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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5909370" data-attributes="member: 42582">This sounds very much like reskinning writ large - isn't this the sort of thing that 4e is controversial for?But for the past 20 (or so?) years some of us GMs have been trying to work out a coherent theory of scene-framing. Which this seems a little at odds wtih. (Maybe?)The Burning Wheel Adventure Burner has a concept called micro-dungeoneering ("micro" because the "dungeon" is a sketch map and a series of concepts, rather than the elaborately detailed grid maps and room descriptions of yore). It is a bit like your adventure-based design - the players are committed to entering the dungeon, they can't pull out (or rather, if they pull out, the adventure is over), the whole thing is (resource-wise, and speaking in 4e-ish terms) one big encounter/situation.But the Adventure Burner is also pretty explicit that this is for one-off play, not campaigning (or one-off style - you could run the same PCs through multiple microdungeons, I imagine, but it wouldn't be like a "regular" campaign). And it is also clear that the GM will have a lot of authority over what is at stake in the micro-dungeon - the players have a duty to make their PCs "ready to go" into the dungeon. The players don't get to negotiate their own stakes like in a normal Burning Wheel game.I'm used to a GMing approach in which tasks are not tightly nested across scenes/situations/encounters - the way that one encounter resolves can significantly effect how other possible encounters might open up and be framed.If a scene has to resolve a certain way for the subsequent scenes to open - if, in a sense, the content and framing of the subsequent scenes is settled before the first scene is even staged - I don't see how the players have much freedom to control the plot.Here's my attempt to isolate my sticking point: the encounter as a unit of play is not arbitrary. It has a certain "naturalness" within a certain approach to RPGing, in which the GM controls scene-framing, but the resolution of scenes - and therefore the overall plot - is not determined solely by any one participant, but rather emerges out of the use of the action resolution mechanics as the players have their PCs engage the scenes.The adventture seems to me too big a unit. An adventure contains a plot - a sequence of events, thematically or aesthetically linked. So adventure-based design seems to involve predetermination of the plot of the game.I can see how the mechanics work. What I'm still missing is how the players, as well as the GM, are able to exercise control over the plot.If the answer is, "whatever the players decide to have their PCs do coming out of scene 1, it will have to involve 2 more interaction scenes, 3 more exploration scenes and 3 fights before rests and rewards can be triggered", then I'm seeing a structure that is far more constraining then any of the alleged constraints found in 4e's design.But maybe I'm misperceiving. Or maybe that's not the answer.</blockquote>

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