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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8999471" data-attributes="member: 42582">The general sort of solution is this: there is no resolution by way of various fast paced prodding and distractions.In the same way that a comic may cut between panels, or a film cut between scenes, or a book cut between chapters, with no clocks ticking in each moment of narration to follow the precise passage of time, so the same thing can happen in a RPG?For instance, here's an example from Prince Valiant play:You can see, here, that there is attention paid to Sir Morgath's pumping of Satyrion for information, then to Sir Gerren checking the castle's defences, then to Sir Morgath hearing Flora's alarm at the missing Theo, the Sir Justin joining the muster, then to the pursuit on horseback, which resuts in two PCs splitting up - Sir Justin defeating Wassel while Sir Gerren fails to catch Satyrion - before they rejoin, then to the assault on the castle, then to the escape from the castle, with the upshot being that all the PCs rejoin on the plain.The way that your issues of "observability" and "interaction" are handled is by techniques such as Sir Gerren's Oratory check to call for help and then again for the muster.Here's another example:Twillany and Rhan leave the three knights and find the dais in the forest. Then we cut back to the knights and resolve some of their conflict. Then Algol (a retainer) is dispatched. Then Twillany and Rhan are narrated as returning. Rolls are made to see if the retainer returns with the crucial item, and finally he does.None of this is especially difficult in a system whose resolution is based around scenes and consequences, rather than around granular "prodding".If one compares this to D&D - time would have to be tracked for Twillany and Rhan's trip through the forest. Then time would have to be tracked for the investigation of the dais. In D&D using a Legend Lore-type effect on the dais would probably take 1 minute or 10 minutes ("1 turn" in the old nomenclature). All of this would be many rounds of combat, and there is no canonical device I'm aware of in D&D combat to "pause" or "stretch" things such that those many rounds don't just take place end-to-end. Which in this case would probably leave not only the PC knight Sir Justin defeated by the Bone Laird, but the other PC knights defeated also.In a MHRP session once, I remember that the three PCs - War Machine in his civvies, Nightcrawler and Ice Man - had been picked up while out on the town by the B.A.D girls - Black Mamba, Asp and Diamondback. Nightcrawler had teleported on of them to the roof of the Capitol, apparently wooing her but actually, in the end, teleporting away and leaving her stuck up there so that he could thwart their plot; in the same action sequence Ice Man had frozen the moat at the base of the Washington Monument and (from memory) was skating there with his partner (mechanically, imposing romantic-type complications on her); while I can't remember fully what War Machine was doing except that at a certain point he summoned his armour and then flew his date to the top of the Washington Monument and left her dangling from it, before going off to join Nightcrawler to thwart the plot.It's easy to imagine what I've described in terms of "cuts" between frames of a comic or scenes of a film. The game handled it with no problems at all.Are you focusing on the fiction, or the play process?What you describe as a play process - majority vote with DM veto - is not canonically part of D&D in any version I am familiar with. The same social agreement that might nevertheless permit that play process to unfold in a game of D&D could equally take place at a table playing Burning Wheel.Focusing on the fiction, the way that your posited artefact would work in a game with more canonical BW play processes would be via the grant of appropriate Wises (say, "Nature of Reality-wise") by the Crown, with checks being resolved to see what sort of chaos ensues (the chaos being the consequence of failed checks); and then reality "flexing back" would permit the GM to stipulate the PCs' Beliefs and Instincts for that period of play. That would be a diversity of experience that I don't think D&D can deliver, as it has no mechanism like Wises checks or like Beliefs and Instincts.So I don't really feel the force of the example.The implication of this is that a game becomes more flexible simply by having few or no design expectations.That doesn't seem right to me.</blockquote>

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