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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 4505758" data-attributes="member: 42582">In fact, as I just posted in my reply to Justanobody, the player's story is relevant to determining the DCs for the skill challenge - and it is a core feature of the skill challenge mechanic that a player can introduce a new skill based on his/her story of what is going on, what has gone on, and what is possible in the gameworld.I don't think I'm ignoring that preference overall (perhaps in my earlier reply to you I may have). I'm just saying that, if you are playing a game with players who have that sort of preference, you are probably better off not including non-combat encounters (including skill challenges) in the game. Skill challenges are (on the whole, making what I hope is a permissible generalisation) for players who are not equally pleased playing D&D combat or DDM.I agree with this. But I think for many participants in an RPG the interest in combat is the story that hangs upon the mechanical elements. And I think if this is not what an RPGer finds interesting, than the skill challenge mechanics are probably not for her/him.I think we've had this conversation in the past also. I agree that not all ideas (what I'm calling "fictions", given that they are not ideas of real things) are stories. But I don't agree that all stories are retellings. Some stories are the original tellings. I think a lot of (by no means all) RPGing is the original telling of a story. For example, when a player says "My guy swings his sword at the orc" that is the first telling of a story about some PC attacking an orc. Not a nobel-prize winning story, but a story nevertheless.I don't think that wargamers or DDM players are telling stories - that's one typical difference, I think, between a wargame and an RPG. Likewise with respect to Magic the Gathering or Monopoly (which is why I find discussions about RPGing in 4e that begin with references to Monopoly particularly unhelpful).I know you don't regard a lot of RPGing as storytelling. I've hypothesised above that this is because you limit the notion of "story" to retelling, and exclude the first telling. If this is wrong, then I don't know what your reason is for denying that a lot of RPGing is storytelling. (Is it because you have tighter strictures on what constitutes a story? eg a certain sort of plot, or thematic content, or tightness of authorial intention?)This wasn't meant to be a contentious point. The 4e books distinguish three modes of play: exploration, combat encounters and non-combat encounters (PHB pp 9-10). Exploration includes "interacting with the environment" outside the context of an encounter (PHB pp 262-263). So a lot of what many people call roleplaying - eg saying (in character) "I go up to the door, calling out 'Anyone home?'" and, once the GM tells you that a gravelly voice replies "Yes", continuing "I say 'We come in peace'", etc - falls under the notion of exploration in 4e.Exploration, in this sense, has nothing in common with what Ron Edwards/The Forge call "exploration" (ie the metagame priority of imaging/learning about the fictional world of the game).However, the PHB goes on to say that non-combat encounters will "focus on skills, utility powers and your own (not your character's) wits", which means that some of what I was trying to get to with "roleplaying" above would also constitute a non-combat encounter (eg the example I gave above is probably on the verge of becoming a non-combat encounter, which may be resolved via skill challenge or the player's wits, depending on the way the table prefers to handle these things).I hoped that the notion of "roleplaying" in play in the previous few paragraphs was something in the neighbourhood of what you meant by the term (my own usage is a bit broader, including what you are calling storytelling).Just one example: no version of D&D has had full-fledged hit-location/critical rules of the Rolemaster/Runequest sort, which means that storytelling has always been required to determine what sort of injuries anyone suffers in combat, and (consequently) to describe what the healing of those injuries consists in.Unlike in a skill challenge, however, that storytelling normally does not feed back into the mechanics (eg it does not open up or close off mechanical options like which skill is useable). I wouldn't be surprised if the game has been played in ways which allow it to feed back in, however - that would fit with the free-formish nature of action resolution in pre-3E D&D.</blockquote>

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