NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9240266" data-attributes="member: 42582">This might be an interesting domain of difference between video games and RPGs? (The question mark indicates tentativeness/conjecture.)What I've got in mind is that - at least as I understand how they work - in a video game the designer has to create rules for starting and ending scenes as part of their design: they must program in the visuals, the technical details, etc that will permit a scene to occur and resolve.(If the above is far too simplistic, or just flat-out wrong, apologies!)Now, the classic D&D/Gygaxian approach to RPGing is (in a sense) quite close to how I've described the video game approach: the dungeon creator builds the scenes into their design, generally via the key and the way it interfaces with the map.But in trad (post-classic) play, the participants have the responsibility for opening scenes, closing them, transitioning, etc, in real play time. How a game handles this is, in part, a function of its currency rules. (Eg the way that injury, associated penalties, and healing work in Rolemaster means that scenes are never fully closed; or think about the implications for scene closure of a fairly standard expectation that a character will salvage arrows after a fight.) But, as you suggest in your post, other aspects of the game (both design and play) might affect this stuff too.I don't think a good RPG design will just punt this stuff to the GM. It will either provide methods (like map-and-key, or MHRP Action/Transition scenes), or guidelines (as AW does), maybe both - and also illustrations (whether of prep, like a sample dungeon; or a play example) that show how the game is meant to work.And then the currency rules need to be designed not to subvert those methods and guidelines. Notice how Gygax's advice to GMs in his DMG, about "restocking" dungeons between adventures, tends to undermine the game's methods for managing scenes and hence managing pace and excitement in play. That advice is, in my view, the beginning of D&D's move from being officially "classic" to officially "trad", with resulting tensions between the formal and informal components of system.</blockquote>

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