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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8114508" data-attributes="member: 82106">Not convinced. You can ABANDON an SC within my paradigm, if the PCs give up before mechanically reaching the 'failed' state. This might happen if they aren't willing to pay the cost of success. You won't ever see 'short circuit to success', or simple disengagement. It is really hard for them to go off the rails when the terms of their construction is made 'meta game'. I agree that this was not how it was presented in DMG1, for the most part (there are hints). Unfortunately, what WAS presented, even the details of mechanics aside, wasn't super workable. I suspect that some of the authors simply envisaged SCs as very limited situation tools where they would only basically be an 'encounter without combat'. The examples bear that out, but real world play showed that A) the mechanics were not good for that, and B) in practice it is hard to 'keep it in the box' to that degree. So, it was a story game mechanic grafted into a process sim sort of context, and that didn't work well. DMG2 provides a bunch of fixes, but it still isn't quite bold enough to do what I'm talking about, which is to ENTIRELY shift the mechanics to being about the meta-game vs being about the details of in game resolution (and here I am using meta-game again, but whatever...).</blockquote>