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The notion that there is some finish line and progress bar eludes me. The constraints on the DMs narration are the fiction, including unrevealed backstory if any and the unspoken guiding principle that the possible narrations should be trimmed down to only the most plausible ones (assuming they...

The question might be why are you changing the fiction before, to what ends and why is it better to do it beforehand and then run the creation neutrally in the moment rather than just changing it in the moment to meet the same ends?

Sure. But there’s no basis for which goal should be difficult and which shouldn’t be. Which demonstrates the arbitrariness of using different ones for different difficulties. It’s more nuanced though, as some PCs will fail and even the same PC can do all the checks. My point doesn’t rely on...

Yea that’s along the same thought lines I’d had, though said much more eloquently. My point was more that if someone wanted those decisions to be part of the challenge or have weight and impact more directly tied to the current fictional position then 4e skill challenges aren’t a great fit...

Why try to make it personal?

1. What does the GM base his decision to require 3 successes before 5 failures instead of 5 successes before 7 failures. Deciding one vs the other seems a bit arbitrary? 2. Every action the PCs take is of equal weight to resolving the skill challenges and thus isn’t contextual to the specific...

So question on skill challenges because that’s the implementation I’m most acquainted with. How can one take into account the changing fiction after each success with a predefined number of successes before failures mandates. Even assuming the players make logical moves each check what prevents...

To me illusionism and consent would be navigated by a type of pre-consent as the nature of illusionism is that ideally you shouldn’t know which moments it’s occurring. So there’s a few critical states, you either pre consented or not and orthogonally you either are aware it’s happening or not...

Here’s a fun question. Is illusionism inherently bad? I don’t think so. I think it’s possible for players to voluntarily sign up for some occasional illusionism as a preferred method for keeping a linear campaign moving forward. Likely preferred by some players to more overt or metagame...

IMO. One reason power gaming could be reclaimed (not sure it ever actually needed reclaiming in the first place as it was often seen as a virtue depending on your social circle), but assuming it was reclaimed is because there were other words to describe the negative aspects that were sometimes...

I agree. I’d just add I think the notion of forcing someone to do something implies, even necessitates that you are forcing that thing against their will. That’s why I don’t think forcing them to do something they want to do makes semantic sense.

I mean, in boxing is anyone being railroaded? Is anyone being forced to do something against their will?

IMO theres seems to be 2 definitions of force in play, one is based on consent/fairness. The other is based on physically causing something to occur. I think we can all agree the GM causes X to occur and whether it was done with or without player consent or even player fairness. So maybe we...

My question would be, how can you force someone to do something when they consent to doing that something?

I just want them to use the terms correctly. Nothing to do with my personal lexicon. If that is your definition of force then I’d say it is unrelated to being railroaded.

Yea. I could have been more clear. But that kind of confusion seems par for the course.

I don’t think games in the right word, maybe playstyles. IMO if it’s a good question then that makes taxonomy considering it very important. What conversation specifically are you trying to have by this intentional provocation? That others distinction between what they mean by linear and...

@Maxperson. Even in this post I expanded that ‘everything’ meant ‘no paths off’.

The context that forcing everything was short for forcing everything related to keeping the players on a specific path since that’s clearly the context of what we were talking about.

Okay. I feel like you failed to take in the immediate context of the discussion for what I said. I could have been more clear but I think the context was there either way.