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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5514957" data-attributes="member: 42582">Picking up just on your last sentence - this may relate to my quibble with KM - I see 4e as a game in which the GM frames the scenes, but the players then take control of the resolution of those scenes.And in that sense, yes, definitely, players can take control of the narrative - whether via rituals, skill checks, etc. But (at the risk of raising RC's ire) this is, to my mind, closer to what Hussar described a little upthread as "engaging the gameworld" - rather than sidestepping it.To try to elaborate just a little on that controversial way of putting things: one function teleport has in classic fantasy RPG play (at least as I've experienced it) is to skip over the boring bits. But if the GM is framing scenes well, then there won't be boring bits - and skipping over the interesting bits is what creates the sort of anticlimax triqui is talking about.When the players drive the scene forward by "engaging the gameworld" in the sense of actually interacting with the interesting bits, rather than skipping over them to an anticlimax, then we have good RPGing.Now as RC and DannyA have pointed out, it is possible to run a murder scenario (for example) in which the interesting bits come after the murderer has been identified. But as I and triqui and Hussar have pointed out, this is perhaps not true of all murder scenarios. The overall issue, then, in my view (and I think on this I agree with RC and Hussar) is making sure that the sorts of tools the players are given for engaging the gameworld are going to mesh well with the sorts of situations the GM will be presenting, so that they encourage engaging with, rather than skipping over, the interesting bits.Where I think I disagree with RC is that 4e is probably the first version of D&D to really address this issue in a self-conscious fashion. Earlier editions introduced spells not by thinking of them as player tools, but by thinking of them simply in terms of fictional plausibility. As a result, play in earlier versions of D&D has (I believe) tended to shape itself to the spells taken as given. (Monte Cook had a column probably close to 10 years ago now where he emphasised very strongly that D&D GM's should be framing situations and designing scenarios to accord with the spell capabilities the system presents - even where this might be a little surprising/counterintuitive in the results it leads to. There was no suggestion that we might first think of the sorts of situations/scenarios we are interested in - by reference to genre, etc - and then design and limit the tools to achieve this goal.)Whereas the 4e designers had a certain conception of what sort of play the game should involve, and then did their best to introduce spells (thought of as player tools) that would facilitate that play. (And to go back to the rituals and their levels - part of this is a much more self-conscious conception of what it means to play the game with Heroic, Paragon and Epic PCs.)</blockquote>

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