Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5968516" data-attributes="member: 42582">By "scenes" I don't mean shopping, travelling, talking, eating etc. I mean scenes in the "RPGing by way of scene-framing" sense - more-or-less straight-down-the-line Forge-ist play.But it is just false to say that an encounter becomes irrelevant because (for example) success by the PCs is guaranteed. Because the way in which that success is achieved may well matter. Here is an example that illustrates that, that LostSoul posted a while ago now:And of course there are a whole range of possible challenge-levels between "guaranteed not to fail" and "encounter that will consume 1/4 of your daily resources". All of which can matter in the sort of way that skill challenge mattered, and/or in other ways as well.It seems to me that when you are saying certain encounters have "no real effect beyond the encounter" you are meaning only that they have no effect on resources available outside the encounter. But they may have all sorts of other, highly relevant effects on the fiction. Those effects on the fiction may, in turn, have all sorts of mechanical consequences. For example, being polite to a dryad might give a bonus in some future social interaction with a treant; running away from the Tarrasque might have a pretty significant impact on the way the next scene is framed.(Encounters that you are classifying as "non-encounters" can also be relevant to resources available. An easy social encounter, for example, might lead an NPC to provide assistance in a subsequent encounter, which would be a form of resource creation on the part of the players. Burning Wheel puts quite a bit of emphasis on this particular approach to the generation of player resources.)And the fact that encounters matter, in all sorts of ways, whether or not they drain resources in a way that will ramify beyond the encounter, makes balance highly relevant. Because if one character is consistently able to dominate play in the scenes that the GM frames, it is irrelevant whether or not those scenes are level-appropriate encounters. There will still be an imbalance in the capcity of the various players, via their PCs, to affect the content of the fiction and the unfolding story of the campaign.I don't quite get the conception of an RPG scenario that you are working with, but if you reallly think that skill challenges aren't mechanically significant, are not sites of challenge where important stakes are put into play and resolved one way or another, and therefore are not episodes of play in which mechanical balance between PCs becomes relevant; if you really think that the only way an encounter can be relevant in a mechanical sense is if it depletes the resources available to the players in a subsequent encounter; then your conception is very different from mine, I think, and also different from the one that 4e most naturally presupposes.</blockquote>

Verification