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: 8285190" data-attributes="member: 42582">I think the last sentence is true. It's very close to tautologous, I think, in the context of RPGing: subsequently-narrated fiction must conform to prior established fiction. (I'm putting special cases like Toon (cartoon "reality") and Over the Edge (deliberately playing with the fourth wall) to one side here.)But I don't agree that the point about Strahd in the module is beside the point. Because I think that, in practical terms, it is almost impossible to state the limits on what might count as regrouping, or marshalling forces, for a NPC in any situation that is less contrived or artificial than a pretty traditional dungeon. When you're talking about a Count - a ruler of a meaningful political unit - then in 8 hours that person can rouse guards who were sleeping or were on the walls rather than in the towers or whatever; if a vampire can summon packs of wolves or flocks (? not sure what the right noun of assemblage is) of bats; if a magic-user then perhaps can place magical traps or defences; etc.I don't think so.By "naturalism" I'm echoing a term ("naturalistically") used in the OP. The OP contrasts "naturalistic" extrapolation of the fiction by the GM with "systematised" extrapolation such as found in Cortex+ Heroic/MHRP (the Doom Pool). I am drawing the same sort of contrast; as well as Doom Pool-style techniques (which can also be found in HeroQuest revised) I've mentioned games that systematically contrast the GM's role in framing scenes with the players' role in declaring actions for their PCs within scenes; and also 13th Age, which just uses a hard rule for recoveries of survive 4 standard encounters without an extended rest, or else suck up a campaign loss!My experience is that many RPGers seem to object to these systematised approaches because they are "artificial". Hence my (and I believe [USER=6696971]@Manbearcat[/USER]'s) use of "naturalistic" as a label for the contrasting approach.What you are arguing for - as I read you, at least - is that a naturalistic approach can still yield meaningful limits on the GM's moves within the fiction to "amp up" the encounter if the PCs take 8 hours of rest. I think this is true in the context of (say) Tomb of Horrors or White Plume Mountain. But as I've said above, I don't think it's true once you get into less contrived situations.</blockquote>

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