Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6247565" data-attributes="member: 42582">I think the standard approach - somewhat spelled out in games like HeroQuest revised and Marvel Heroic RP (I say "somewhat" because it's not fully spelled out, but is discussed in more detail than in 4e) - is that the table agrees on genre in general terms, as part of setup and then reinforced through play, but when the crunch is on the line the GM is final arbiter of the "genre/credibility" test, precisely for the conflict-of-interest reasons that you mention.The closest I can see to the genre/credibility test idea in the 4e DMG - and it's not crystal clear, but nor in my view is it hopelessy opaque - is on pp 42 and 75, in the context of player improvisation using PC skills:This sort of action is exactly the kind of thinking you want to encourage . . . Thinking players are engaged players. In skill challenges, players will come up with uses for skills that you didn’t expect to play a role. Try not to say no.  . . This encourages players to think about the challenge in more depth and engages more players by making more skills useful. However, it’s particularly important to make sure these checks are grounded in actions that make sense in the adventure and the situation. If a player asks [for instance,], “Can I use Diplomacy?” you should ask what exactly the character might be doing to help the party survive in the uninhabited sandy wastes by using that skill. Don’t say no too often, but don’t say yes if it doesn’t make sense in the context of the challenge.I think there is scope for interesting discussion about the similarities of and differences between the "mother may I" style that player protagonism gaming is contrasted with, and the "genre/credibility" test that flexible, free-descriptor-style scene resolution depends upon. It came up, for instance, on the "fighters vs casters" thread.Unfortunately (from my point of view) that interesting discussion, at least in that thread, was somewhat foreclosed by a tendency of the "player protagonism" sceptics to begin from an assumption that GM authority in respect of genre/credibility must be equivalent to GM authority over outcomes. Given that I know from personal experience that there is a big difference between the two, any analysis - even a critical analysis - that begins from an implicit denial of that difference is a non-starter, as far as I am concerned.</blockquote>

Verification