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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8835970" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Oh good Lord. And people say Mr. Alexander doesn't have it out for 4e. Could he possibly get any more openly insulting without just sitting down and saying, "I'm here to naughty word on 4e."?The procedural reliance occurs on the player side too--optimizing the fun out of the gameplay by developing airtight "standard operating procedures" that avoid risks before they happen. This very thing was what led to so many of the adversarial DMing elements of early D&D, such as horrible cursed magic items that look identical to proper ones, cloakers/rust monsters/ear seekers/etc., and the ever-proliferating number of slimes or golems only weak to certain kinds of damage.I'm not sure I completely agree with your analysis of "Set Piece" design though. (I refuse to use the other terms, except to advocate for people to stop using them.) Much of what I do as a Dungeon World GM is in a "Set Piece" lens, but I do so through things my players are interested in following up on. We recently completed a whole friggin' adventure that arose purely out of one player botching a roll for getting in contact with an antiquities dealer who was thought to have information on the El'Adrin that his Battlemaster would want to know, involving shattered spacetime, alternate pasts and futures, and an extremely British time dragon. The players were doing it specifically because they cared; they wouldn't have been rolling for those things if they didn't, and as the mystery got deeper they became more curious. Had they brushed it off or latched onto something else, it would've been just another discarded plot point.Instead, I think the issue is a more nuanced, less buzzwordy version of what a lot of people grouse about with regard to games like this, without actually appreciating the texture of the thing. In Set Piece Land, the GM has an enormous responsibility to ensure things like pacing and apparent progression and actual impact over time etc. These things no longer innately arise out of the monsters themselves, because, at least in a properly robust Set Piece-designed system, you can take any given monster block and scale it across a significant range of levels and it will work more or less correctly.* It's incumbent on the GM to curate the experience of progressing and growing, of facing off against an incredibly tough opponent at level 5, then those opponents eventually becoming standard (if still challenging) fare, then them becoming distinctly secondary targets before finally having them as the fodder the characters mow through. For example, using 4e terminology, an ogre might be a Solo at level 5, an Elite at level 8, a Standard at level 10, and a minion at level 15+, possibly even dipping into "swarm" rules from other games once you get up into Epic tier. The GM no longer needs to worry about the mechanical structure of the world, and is instead relied upon to provide the narrative and ecological structure of the world, things that rules are notoriously pretty bad at providing anyway.For folks deeply immersed in the "Emergent Behavior" kind of design, where narrative and ecology are baked in but mechanical structure is wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff, this more or less turns everything on its head. The things you expect to do yourself are already done, and the things you expect to be already done have little to no effort put into them. That could be extremely frustrating and disorienting to deal with.*There are always exceptions, e.g. a level 1 dracolich is a bad idea, and odd examples e.g. needlefang drake swarms had some...issues...but the overall pattern holds fairly consistently.</blockquote>

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