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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Libramarian" data-source="post: 6074162" data-attributes="member: 6688858">Now I'm thinking of it like this: the gamist dungeon and the Pemertonian scene-framing technique are both sort of anti-simulationist; they're both solutions to the "20 minutes of fun in 4 hours" thing that happens when you just try to simulate a fairly mundane medieval fantasy world with D&D. The solution of the gamist dungeon is to make the game world an unrealistically fun place, so you can just let the players roll up some characters and wander around in a very relaxed, intuitive, non-metagamey way without it being boring most of the time. It's like a back-end solution. The scene-framing approach is like a front-end solution: it focuses on teaching the DM how to direct the game in a way that you skip over the boring parts and get to the fun (but in an improvisational way that doesn't involve actually planning out the whole plot beforehand). I don't think either of these approaches are trivial or "just good storytelling". They both involve sophisticated rules, tools and techniques.I've been reading some old 4e Design & Development articles today, and <a href="https://www.wizards.com/DnD/Article.aspx?x=dnd/drdd/20080630" target="_blank">the one on the DMG</a> makes it clear that they were concerned about this:Many of us have played in games where we spent hours searching for  the fun, because the structure of the adventure or the meanness of the  DM kept us from finding the information we needed to keep things moving.  Nobody has fun as those hours stretch on, so we formulated the  "Information Imperative" (page 26): Give the players the information  they need to keep the adventure going. Once again, it's a principle we tried to carry through the rest of  the book: in narration (page 22), skill challenges (page 75), and  adventure design (page 101). Also, just because I have to point this out as well, I think this puts to rest the question of whether or not DCs are meant to scale with character level in 4e <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />In past editions, we'd describe things like cave slime as if the DC  of the Acrobatics check to avoid slipping in it were an objective,  scientific measurement of its physical properties. "How slippery is cave  slime? It's DC 30 slippery." But setting a fixed number like that  limits its usefulness -- cave slime would be too challenging for  low-level characters and irrelevant for high-level characters. In 4th  Edition, we tell you to set the DC to avoid slipping based on the level  of the characters, using the Difficulty Class and Damage by Level table.  So when 5th-level characters encounter cave slime, they'll be making a  check against DC 22, but 25th-level characters have to make a DC 33  check. Does that mean that high-level characters encounter Epic Cave Slime  that's objectively slipperier than the Heroic Cave Slime they  encountered in their early careers? Maybe. It doesn't matter. What  matters is that the DM has permission to use terrain that's relevant to  the characters, regardless of their level -- and has a table supported  by solid math to make sure it's relevant. </blockquote>

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