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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6204077" data-attributes="member: 42582">I'm not 100% sure I follow this contrast between combat and non-combat problems. Who decides that a problem is combat or non-combat? If it's the players, then they can deploy whatever resources they think are appropriate.For instance, in my last session the PCs had received a vision that a star - an emissary from Ulban - had fallen to earth, and opened a portal to the location in question to check it out. I assumed that they might start by scouting, or talking, but in fact they charged straight into combat. What sort of challenge was that? The players decided. (And for all I know, it may turn back into a social challenge before the situation is resolved.)That's fine. I want no part of storyteller style, so we've worked out what I already knew from earlier threads, namely, that we are looking different things in RPGing.I'm not sure why you use phrases like "flash of clairvoyance" or "player omniscience" - I've given pretty detailed discussion upthread of secret backstory and its relationship to scene framing and action resolution (including via discussion of the duke example in the 4e DMG). There is no conflict between secret backstory and "indie" style. But there is conflict between resolution turning on secret fictional positioning which the players can't discover and act upon, and "indie" style.If I was framing the PCs into an interaction with the mad chamberlain, I (i) would already be confident that a mad chamberlain actually connected to some already-established thematic concern for the game, and (ii) would be expecting the interaction itself to provide the players with the opportunity to recover some of that secret backstory via interacting with the chamberlain.It's a bonus. It's not free - the players spend a resource to get it (namely, stuff on their equipment lists). In 4e the rule is that 1/10 the cost of an item of the PC's level is a +2 bonus - for 5th level PCs, that would be +2 for spending 100 gp.If the bribe was paid but the skill check nevertheless failed, that is when discovery might kick in. Or another option would be to allow the PCs to turn a failure into a success at the cost of being discovered by a 3rd party.I think we have here an instance of Manbearcat's point.No one disputes that getting in trouble for offering (or paying) a bribe; or charming an officer of the king's household; or drawing swords in the king's palace; might naturally cause trouble. But equally they might not. How do we work out whether or not these natural consequences come home to roost? In "indie" style, these consequences are inserted by the GM as results of failed check in order to preserve and consolidate genre and them while also complicating the players' attempts to impact the ingame situation via their PCs.By "weakness" I assume that you mean "reason you don't want to play it". For me it's not a weakness; it's a strengththat the focus of the game is on the matters that the players have established as their concerns that they want to engage via their PCs.If the players' goal in the scene is to meet the king, and an obstructionist chamberlain is one of the obstacles they have to work around, that could be interesting. Working around that obstacle might include enchanting the Chamberlain, or bribing him, or distracting him, or anything else that seems fun and feasible. It wouldn't include having no choice but to give up, exit the situation, and go out on a backstory hunt to find a way of dealing with the Chamberlain. At that point we have a GM-driven game (the focus of play is the chamberlain, who was introduced as an important story element by the GM), not a player-driven game (the players cared about the king, not the chamberlain).Huh? The roll succeeding or not is a rules issue, not a GM decision. And the consequence was set by the player, not the GM. To me, this is a matter of some impotance. I don't follow this. I'm not sure who you are envisaging "tossing out scene ideas", nor what exactly think the process is.I generally don't have trouble framing scenes where my players can have an impact via their PCs and the action resolution rules. I follow their cues in framing scenes that they are interested in. And I fill in backstory and details in ways that resond to their cues and interests as they unfold over the course of resolution ("Schroedinger's backstory including NPCs"). I don't see what's particularly Mother-May-I aboout it. In fact, I tend to find it's something of the opposite.This idea that you can make the plot "fit" the PCs' backgrounds - and that nothing else has to change after we file off one set of serial numbers and right on another - is at odds with the style I prefer.Another example of contrast - there is a style of adventure design where the players are hunting a McGuffin and the bulk of the adventure is a series of essentially obstacles that are unrelated in any deep thematic way to the players' goals or the McGuffin. (In fact, that's pretty much inherent to the notion of a McGuffin.) I hate that sort of thing. In my ideal every moment of the adventure should point towards the thematic stakes, and be more than just a procedural obstacle.</blockquote>

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