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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8125487" data-attributes="member: 82106">Right, but this is a big problem for a published adventure developer. Their business model is to sell you content THAT YOU WILL USE. If it is largely going to end up on the 'cutting room floor' during play, that definitely reduces the utility of the material. On top of that, DMs are surely under a temptation to use 'DM force' to bend the arc of play such that it intersects with the material provided. This was no issue at all for early 'classic' D&D. It aspired to NOTHING ELSE but the 'dungeon crawl' and thus a map full of rooms, traps, secret passages, and dangerous guardians of fantastic treasures served as a complete solution. Every room was virtually guaranteed to be visited! There was no advantage to the party to not do so, and thus no incentive for the DM to bend anything, at least in that sense (she might fudge some rolls to keep the PCs alive in a tight situation, but that wasn't really inherent to the system, it would be driven by table dynamics). As soon as games developed in a more elaborately plotted direction, things got stickier. Modern 'narrative play' is really a response to that, but it leaves you with only a very provisional 'adventure path' and vendors of such material have not really ever come to terms with that. The best they can really do is try to provide the DM and players with strong hooks to give the narrative's assumed plotline a lot of momentum, and then leave it to the players and DM from there.FOR ME this is not a problem, I don't really ever buy adventures. I think the most recent ones I own date back to the mid-90's or earlier and I am not really planning to run them anytime soon. I think I ran one pre-plotted 4e Dungeon adventure, and it was a pretty rough experience, things were just as a I suspect, a very thin plot that required a lot of DM arm-twisting in the form of "and then this happens..." sorts of stuff to 'keep it on track'. This was my favorite aspect of 4e, VERY VERY easy to just free-form ad-lib a game. All I ever did was write up some notes and descriptions of 'stuff' and then maybe it would come up in play. Most of it didn't!There are many other ways to give weight to decisions. They should be weighty for all the reasons that exist in the real world (or analogous ones at least). This does require character development and joint participation in determining what the stakes and consequences really are. Mechanics can help that. Resources can then factor in as some of those, much like Dungeon World might do it.The players choices aren't illusions. The CHARACTERS choices are certainly 'illusions', since they don't really exist... This is where most people's analysis falls down. They are determined to structure their thinking around an idea that the characters are treated as 'real' in some sense. It leads to a lot of difficult problems in play. So, resource management, IMHO, has the function of acting as one of the 'fictional positioning' constraints that are used by the game participants to decide what moves are and are not allowed and/or what their impact on the fiction is. And I'm not advocating for the elimination of resources. I'm advocating for their use in a way that is under the control of all participants. So, if it is dramatically useful, to achieve the PLAYER's goals in terms of narrative and character development, etc. then they can, for instance "run out of torches" or "press on despite our wounds". I generally operate in the mode where the GM is framing scenes. So usually it will be the GM who is going to have the torches go out, perhaps, and 'press on' is more likely to be a player option, and it WILL be informed by what the fiction is telling them about their resources. Hit points and such are there to give them a good way to measure that stuff, but if they are really just wanting to be at full strength, for some dramatic reason, at a certain point, then that is probably a scene that should get framed into play. I think this is not too different from how [USER=42582]@pemerton[/USER] has been doing it, though we seem to utilize slightly different techniques sometimes. Anyway, I actually like resource games, but I don't like when they are a choice of which player's character to gimp. If that is going to be the choice, then it should be a choice of the participants in the game, not dictated strictly by mechanics.</blockquote>

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