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Message: <blockquote data-quote="apoptosis" data-source="post: 4583046" data-attributes="member: 3226">If the DM could manage to show that them tracking me was difficult and that is expressed in game..then that is good.It is why i like games that give out such gems like bonus dice. This allows these a good way (though not the only way) to reward (or penalty dice to penalize) choices to make them more meaningful. This way i could get bonus dice during the assassins conflict to denote the difficulty they had in tracking me.The other option would be to lower the number of assassins. Of course the counterargument is that unless the DM outright tells me (or somehow in-game informs me) there is no way to know that there are fewer assassins than i should have encountered.This of course opens another can of worms (conversations with you tend to do that...i say that as a compliment as simple discussions are boring). If he does let me know it (in game or metagame-wise) it could also seem that the DM is just saying that there are fewer assassins than there would be had i not tried to be sneaky just to retroactively make it seem like my choice was meaningful, so we are back where we started in some some ways.Now if i had a GM that i knew plotted such stuff out to great detail i knew it would be the truth and my choice would feel meaningful, but very few GMs have such time to do that. This is an advantage to such tools like bonus dice.Other people probably have even better ways to solve this issue.This is true, which is why we generally agree that player input is so vital to the success of the game. And yes D&D is about interesting combats and 4E was designed i believe to specifically to ramp up the interest level of combats.In some ways it is why i really liked the 1E spellcasting idea. Spells were more rarely cast (in my games at least) but they were very meaningful choices when they were used (albeit i know many do/did not like this paradigm). it is why i really liked old M-Us. They didnt do stuff often but when they did it was really challenge altering (not all peoples games of 1E played out like this i know).You make a really good point. I can only say for me (about my enjoyment can NOT expand to others), the thematic choice, on first perusal, seems more like a facade of a meaningful choice than a substantially meaningful one. This would be similar to the choice of killing the bad guy by slashing him versus impaling him. It is a choice and there could be some symbolic thematic differences between the two choices (a slashing wound vs a impaling wound, say he had killed others by impaling them etc.) but it tends to in general be a rather cosmetic choice in most cases.Now i say that this is somewhat specific to this particular example (i apologize to Cadfan, i dont mean to seem like i am attacking your example so consistently).  I do value thematic choices, but i would want the actual event to follow mechanically (in world i guess) with differences in last-ditch vs triumphal conquest.Some of this is this is colored by the fact that...i don't mind the 'final BBEG' conflict that ends in one round if the players made such a choice that engineered a one-round win over the BBEG (honestly the theory of the final BBEG conflict as an ideal, i tend to not favor ,in general. I think it tends to set up expectations that i find very manufactured and takes away from player control....unless of course THEY set it up so that there is a BBEG conflict at the end)PS i wrote this hastily so please excuse poor writing.</blockquote>

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