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Message: <blockquote data-quote="CuRoi" data-source="post: 5464523" data-attributes="member: 98032">Well...I'm not sure I've ever broken it down that way. Its hard for me to put it in that respect. As a side note - I don't run extremely structured games to begin with. I sit down with a map, several plot threads, a host of monsters and NPCs whose motivations and intentions I have already considered and then I just...go. I build the "adventure" as we go and as the party does stuff which I can only sometimes anticipate. Basically, we tell a collaborative story and when rolling for combat, skills and the like seems appropriate, we just do it. Sometimes its a solo project, others, its a group effort. For group efforts, I sometimes resolve it as multiple individual efforts, sometimes as a single roll. A Serenity game I ran comes to mind. The players were wanting to break into an Alliance computer system and gather some information. The group had an expert in covert skills and a computer expert working on the problem. The computer expert nailed the set difficulty while the covert expert failed. They got the information, but tripped a hidden security program on the way out of the system (they found that out later, heh). Other times, I require players to pick a task leader (say for a diplomacy check in 3.5 DnD) and all other rolls are just an "aid another".  Most often though, it's a open format where we are telling a story and I'm asking for rolls when the PCs do something that sounds like it needs one. One time my players wanted to drain a pond (long story) and I let them set about trying. They had no magic to really get it going and no one even had a shovel. I set easy DCs, estimated progress and the amount of water in the pond, and I made them roll for every foot or so trench digging - it was to illustrate how unbearably long this was going to take. They got the picture and moved on. I could have just said "ok the day ends and your tired and you have diverted a portion of the pond" from one roll, but I figured the PCs didn't want to spend the next week doing manual labor and I was correct : ) I approach everything as a narrative, from combat to skill checks, so the whole session flows in a dynamic fashion I guess. As tasks come up, they are dealt with and sometimes it's a single roll, others its a longer process. So I retain dynamism simply by keeping the story flowing and reacting to the player's creativity on the fly. I simply make sure to go around the table and say "ok, so what are you doing during this time?" so everyone gets a chance to act if they aren't all pursuing a group effort. At the same time, I don't feel everyone necessarily has to contribute to every challenge, so I don't think its necessary to find ways for players to be involved; I just look for opportunities to let every PC shine.</blockquote>

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