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Message: <blockquote data-quote="uzirath" data-source="post: 8988544" data-attributes="member: 8495">As you probably recall from my occasional posts, I am most experienced with GURPS and its various offshoots. It is, I think, rooted in the same tradition as Rolemaster and D&D, with GM prep establishing the setting and events that may be "activated" by PC actions. (There have been strides in recent years to accommodate wider varieties of play.) In thinking about your Rolemaster example, I'm trying to imagine how I might run that today using GURPS. I think I would divide the scene into a few smaller, opportunities for characters to take meaningful action. (A bit like a 4e skill challenge.) I might, for example, have the party overhear the riders talking above. Do they have someone who might understand the language? Or a magical means of doing so? If so, they might hear them calling for a shaman to come test for magical interlopers. If not, they would have to guess based on the snippets that they hear (including, perhaps, the shaman approaching, chanting and shaking his staff). Or they might hear a horse's hooves echoing on the cover. Do they try to create a distraction? Prepare for battle? Perhaps plan a ruse (an illusion of a Baklun deity rising from the pit...) Etc.Each choice would likely be resolved with skill rolls against pertinent abilities, whether mundane or magical, with consequences and further opportunities for action emerging from the particulars. I think it could play out to be fairly dramatic. I can think of similar nail-biter moments in recent game sessions.Admittedly, this does require plenty of GM fiat, and no amount of pre-planning could account for all the possibilities. This isn't to say that other systems couldn't manage a similarly dramatic scene using entirely different mechanisms. I am not sure I understand this point. I agree. I attempt to manage this by keeping the setting focus loose and a bit blurry for most situations. The exact ranges of spells and whatnot don't matter when we're in a broader story mode. Things can be more fun if they flow from the descriptions and die rolls. (I love using margin-of-success and failure to guide the story.) For players who like the tactical combat mini-game, I'm happy to drop into fully particularized combat when the second-by-second drama is the ideal focus. I think of that a bit like "bullet time" in The Matrix. For other groups and genres, even combat can remain a bit fuzzy.</blockquote>

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