Q Is for Quizzical Questions Queried
In The Boogie Knights of the Round Table (BKotRT), the player who succeeds at an action gets to narrate the results of the action. If the action is unopposed and the player fails to meet or beat the difficulty number (DN), this means the GM gets to narrate the results of the failure.
But what if the heroes are involved in a mystery? It’s easy enough to assign a clue or a crime scene a DN and then have the players narrate how their heroes approach the mystery. Then dice are rolled, and totals are compared to the DN. Simple, right?
Well, sort of. Let’s imagine Christopher’s hero Uriah Gandalfini studying a crime scene in an alley. Uriah knows that a violent crime was committed in the alley, but he needs more information than that. Fortunately, he has an acoustic guitar with him, so he strums out the beginning chords of his new song, Revealments of Ragnorak. The GM assigns a DN, and Christopher rolls the appropriate dice.
If he meets or beats the DN, Christopher narrates the results, not the GM. This means that Christopher gets to decide what information he uncovers in the alley about the crime. That’s sort of the opposite of the way detective work tends to work in RPGs. On the other hand, if Christopher doesn’t meet or beat the DN, the GM gets to narrate the results, which seems easy enough unless the information in the alley is essential to further progress in the adventure. If that’s the case, it’d be bad form to narrate Christopher’s failure as a complete failure on the part of Uriah.
These two different situations highlight the free-form, improvisational nature of BKotRT. The GM probably shouldn’t get too attached to a particular set of events or conclusions. The more the players succeed with their dice rolls, the more the players get to decide the details of the story. Also, failure doesn’t mean failure. It could mean success but with complications or unwanted consequences.
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