NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6243596" data-attributes="member: 42582">Sure.But I posit that in a fantasy RPG with 12th level PCs, who are (in virtue of that fact) comparable to Aragorn or Conan or Merlin or Ged in terms of the scope of their prowess within the fiction, that a reluctant Chamberlain whose reluctance is a result of being a gebbeth under the control of the corrupted Court Mage is more exciting!The war troll was an object of interrogation. The guard dogs were just that. The reason we were not granted an audience wasn't because we weren't genteel enough, but because of political opposition.Plus, the whole notion of "adventurers" is one that I find problematic - it's fine at the metagame level, but you are using it in a way that implies it has some ingame meaning. In the scenario we played, my PC was a Knight Commander of his order who had been rallying the defenders of the city, [MENTION=27570]sheadunne[/MENTION] played a mercenary fighter in whom the balance between hope and cynicism had left him ripe for recruitment by me, [MENTION=386]LostSoul[/MENTION] played a cyncial enchanter, and [MENTION=16586]Campbell[/MENTION] played a refugee from the Feywild, a punisher of Sehanine who remembered a lost harmony between the human and elven worlds. So these characters have a history and an integration into the fictional situation that makes them more than just "adventurers" seeking an audience with the king from out of the blue.These elements of history and situation were drawn upon by [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION] in presenting the chamberlain and the court mage.This challenge was resolved, in part, via diplomatic means: we argued with the chamberlain and then, by defeating the war troll - whose attempts to go wild had been exacerbated by Quinn's mind control - persuaded other members of the war council that we, rather than the chamberlain, had the right policy.Thematically and in basic dramatic strcuture, the scene could be compared to the Gandalf/Wormtongue/Theoden scene in The Two Towers, only with more crazy violence.I don't know why you say this. Quinn came close to being stopped at the start of the adventure, when he got in over his head in the city sewers. And then, once the dragon shattered the dams above the city, he nearly got swept over a cliff by rushing waters (Thurgon saved him).These claims are both wrong. Furthermore, the second one seems simply to be made up! It has no connection to anything Manbearcat actually posted.The Chamberlain wasn't impressed by anything - his gebbeth body was cut in half by the war troll's chain when the war troll went wild.It's true that the encounter was framed by Manbearcat in a way that spoke to the inclinations - both story and mechanical of the PCs - of the PCs, but that is the whole point of "indie" play, and also refutes your contentin that this scenario could be designed on a non-indie model. There is no non-indie way of framing a scenario to respond to the hooks built by the players into their PCs, and then adjduciating and evolving it as it unfolds in a way that maintains the pressure on those same points and invites the playes to thereby push towards resolution of the thematic elements built into their PCs. Because to run a game in this way is precisely what the "indie" style, as characterised by me well over 1000 posts upthread, is all about.I think this is a good summary.I think we can also note that some of these things are matters of degree - for instance, from memory some of LostSoul's failed checks early on did just mean that Quinn didn't quite do what he was trying to - and also, in 4e, skill resolution in combat, particularly as it pertains to movement, tends to be less fortune-in-the-middle and more like sheadunne's characterisation of 3E. I find this difference in techniques across domains of conflict (combat vs non-combat) is one of the more challenging aspects of 4e in play.</blockquote>

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