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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9033336" data-attributes="member: 42582">Your focus on this problem is putting the cart before the horse. Or to use a different less metaphorical description, is mistaking a prominent part of one RPG - a certain sort of approach to D&D, and similar games - for a crucial part of all RPGing.The first question is: what is the procedure for determining what happens next?In a RPG, the answer to this will consist in an allocation of "ownership" over bits of the fiction, and some statements of rules about who can say what about things they own. (Eg a player can say what their PC looks like - but perhaps only after rolling on the random appearance table, and establishing some constraints around those permissions!)Then we can say that, sometimes, when someone says something that requires a specialised procedure to be used to allocate the subsequent permissions. Only at this point does your "matching" problem arise. And there are many ways of solving it. John Harper, in the Agon 2nd ed rules, explains in half a page that, and how, the player gets to do most of this. Luke Crane, in the Adventure Burner (reprinted in the Codex), spends more than half a page explaining how a Burning Wheel GM does this, taking input from the player so that the framing reflects a shared conception of the fiction.The result is that the play experiences of Agon and of BW are quite different. But both are apt to produce agreement on both fiction and process: in the case of Agon because the party with the interest also has the authority (and so unless they act irrationally, will be happy with how things work out); and in the case of BW because back-and-forth negotiation is fundamental to the procedure.D&D (and similar games), at least as commonly played, is rather distinctive in purporting to solve the "matching" problem by way of an allocation of authority to someone other than the participant with the interest: that is, it is the player who has the interest in how things are "matched" (eg they want their declared action to be considered an "Acrobatic" one, because their PC has high DEX) but it is the GM who is given the job of matching. One ostensible reason for this is to maintain immersion - the player never needs to think about the rules. Another is to preserve the challenge - the player doesn't get to always "match" in their favour (Agon has a different way of handling this, by rationing players' resources). In order to avoid the evident risk of conflict of interest, the GM is urged to be "fair" and "impartial" but it is far from clear what this means outside some rather narrow class of cases. (Hence [USER=7027139]@loverdrive[/USER]'s doubts, upthread, about whether there can be skilled play in D&D.)So anyway, as this post shows I think it's quite straightforward to explain why the "matching" problem is a big deal in a certain sort of D&D play (and in similar RPGs) because of particular rules and the particular processes they mandate. But this is all a downstream phenomenon, which results from relying on authority in a voluntary activity. It's not any sort of primordial problem.</blockquote>

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