Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5157849" data-attributes="member: 42582">The thread <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/general-rpg-discussion/274553-why-must-numbers-go-up.html" target="_blank">"Why must numbers go up"</a> has drifted in a few different directions.One of them is about "traditional" versus "modern" approaches to resolving non-combat encounters.In the traditional approach, the GM sets a game-mechanical difficulty that reflects the imagined reality of the ingame situation. The players then try to succeed at their die roll, or perhaps to change the ingame situation to reduce the difficulty before rolling. It is the GM's job to work out how much benefit the players get from those sorts of efforts (eg what is the bonus to a Diplomacy roll if the players offer the NPC a bribe). Once the dice are rolled, it also the GM's job to specify what exactly is the ingame meaning of game-mechanical success or failure (eg does the NPC agree to become your lifelong servant, or simply offer you a small grunt of encouragement?)In the modern approach, the game-mechanical difficulty is determined by the game's encounter-building guidelines - whether the level of a skill challenge, in 4e, or the dictates of the pass/fail cycle, in a game like HeroQuest 2nd ed. The GM then describes the gameworld in such a way as to make that difficulty level make sense (eg the difficulty of the Acrobatics check for level 30 characters is 35 - it's Astral Teflon Slime!). The players engage the challenge by making skill checks, and depending on how those skill checks pan out as the challenge unfolds the GM describes the ingame situation as evolving in the appropriate way, and the players respond to that in their subsequent skill checks.Some people think that the modern approach undermines creativity and imagination, and instead turns the game into an exercise in dice rolling. My own experience is the opposite - namely, that it provides a game mechanical platform for the GM and players alike to exercise imagination and creativity both in framing the situation, and then playing out its resolution.I'm wondering what experiences others have had in actual play, whether of 4e skill challenges, or in other "modern" games like HeroQuest, The Dying Earth, etc. Has anyone actually encountered the "exercise in dice rolling" phenomenon, or is it a merely theoretical objection?</blockquote>

Verification