional factor between players and DM.The "it's too easy" objection comes from a sense that maybe the limits in some systems are a bit too lax and-or the DM's ability to set or enforce limits has been reduced or neutered; that it's up to the players to in effect police themselves.The "they will just find secret doors everywhere" objection comes - at least in my case - from a far-too-often-proven-correct assumption that players will not police themselves: that wherever they think they need one they'll look for secret doors, and even if the dice-roll odds only give them success a third of the time that's still going to leave you with a world in which an awful lot of walls have secret doors in them.Except "cool stories" need conflict.  See above for where that has to come from, and for why the oppositional model remains well inside the window.And the goal of having fun playing the game has always been there; it didn't just magically spring to life with the story-now concept.Was that a quote from one of the Story Now guys?  I ask because someone (Ilbranteloth, maybe?) posted a very similar theory in one of these threads, and I thought the words were his own.So it's not just Schroedinger's Door, it's Schroedinger's Entire World.And how on earth is it possible to foreshadow or even accurately describe a scene in a setting like this?  If the wall didn't exist until a PC saw it (or a DM framed it) what might have happened differently had its existence been previously known by the DM?  Would sounds have echoed differently in the previous scene?  Would temperature or airflow or lighting have been different?  Most importantly, would these clues have caused the PCs (or the opposition, for all that) to have done anything differently?  If yes - particularly to the last of those questions - then the validity of that previous scene is called into serious question; and if this sort of thing is common then the whole game is shot.Lanefan</blockquote>

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