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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5622796" data-attributes="member: 42582">At least in HeroQuest, it's not about the GM setting the DC very high to negate someting. It's about the GM telling the player, at the metagame level and before anything has happened or been attempted in the fiction, that a certain canvassed option isn't going to wash.The difference from old school GMing would be (i) that it happens pre-emptively, in this metagame fashion, and (ii) because of that, it can be done, and is expected to be done, in a more consensual fashion. (I identify in more detail below how metagame mechanics, and mechanics that have a certain looseness of fit between mechanical resolution and ingame fictional events, help contribute to the second of these differences.)Whether these differences are very siginficant overall, or for any given group, I don't know. They are significant for me.I don't entirely agree. The narrative aspect, for example, can be pretty important for bringing page 42 into play.One actual play example of this: before using Footwork Lure against a sonte golem, the player of the fighter in my game dropped a flask of wrestling oil onto the ground between himself and the golem, to increase the distance that he could slide the golem (and thereby get the benefits of Polearm Momentum against it). For this to work, the narrative aspect of Footwork Lure - that by deft work with his halberd the fighter lures the golem into stepping on the slippery patch of oil - has to be acknowledged. And the fact that the slipperiness was caused by oil itself became relevant when the party's wizard place a Wall of Fire in an adjacent square the next round - I decided to let the fighter roll a save for his patch of oil, which it failed, and the oil therefore combusted and the enhancement of Footwork Lure was lost.One hypothetical example (at least, hypothetical relative to my table): a PC knocks a snake "prone". Following the Rules Compendium text (p 233), the table accepts that the prone conditioncan affect limbless creatures, such as fish and snakes . . . when such a creature falls prone, imagine it is writhing or unsteady, rather than literally lying down.So the table agree that the snake has been flipped onto its back. Now one of the players remebers that the party was earlier warned by an oracle to look out for a snake with diamond markings on its back, and wants her PC to make a Perception check. The difficulty of that check, which the GM has responsibility for assigning on the spot, is clearly going to be affected by the fiction that the table has agreed to.And the narration is crucial to resolving a skill challenge, per PHB p 259 and DGM pp 73-75:Your DM sets the stage for a skill challenge by describing the obstacle you face and giving you some idea of the options you have in the encounter. Then you describe your actions and make checks until you either successfully complete the challenge or fail… Running a skill challenge: Begin by describing the situation and defining the challenge. . . You describe the environment, listen to the players’ responses, let them make their skill checks, and narrate the results...     When a player’s turn comes up in a skill challenge, let that player’s character use any skill the player wants. As long as the player or you can come up with a way to let this secondary skill play a part in the challenge, go for it… In skill challenges, players will come up with uses for skills that you didn’t expect to play a role. Try not to say no. . . This encourages players to think about the challenge in more depth… However, it’s particularly important to make sure these checks are grounded in actions that make sense in the adventure and the situation.But even in cases where the narrative doesn't have an immediate mechanical consequence, it can still be important to play - which relates to my earlier response to Yesway Jose about mechanics for love. Thus, if a player describes a PC's power or ability working in a certain fashion, this contributes to the persona that is being developed for that PC. This is in turn relevant to how NPCs, demons, gods etc will view with and interact with the PC. Which matters to exploration, to scene framing, and can also, in turn, have mechanical implications in the context of a skill challenge.An actual play example: the drow chaos sorcerer in my game has recently become a Demonskin Adept. The way the player of this PC describes his various abilities working matters to the manner in which demons, demon worshippers, devils etc - in short, all those who care about chaos and its ways - perceive, and therefore interact with, the PC in question. And this is not irrelevant or an afterthought to the the game. This is the game.(A related point - a player, by choosing to narrate his/her PC's powers and abilities in a certain way, is also implicitly constructing the table's own "credibility test" paramters. This is another point of difference, I think, from classic D&D.)What I've said above helps answer this, I think. Yep. But I'm used to it, because most of my GMing experience is with Rolemaster, which my group played in a vanilla narrativist fashion while still relishing every ounce of mechanical detail that Rolemaster provides both in character building and action resolution (OK, not every ounce, but many if not most of them).For me, there are two keys, I think, to dissolving the tension. One is to make sure that the stakes of the combat are tightly integrated into the unfolding narrative. This doesn't mean no light-hearted or more peripheral conflicts - but even peripheral conflicts are still peripheral ie on the periphery of the unfolding narrative, and not completely divorced from it.The second key is to make sure that the combat itself, as it unfolds in its tactical richness, is also populated by moments that express the concerns of the unfolding narrative. A whole range of decisions made by the participants in the game feed into this. For me as GM, it's part of what I keep in mind in encounter building, and then in adjudicating the encounter and actuallly playing the NPCs - for example, in target selection, choosing which powers to use, etc I look for opportunities to push salient buttons (will the dwarf be defeated by a phalanx of hobgoblins? will the mage-invoker of Ioun and Vecna, having teleported into a room to blow the doomspeaker of Dagon out through the window, be able to survive the guardian demon she summons into the room as her final act? can I wipe the smile off the face of that cocky drow sorcerer?). I think 4e is very good for this, because it's underlying mechanics are robust enough that making decisions in this sort of way - at least in my experience to date - tends to yield a dramatic but mechanically "fair" fight. I generally don't have to worry about anti-climactic underkill or "oops, TPK" overkill (which is a definite difference from Rolemaster).The players also contribute in this second way. By building their PCs and choosing certain classes, powers and abilities, they already introduce, by default as it were, certain material into the course of tactical play. And because of the same "flexibile" or "forgiving" character of 4e's underlying mechanical robustness, they can play to the narrative without concern that this will lead to mechanical suboptimality that costs the party. (To put it another way: at least in my experience, the mechanics are robust enough in this sense that they don't genrate a very strong push from narrativism to any sort of hardcore gamism. They leave room for more light-hearted gamism - "high-fiving" clever moves and the like - but I think this sort of gamism is fairly compatible with a relaxed narrativism that focuses more on aesthetic and thematic value than the "serious moral questions" that are sometimes identified with narrativism.)A game like HeroQuest probably offers more immediate satisfaction for a narrativist agenda, but some of us like the crunchy bits of 4e. Burning Wheel and The Riddle of Steel are games that probably mix crunch and narrative control in comparable sorts of degrees, but both tend more to the gritty than the gonzo, I think, and my group likes gonzo fantasy (not necessarily silly fanatsy, but plane-travelling, mixing it up with devils, demons and gods, epic destinies, etc).</blockquote>

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