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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5913557" data-attributes="member: 42582">I've been saying just this on several threads now.The same thing goes for comments about rogues passing guarded gates by poisoning the guards' lunches rather than fighting them. Is this really going to be a regular part of D&Dnext, when it's never been a regular part of typical D&D hitherto?And to be clear: I think it's completely feasible to design an RPG in which poisoning the lunches of the guards is just as viable (mechanically, and in the real world play environment at the table) as fighting them, and in which blocking doorways against hordes is as common as sleeping those hordes. But I don't think it's feasible to do this using traditional D&D mechanics.Agreed. I don't entirely understand adventure-based design, but to the extent that I do understand it I don't think I like it.Scene/situation/encounter based design has taken a while to emerge as a coherent approach to RPGing. But now that it has emerged, it turns out to be one of the most reliable and effective ways for generating non-railroading, player-driven, protagonistic, exciting RPG play. The key to this is that the scene/situation/encounter is not an arbitrary locus of action. The resolution of individual scenes - the pacing of them, the open-endedness of them when the players go in - is central to the emergence of plot/story out of play.Adventure-based design seem to me to tend either towards railroading (in its AP variant) or towards Obmi-ness (in its sandboxy variant).Man, you're on fire!, but I can't XP you.I think there is a type of desire for obscurity. It comes out in some of the "write flavoursome prose for adults" threads, too. I don't think it's about rationing expertise, though. It's about a conception of the rulebook as somehow being part of the play experience, the first step into immersion. A rulebook that is clear and metagame-y in its language breaks immersion, because it makes it transparent that the activity consists of real people sitting around a real table playing a game.</blockquote>

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