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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6854340" data-attributes="member: 42582">That's clearer, thanks. So the issue isn't so much dice rolling as who gets to frame checks?I think the "agency" aspect to this arena of play is fairly important - there is an element of the players wanting to be able to make a move (in this case, a mechanical move at the "meta" level) that obliges the GM to dispense some backstory. (Or, in the case of, say, an Athletics check, that obliges the GM to allow that the fictional situation has changed in the relevant way.)I also think there is a degree of "training", which is linked to certain play assumptions. For instance, to the extent that there is an implicit understanding (among some players, perhaps promulgated by some game texts) that the mechanics are the "physics" of the gameworld, then you may have players who think they need to work out the physics in order for the fiction to change; or GMs (not you, obviously) who insist on the roll as part of working out the physics. (This came up in the big "fail forward" thread, for instance, where some posters took it for granted that climbing a mountain, or trying to navigate, must involve a check against Climbing skill, or Survival skill, etc.)The agency and the physics-training can probably push in the same way, too, for some players, because they may become used to the idea that activating the physics by declaring a check is the preeminent way to exert agency in the course of playing the game. This sort of outlook I think has roots as far back as skill-and-check based games like Traveller, RQ and RM.If the players are used to an approach to play in which scenarios are "closed" rather than "open" (eg the goal is some outcome predetermined by the GM, like "rescue the princess" or "deliver the widget to the whosit"), then they might also be expecting that one of the major determinants of whether the mission can be completed well or not is the availability of information, and might then expect the GM to be rationing it to some extent. (Traditional CoC games are full of this sort of thing - and I don't think its subversion by GUMSHOE/Trail of Cthulhu has yet become mainstream.)Personally, and probably more controversially, I also think some of the explanation is the lack of clarity around the rationale for various dice rolls in classic D&D, which can then lead to some of these rolling procedures taking on almost a cargo-cultish status (in the sense of: players are going through a process, or at least what they take to be a process, without that process actually having any sort of appropriate causal connections or larger context that renders it sensible).For instance: why does classic D&D require a roll at all to hear noise behind doors? Is this primarily modelling the thickness of doors? Is it about rationing information in order to enhance the play experience? And if the answer is the second, and we then read that back into the fiction by positing thick doors (which also helps explain the STR check needed to open them), why does a thief have to make a roll to hear noise at a window (which is typically not thick at all)?The answers to these questions aren't really made clear in the Moldvay rulebook, and even less so in Gygax's DMG, and to be honest I don't think they're that much clearer today. The rules talk about checks to hit in combat, and checks to notice hidden things, as if there's no interesting difference between them other than the stat used; whereas the former is primarily about making a move in the fiction, while the latter is about increasing the backstory available to the players, which I think are clearly quite different things that might be governed by quite different considerations (as your quotes from Mike Carr seem to suggest).And to top it off: if we adopt a policy of making "necessary" information available, what exactly is the point of playing a thief, or a bard, or a wizard with knowledge skills? I think there are reasonable answers to that question, but I'm not sure the game has tended to make those answers obvious.I know this rant hasn't engaged with the "who gets to frame" issue, and to the extent that that is the main issue then my rant misfires. But without knowing either your particular group or that of the OP, but having some general sense of various approaches to RPGing, I think there is something at work here which isn't just about (or at least primarily about) generations, but much more about how different groups have tried to make sense of a legacy that was bequeathed by a game optimised for use within very narrow parameters (the mostly open-ended dungeon crawl in which the GM has pre-written notes that establish the bulk of the salient backstory) but has more-or-less the same mechanics being used for a very different sort of RPGing (far more "closed" scenarios set against, or taking place in, gameworlds with a richness of fiction - like FR - that tend to defy any attempt to write down all the salient backstory in advance).EDIT: I had another thought about this:I agree that more-or-less standard/ordinary RPGing works best when the GM has a clear authority over framing. But I'm not surprised that there are some players who push back against this, because the boundary between GM framing and GM force/adversarialism can be a fairly murky one.When I re-read Gygax's DMG, one of the things that strikes me are the references (not all that many, but enough that I notice them) to the GM sticking first-and-foremost to what is written down in the dungeon key. To me, this seems central to ensuring that the game is a fair puzzle-solving enterprise for the players, rather than something closer to Calvin-ball.Anti-scripting, "No Myth"-ish games of the sort I tend to enjoy also have all sorts of formal and informal devices to regulate the way the GM frames things and introduces adversity (MHRP - the Doom Pool; BW - GM's obligation to frame by reference to player/PC flags; 4e - much more informal, but the players tend to have enough depth of resources, espeically at paragon and up, that the GM only has to notice the encounter-building guidelines out of the corner of his/her eye to have a sense of what will or won't be fair to toss into the mix).But there is a lot of D&D play that has drifted away from the constraints of Gygaxian dungeon crawling without adopting other sorts of devices for helping to make play fair. (Luke Crane suggests that this break down of fairness happens even with the move from Moldvay Basic to Marsh/Cook Expert, because the context for wilderness play and wilderness mapping doesn't give the players enough opportunity to construct the information they need, unlike the much more constrained environment of dungeon mapping.)The default solution - that probably had its heyday in the 2nd ed AD&D era but which seems to find at least some support in 5e - is to put all this back on the GM. That's a big load for one participant to carry, even if well-intentioned, and does put pressure on the framing-vs-adversarialism distinction.</blockquote>

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