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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5397221" data-attributes="member: 42582">I see now what you had in mind.Given the rest of your post, I assume you agree that "equally satisfying" means in principle satisfaction for the right player/GM - I think I would find it less satisfying, because it tends to make (literal) exploration of the gameworld become more important, but I think there are a lot of players who like to explore the gameworld.Maybe. But it doesn't feel like one to me. On the other hand, I'm someone to whom Ron Edwards' GNS essays speak very powerfully, whereas a lot of people, at least on this forum, don't seem to find them very helpful at all.The difference I feel between the two examples you give is that looking foolish for getting collared by the Wolf in Sheep's Clothing is (I think) a bit like looking foolish for making a silly move in chess that needlessly allows a piece to be taken. The feeling of foolishness is a result of having played badly. In Edwards' terms, the stakes here are Gamist one - "Step on up!"In my games, this sort of dynamic is certainly at work when the mechanics, and especially the combat mechanics, come into play. To a lesser but still noticeable extent it also informs character building. And even for me, as a GM, I like to present encounters that play well rather than poorly relative to the 4e mechanics set - this is less comparitive/competitive, obviously, but still buys into that sense of doing an activity poorly or well.On the other hand, the feelings that are in play when a player has his/her PC ruthlessly cut down the barkeep are a bit different. This has actually come up recently more than once in my game. One particular player, whose PC is in many respects the most scrupulous of all of them (eg the PC's attitude to looting defeated NPCs is, by D&D standards, very constrained by a sense of who has prior ownership of the loot), has also had that PC kill unconscious hobgoblins at the end of a battle, not because prisoners couldn't reasonably be taken (there was a whole slew of NPCs who might have looked after them) but because the PC holds a bitter grudge against goblins and hobgoblins since they wiped out his home city, took his mother as a slave and then killed her rather than let her be rescued. And in a more recent session, as the players were fleeing a collapsing temple, having barely stopped a demonic ritual, the same PC magic missiled an NPC to death whom the PCs had met in the temple. The NPC was a devil-worshipper there to investigate growing demonic activity, and the PC in question killed the NPC (i) on principle, that devil worshippers, like demon worshippers, have forfeited their claim to live, and (ii) on the practical grounds that he was worried that too much exposure to devil worshippers might corrupt one of his fellow PCs (who had already shown some propensity to being influenced by an imp).In both cases, the other players responded with some shock at the ruthlessness portrayed. But this isn't like the case of playing well or badly. It's not an emotional response based on a social situation in which one's prowess or ability is compared to another's, or to some ideal standard. Rather, it's a much more evaluative response to a fictional portrayal of a moral challenging situation. And the emotional dimension is amplified in the way that RPGs are particularly good, perhaps uniquely good (?), at achieving, because there is a blurring of the line between the PC's moral judgement, that it is permissible - even mandatory - to commit these murders, and the player's aesthetic judgement that it is permissible - even desirable - to portray and perhaps endorse such a moral judgement in a fiction.So, to cut a long story short, my own experience fits with Edwards', that gamist and narrativist play are very similar in structure (the GM's job is to make meaningful choices by the players possible, and if this isn't happening then the game has gone badly wrong) but quite different in the sort of experience they aim at producing.It is also part of Edwards' view that play can't simultaneously be both gamist and narrativist. I guess it depends on what is meant by "simultaneously", but I know that in my game both sorts of pleasures are aimed at, although typically at different times, or using discrete parts of the game system. (And thus there can be a particular pleasure in using the mechanics in a very skilled way to produce a thematically very satisfying or provocative outcome in the game.) I've never had the time to read through all the Forge threads where Edwards explains his view, but I suspect it depends upon imposing a certain sort of analytical framework on play whereby some elements of what is aimed at become subordinated as mere "techniques" whereby the ultimate elements of what is aimed at are to be achieved.Agreed.I'm pretty confident I follow your first paragraph. I remain uncertain about your move to the second paragraph. The removal of detail will only cause problems if the GM also isn't prepared to let the players respond as they see fit (taking for granted that they don't break the implict or explicit understandings at the table as to genre, tastefulness etc) to what is important. Hence my little rant in my earlier post, that in my view the vice of D&D GMing advice (and a lot of GMing advice in general) has not been to emphasise removal of detail, but to emhasise to the GM the importance of controlling and shaping the story, which one way or another entails that the player's will not be free to choose how they respond to the situations the GM set up for them.I strongly agree with this.Given the dynamics at the typical RPG table - of which I (naturally enough!) think my own is an example - there is always going to be some (social) pressure for the players to go along with the GM. That's why, as a GM, I am always doing my best to make sure that the situations I'm presenting are ones that the players want to engage with independently of any feeling of such pressure. I also try as best I can to make sure that the situations I present offer clear ways in, but don't dictate any given way out - thereby trying to ensure that when I have made a mistake, and the players have their PCs enter the situation only because it's the one the GM offered up, that they at least have the freedom to exit the situation in the way that they want to (and hopefully, the manner of their exit will then help me get back on track with my GMing).An example of this which came up upthread was when Mal Malenkirk said that, if he found himself in the courtyard with the Aztec statue and the oranges, he would try to pick the lock on the door to get out. I think it is bad GMing to respond to that sort of player choice by trying to obstruct it, in order to try and force the players to deal with the situation in a manner that the players clearly are not interested in.This also hooks into the discussion of improvisation in this thread. In the courtyard-escape scenario, if the PCs are level 1 and the DC for the lock has been set at 40, then it is mechanically impossible for them to leave the courtyard via such means. I therefore think that the GM is under an obligation, in setting DCs in that sort of situation, to consider not only the ingame logic - "How difficult a lock would the builders of this courtyard have put into place?" - but also metagame considerations - "What are the consequences for the potential flow of play if I make this option mechanically impossible for the PCs?" Even if the GM thinks that it would be cool to reuire the PCs to do some trick with the oranges that will lower the DC from 40 to 20, it may be that this is (or turns out to be) a mistake, because the mechanics impede the optimal (from the players' metagame point of view) flow of the game.Of course we all make mistakes of this sort from time to time (or at least I do - and in the past I have probably been guilty of deliberately constructing situations that I now regard as mistaken in this way). Rolemaster is a game system that, due to features of both its character build and action resolution rules, in particular makes these sort of "mechanical dead ends to play" easy to stumble into. I find that 4e, with its clear guidelines on combat encounter building, DC setting and skill challenge resolution, helps me to avoid these mistakes more easily, and also to negotiate my way out of them without having to fudge (which I strongly dislike), take things back (which can spoil the flow of play and tends to utterly spoil immersion) or otherwise exercise non-mechanically-mediated GM power.</blockquote>

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