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Message: <blockquote data-quote="D'karr" data-source="post: 6079495" data-attributes="member: 336">In my games I've been able to do both within the system.  To great success I might add.  It's just that I don't use combat as the sole means, or even an important tool, to enhance the exploration.  There are other tools that work better for it.  In all games it really boils down to a matter of pacing.  But 4e also gives me tools to do it, and reward the efforts.  When I was young I had hours upon hours upon days to play.  Which meant that I could take hours upon hours upon days to get to the point.  As an adult, my time, as well as my player's time is way more limited.  So spending several hours in minutia that doesn't really advance the goals of the players becomes a drag in the end.  We're not getting anywhere.  Now I can give the sense of them not getting anywhere by using a mechanic that eats up their resources but doesn't eat up our "real life" time.Think of a movie like Lord of the Rings - The Fellowship of the Ring.  It was quite a long movie, but in a 3 hour setup you got quite a bit of information and all of it moved the protagonist's story forward.  To achieve this, the pacing was the most important aspect of getting all that done.  The goals of The Fellowship are still the focus, but the movie only shows you the "interesting" parts.  It alludes to the rest, but does not focus on it.  When Gandalf goes to "research" the ring, you don't see hours upon hours of him going through books, or his hours upon hours of travel to the library, or "random encounters" on the road.  You see him leave, you see him riding a horse, you see him looking at books, and finding the information.  You see all of this in about 30 seconds to a minute.  That is pacing.  If every bit of the travel day-by-day, every person he talked to, every book he pored over/through had to be mapped out the movie would have been 5 hours long just on that scene.When the party leaves Rivendell, you see various short cut scenes of them traveling, you see a short scene of the ring affecting Boromir's mind and you see a camp scene.  But you don't see every campsite they spent time in, you see one short scene of it.  Then you see them in the Misty Mountains, then you see them in Moria.  All the travel between these places is obviously alluded to, but there is no long drawn out focus on it.  There is one important but short scene at Caradhras, one important but short scene at the gates of Moria, and one significant encounter with the dweller at the gates.  All of that doesn't take very long, even the combat with the dweller is rather short.  The dweller takes several hits, he goes "bloodied" and retreats.  The travel through Moria is supposed to be 4 days long IIRC but the entire travel can be described in a few short sentences until they reach the Tomb of Balin.  Then an important encounter occurs.  All these scenes are obviously important to each other, and each is informed by the ones that have gone before, but combat is not the pacing mechanism used to propel the "game" forward.</blockquote>

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