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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6074183" data-attributes="member: 42582">Couldn't agree more. This is why I think Ron Edwards is right when he identifies gamism and narrativism as strongly akin (though with differing conceptions of what "fun" means), and both at odds with simulationism.(EDIT: I also think this makes it easy for play, at the table, to move back and forth between a light-hearted narrativism and a low-competition gamism.)The passage you cite should have been in the DMG!Here is a passage from Maelstrom Storytelling which (in general content, if not all its details) is nearly identical (and written in 1994, so 14 years earlier):focus on the intent behind the scene and not on how big or how far things might be. If the difficulty of the task at hand (such as jumping across a chasm in a cave) is explained in terms of difficulty, it doesn't matter how far across the actual chasm spans. In a movie, for instance, the camera zooms or pans to emphasize the danger or emotional reaction to the scene, and in so doing it manipulates the real distance of a chasm to suit the mood or "feel" of the moment. It is then no longer about how far across the character has to jump, but how hard the feat is for the character. . . . If the players enjoy the challenge of figuring out how high and far someone can jump, they should be allowed the pleasure of doing so - as long as it doesn't interfere with the narrative flow and enjoyment of the game. The scene should be presented therefore in terms relative to the character's abilities . . . Players who want to climb onto your coffee table and jump across your living room to prove that their character could jump over the chasm have probably missed the whole point of the story.In terms of making the narrated fiction match the mechanics, I think there are two basic ways of going. Either you follow the lead from the DMG door table, and narrate the slime as objectively more slippery (I remember a thread a few years ago in which someone coined "Astral Teflon Slime"); or you treat the increaes in the numbers on the character sheets as pure metagame, and so narrate both the difficulty and the PCs' abilities as unchanged.For physical challenges, in my own game I tend to take the "door table" approach (and similarly follow the jumping and falling rules in the skill sections of the PHB/Rules Compendium). For social/mental/spiritual challenges, I tend to mix the two approaches: the PCs might be getting a bit better, but also a lot of the number-creep is pure metagame (in order to keep all the maths on the same track) and doesn't necessarily correspond to such dramatic changes in the fiction.</blockquote>

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