Pemerton. I bow to you. I had thought myself the wordiest writer on EnWorld, but you have just took the crown from me. That post is so long, I got lost in it. It may take me several days to read it, if I ever manage to.
I can only respond to some of the highlights.
You two have very different conceptions of RPGing from me. (Or else, perhaps, are using words with very different meanings).
Here are two episodes of "flavour", not all that untypical in my experience.
(1) The PCs are walking along. They find their travel blocked by a deep gorge.
(2) The PCs are walking along. They find their travel blocked by a rushing stream.
The difference between the stream and the gorge is a difference of flavour/colour. But it is not
mere colour.
Agreed. You have differentiated them mechanically. But it would be possible to make the difference mere color. If you used the same process simulation to resolve both hazards, for example rolling a series of Survival and Perception skill checks to get X successes before Y failures, then the difference between the two is mere color. For that matter, the difference between crossing the gorge and winning a seige of a castle might also be reduced to mere color.
There are whole modules built around the premise that these sorts of differences of flavour matter to action resolution because they make different player resources, and different modes of deploying them, relevant.
Think about that for a bit.
I don't really see that you're describing anything here other than bad (lazy? inexperienced?) GMing.
No, I don't really see how you are describing anything here other than bad GMing. You know enough Nar techniques to know how to make this opaque to the players. Don't set up a bad example of handling the situation as a straw man and then think that suffices to dismiss it. Besides which, this is tangent you've picked up on from something that was meant to be a simple analogy. You're well off the point of the analogy now.
In such a situation I think I'd prefer that the GM be frank than simply railroad.
Pem, I'm not sure you'd even realize when you were doing something I'd consider a railroad. At least I know that there are railroading techniques involved in treating a forest like a dungeon, and would be conscious of the technique I was using. I wrote the definite guide on how to railroad and why.
On another occasion, a PC had fallen unconscious during a fight inside a burning building. Another PC, outside the building, wanted to rush in and rescue him. After some discussion at the table, we resolved the movement as normal but requiring a STR check (at the level-appropriate DC) to break through the flame-weakened timber. The damage-by-level table was used to adjudicate the damage suffered by the rescuing PC (both fire damage and also untyped damage from having bits of building fall on him as he broke through the wall - being a tiefling helped him endure the fire damage).
Speaking of how you can level up and it means no change in your relationship to the world...
First is the equation of "being heroes" with "dungeon crawling". By "dungeon crawling" do you mean any RPG action that involves the players declaring actions for their PCs that are resolved via the relevant mechanical procedures (often but not always dice)? If so, that is a very expansive meaning of "dungeon crawling" - for instance it entails that most Traveller or CoC play is dungeon crawling.
Quite a lot of CoC play is dungeon crawling, I agree. By "dungeon crawling" I mean the play of process simulation with little or no hard scene framing on a map where the players engage in exploration and tactical combat, usually to retrieve treasure, clues, perform quest actions, or in some cases simply for the sake of that as a game itself. And yes, I associate that with "heroic tier" but not either exclusively with heroic tier nor as a definative attribute of it. And yes, I know you dont' do "dungeon crawling", you run a classic "open world" style game that is comparitively high on scene framing and abstraction.
Third, that 1000s of lives depend on the PCs' choices, rather than a few lives, strikes me as in-and-of itself having little significance for the tone or depth of the campaign. I have GMed episodes in which NPC allies, soldiers, dependents etc were added to lists upon recruitment, and crossed off them after dying, in much the same way as an equipment list might be managed. I have also GMed episodes in which one dependent NPC dying though a bad choice from a PC was one of the most emotionally significant moments in the campaign to date.
I've had both in the same campaign.
Fourth, the fact that you broke out BattleSystem strikes me as not particularly fundamental. It's an oddity of D&D (and of course other systems too) that its combat system and skill system don't scale up very well to handle mass combats. This is not true of all RPGs. Even in my 4e game, to give an example, when the PCs had to lead the defence of a duergar citadel against the incursion of a demonically possessed purple worm this was resolved as a skill challenge: the fictional stakes were high, but the resolution mechanics themselves don't need to change to reflect that...
*shakes head* LOL Seriously, Pem, I don't think we are ever going to understand each other.
Finally, it seems to me that I could "change the drapes" of your paragon campaign and set it at a much more prosaic level. Instead of armies vying via BattleSystem, I have market stalls competing via whatever mechanic you want to use to resolve economic rivalry. Instead of soldiers and citizens, I have family members and employees. Instead of grand alliances, I have agreements with millers and farmers and the vendors of spices. And so instead of your game of kings, I am the head of my family which sells spicy fruit buns at market stalls throughout the city, in heated rivalry with the vendors of custard buns. (And the analogue to your retainers and agents is the junior family members who actually do the selling, dealing with recalcitrant customers and thieves but reporting the big things, like thugs demanding protection money, to me.)
I'm not really sure that that is a paragon game...
I'm fairly sure it is. And I'm fairly sure that, some of your humor aside, you could run a seriously interesting game set at that power level. Now, a DM could also squash it, by having an invasion of something well above the power level of the setting show up and reduce the quarrels to a petty state - even banded together the merchant houses can't resist the invasion of dragons or armies of the Empire and the paragons are reduced to mere heroes fighting to survive. But you could also elevate it, can the merchant houses survive the zombie apocalypse after the apparant destruction of the rest of civilization?
What I think this example shows is that the flavour - what is at stake? - does matter to tiers of play. Whereas the fact that the players are managers rather than immediate protagonists, at least in my view, doesn't.
To me it shows the opposite.
In this we have something of a disconnect, very much related to a point I made above. You are framing this almost entirely from the ingame perspective. But for me, as a player, what matters is my experience, not the imagined experience of my PC.
Well, it's about time you realized that. For me, as a player, what matters is the imagined experience of my PC. It's to create the imagined experience of my PC that I'm playing, and the experience of the PC being my own experience as a player is the sensation or effect I'm going for. It's that sensation of remembering play through the eyes of the PC rather than remembering play as something that happened at a table and involved dice that lies at the heart of well played RPGs IMO. Of course I'm framing it from an ingame perspective, because that is the perspective that is dominate in my game. In fact, I'd go so far to say that within RPGs as I play them, if you as a player are not engaging them from an in game perspective you are doing it wrong. As a storyteller, a player that consistantly refused to engage entirely or nearly entirely from an ingame perspective would eventually be booted from my table as a pernicious trouble maker who was ruining the game.
I don't really understand how an NPC can quest to change the rules of the game - that seems very OotS to me.
The NPC doesn't percieve it as questing to change the rules of the game. He percieves it as questing to change to the physics of the world he lives in. Since those physics are defined by game rules, the practical effect on the game of the NPCs quest would be changes in the rules of the game. You rightly discern that I'm broadly speaking in this case of things like new feats, new spells, etc. - things added to the setting or removed from the setting - that correspond to changes in the fictional positioning of the entire setting.
But on the main point, your whole game set-up seems very different from mine (on the assumption that the players share their PCs' ignorance). The PCs in my game wouldn't be framed into a goal that is so opaque to the players. The players tend to choose their own goals and I frame around that.
The players PC's also have their own goals. One PC is Champion of Aravar. He has goals like: serve Aravar and bring honor to his name, discover his own hidden identity (player deliberately left mysteries in his backstory), and related to that find his missing father and reconnect to his heritage. One PC is a Cleric of Showna. She has goals like: connect with the orthodox chuch of Showna and learn its mysteries, learn the secrets of her heritage (again deliberate mysteries in her backstory, really common player theme there), and respread the worship of Showna to the sword coast region so that it may regain prominence. And so forth. Some players main agendas are simplier - acquire personal power or wealth. Some players literally only had a character concept and asked for an agenda that I thought would be suitable to the concept - and were given relationships to NPCs that I knew would be interesting later on. But all of that is occuring within a living world filled with many NPC factions with their own agendas. Some of those NPC factions were added to the game or elaborated on specifically to fulfill or enable player agendas. Some are there specifically to fulfill DM agenda and ensure that the sandbox always has toys to play with. After all, many of my players have never played an RPG before. If there is a lapse in proactivity, I don't want play to grind to a halt.
First, I don't really get the significance of rules. Second, I don't really get the conflation of PC and player perspective.
You wouldn't. I'm not surprised that you don't in both cases.
N'raac also asks whether it will change the encounters the PCs have. Of course it will - if the world changes, then things met within it will change. If new forces are unleashed, then the demigods of the world are likely to encounter those forces. Contrary to the claims about flavour, these are not mere flavour - just as negotiating with a charging orc, a shopkeeper, a guardian angel or a demonic overlord are very different things (different fictional positioning, different emotional and dramatic significance) even if the mechanics are fundamentally the same, likewise encountering a freed primordial compared to (say) a devil or a god (and even more so when that primordial was freed as a result of the efforts of the PCs). The stakes are different. The possible outcomes are different. What the PCs want from them is different. What the PCs will offer them, or try to take from them, is different. This flavour which you two seem to be dismissing is, for me, the essence of an RPG. It's what makes an PRG fundamentally different from a board game - fictional positioning matters, both to framing and to adjudication.
Yes, I agree that fictional positioning matters a lot. I think you can see how from what I described as the goal of play, fictional positioning is critical to creating the game. Indeed, one could say that fictional positioning is at some level all the game. But, when fictional positioning has no impact on the process of play, it can undermine emersion within the fiction. An example of this would be a game like Mass Effect. The first time you play Mass Effect you are quite careful in making dialogue choices because it seems from the fictional positioning that your choices are going to have a big impact on the story. It leads to a satisfying experience of play. But if you then go back and replay the game and make different choices, you quickly realize that it was all illusionism. Your actual ability to make meaningful choices was pretty much non-existent. In many cases, it won't even change the dialogue you experience in any significant way and at most all you can do is shut yourself out of further dialogue. There is basically almost never two different stories. You either get the same story or you don't get a story. None of the changes in fictional positioning nor any of the processes used to change the fictional positioning have much meaning. This is fine so long as you don't penetrate the veil of the illusion, but once you do it undermines the experience.
But I don't need rules to do any of this: if things are going to dissolve, they are going to dissolve.
^^^ *points up* No serious, look up. Read that again.
Luckily for me, for my players and for our campaign I don't GM in this style, and I wouldn't touch an adventure path with a bargepole.
And yet, it moves.
