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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5499173" data-attributes="member: 42582">This reminds me of the following passage from the rules for Maelstrom Storytelling:se "scene ideas" to convey the scene, instead of literalisms. ... 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. ... 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.Sometimes a simulationist focus can actually be at odds with immersion, or player engagement with the fiction. Of course, 4e has a slightly Janus-faced approach to this - skill challenges are based around the Maelstrom-style approach, while tactical combat is based around a "distances and measurements" approach. When it comes to the 4e action resolution rules, my biggest complaint is about the difficulty of integrating these two approaches, and the lack of guidance from the designers on how to do this (DMG2 has a little bit to say, but really not very much).I do this all the time, not only helping out with narration (as mentioned above) but also with tactics, and generally just for fun. I'll often also "nudge" players in the direction of thematic engagement or conflict.To give an exmaple of this: The wizard PC in my game had in his background at the start of the campaign that he was a lapsed disciple of the Raven Queen, became unlapsed during the course of play (cleric multi-class) but now has relapsed in favour of a complex mix of Erathis, Ioun and Vecna (invoker multi-class). The party also has a paladin of the Raven Queen who is very hardcore in his approach, and a ranger-cleric of the Raven Queen who is more interested in the Fate aspect than the Death aspect. So when the players are debating some possible course of action I'll often play the religious "conscience" of one or the other of these PCs (mostly either the wizard or the paladin, because their players tend to engage more than the player of the ranger-cleric), needling them or reminding them of their religious commitments or otherwise sewing minor elements of conflict and disunity! - which then help drive the game forward.This is a technique that I first experienced as a player in a Cthulhu Dreamlands freeform at a convention back in 1992. I thought it was great then - it really lifted play to a whole new level, by keeping the stakes of the fiction firmly and place and stopping us (as players) becoming complacent about them. I've used it on and off since, but find myself doing so now more and more frequently (probably as I've become more confident about this aspect of my GMing).</blockquote>

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