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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5496837" data-attributes="member: 42582">They're not the same thing. They are more than tangentially related, however, because in order to respond to the outcome of a given player-driven scene, it is necessary to frame a new scene on the fly. The elements of that scene may on may occasions be pregiven (eg some key NPCs, perhaps even a key location) but the details won't be, as they arise out of what happened previously.A robust system of encounter-building guidelines based on level appropriate DCs helps with this. A simulationist system makes it harder, because either (i) the simulation gets the DCs wrong relative to level and pacing considerations, or (ii) building in enough additional factors(eg in a combat or other physical challenge, perhaps weather or lighting) to make the simulation generate the right numbers for pacing and level considerations takes too much time. (This is based on my own experience of the differences between running Rolemaster and running 4e.)My understanding is that a prestige class is (i) subject to GM approval, and (ii) tends to require the PC to achieve the requisite backstory in the course of play (the non-mechanical prerequisites for many prestige classes). Of course, (ii) is another avenue for the GM to control access to the class, given that the GM is typically the final arbiter on the world design and encounter design consideratins that would determine whether or not (ii) can be satisfied.Paragon paths have neither (i) or (ii). That's the difference. And it is consistent with a more general difference in tenor of the two rulesets as to where this sort of control over the fiction is located.Skill challenges for overland travel are one obvious example. A published instance I'm familiar with is Heathen in one of the early free online Dungeons.The healing mechanics are another. Both short rests and extended rests - which separate healing from any ingame activity or use of resources - open up much greater flexibility for scene framing, and reduce the impact of ingame causal considerations on the transition from scene to scene (again, the contrast here with Rolemaster and AD&D is very stark - 3E, with its wands of CLW, might make the contrast less stark, but I don't know that wands of CLW contribute very much to a feeling of heroic protagonism).These two techniques can in fact be combined so that - for example - the consequence of a failure in an overland travel challenge is inability to get an extended rest. Which then allows what are, in the gameworld, encounters that occur on different days (and therefore not threatening to verisimilitude in their temporal proximity) to be, in mechanical terms, encounters drawing on the same bundle of daily resources. This is harder to achieve in a game where healing is heavily simulationist and closely linked to the ingame activity of the PCs, and in which skill checks and their contribution to overland travel are also handled in a much more micro-detail fashion.What I've just described can't be done in Rolemaster (unless the GM suspends the normal action resolution rules) without going through all the minutiae of the skill checks to determine whether or not the PCs find a place to rest, succeed in getting to sleep, make their RRs against getting woken by biting insects and hooting owls, etc etc. The core 3E rulebooks don't, to me, suggest that 3E plays any differently from RM in this regard.It allows, for example, a player to play a ranger, whose knowledge of the wilderness contributes importantly to the party's survival, without the actual play experience at the table bogging down into tedious minutiae about setting up campsites.In the combat case, it allows players to build and play PCs whose protagonism is expressed via their choices in combat - this is always likely to be fairly central to a D&D game, given what D&D is about - without getting bogged down in (i) high search-and-handling time minutiae, and (ii) excessive grittiness. The combat pacing feeds into this. The way in which the PCs rebound in combat - what powers do they use, against whom, synergising with whom, at what potential costs - is part of what narrativist play in D&D involves (if you don't want combat in your narrativism, don't play D&D!).Look, if you want to insult my GMing and tell me that I run a crappy game using a crappy ruleset, just come out and say it. Naturally I disagree - and I don't see how you'd know, given that I don't believe we've ever played together, or indeed that you've ever met any of my players, or that you've even engaged with any of my many many actual play examples that I've posted over the years. I linked to one or two of them a few posts upthread - have a look and then come back and explain to me where the railroading is.On another recent thread - about the contrast between values play and challenge play - you asked what a non-challenge-based game would look like. I don't know if the question was serious or not. I assume that you have at least a passing familiarty with games like HeroWars/Quest, and Maelstrom Storytelling, and therefore are aware that there are successful, viable non-challenge based RPGs out there. I assume that you also know that they play in much the way that Czege describes and that I am suggesting is the sort of play that 4e supports better than 3E - namely, comparatively hard scene-framing with open-ended and player driven scene resolution.If you think that there is no difference in play between those games and (for example) AD&D or Rolemaster or 3E, then I'm baffled. If you think that there is such a difference, but that 4e doesn't resemble those games in any respect, then explain why not. As it happens, I think that in its core play 4e - despite some superficial resemblances to 3E and earlier editions - is closer to those sorts of games than it is to any earlier version of D&D.As for the suggestion that this sort of game either (i) disavows coherent links between scenes, or (ii) is all about railroading, I'll post another quote (this time from <a href="http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=20791.0" target="_blank">Ron Edwards</a>):Content authority - over what we're calling back-story, e.g. whether Sam is a KGB mole, or which NPC is boinking whom Plot authority - over crux-points in the knowledge base at the table - now is the time for a revelation! - typically, revealing content . . . Situational authority - over who's there, what's going on - scene framing would be the most relevant and obvious technique-example, or phrases like "That's when I show up!" from a player Narrational authority - how it happens, what happens - I'm suggesting here that this is best understood as a feature of resolution (including the entirety of IIEE), and not to mistake it for describing what the castle looks like, for instance; I also suggest it's far more shared in application than most role-players realize . . . There is no overlap between those four types of authority. They are four distinct phenomena. . . I was working with a relationship map, not with a plot in mind. I had a bunch of NPCs. Whatever happened, I'd play them, which is to say, I'd decide what they did and said. You should see that I simply gave up the reins of "how the story will go" (plot authority) entirely. . . [but] I scene-framed like a mother-f*****. That's the middle level: situational authority. That's my job as GM . . . players can narrate outcomes to conflict rolls, but they can't start new scenes. But I totally gave up authority over the "top" level, plot authority. I let that become an emergent property of the other two levels: again, me with full authority over situation (scene framing), and the players and I sharing authority over narrational authority, which provided me with cues, in the sense of no-nonsense instructions, regarding later scene framing. And similarly, like situational authority, content authority was left entirely to my seat at the table. There was no way for a player's narration to clash with the back-story. All of the player narrations concerned plot authority, like the guy's mask coming off in my hypothetical example [of a dramatic revelation] above . . . I think [good gaming in this style of play] has nothing at all to do with distributed authority, but rather with the group members' shared trust that situational authority is going to get exerted for maximal enjoyment among everyone. If, for example, we are playing a game in which I, alone, have full situational authority, and if everyone is confident that I will use that authority to get to stuff they want (for example, taking suggestions), then all is well. . .  It's not the distributed or not-distributed aspect of situational authority you're concerned with, it's your trust at the table, as a group, that your situations in the S[hared]I[maginary]S[pace] are worth anyone's time.As a general rule, one necessary condition for a scene to be worth anyone's time is that it follow, in some meaningful fashion, from what has gone before. Also, given that in the sort of game I'm talking about players exercise plot authority, and therefore (indirectly) content authority - because once some piece of the plot is established it can't be undone - there is a further constraint on scene framing.The whole tone of your post implies that I'm mistaken in my views as to what 4e can do as a system, its strengths, and its differences from more simulationist systems. And maybe I am - the human capacity for self-deception knows few limits! But it seems strange to me that you simultaneously deny that 4e can deliver the same play experience as 3E, and deny those actual examples of difference that a fairly experienced 4e GM is putting forward. What are the differences, then?</blockquote>

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