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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5792760" data-attributes="member: 42582">For whom? Me - yes, I think so. It's a deliberate GMing choice that I'm making, informed in part by experience, and in part by reflection on that experience in light of the passage I quoted upthread.Well, yes. But it would thereby guarantee them the possiblity of "failing in what they hoped to achieve by getting there". So it seems to be a question of which possibility of failure is going to be foregrounded in the game, and what mechanical and other techniques are going to be used to achieve that. Different groups, and particularly different GMs, are going to make different choices here.This is a non-sequitur. I already mentioned, upthread, the choice of the PCs (which is to say, the players), when confronting a gnoll demonic priest performing a ritual with two innocent prisoners ready to be sacrificed, to approach the encounter in a defensive manner. Which resulted in one prisoner dying as the ritual progressed - the PCs then changed their tactics, a couple of them pushing forward to try and rescue the second prisoner.That is a choice with a long term consequence - namely, the PCs did not succeed in their goal of rescuing both prisoners.And there are all sorts of other ways for choices to have long term consequences - for example, <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/general-rpg-discussion/313724-actual-play-pcs-successfully-negotiated-kas.html" target="_blank">the players chose to give Kas back his sword rather than try and fight him to keep it</a>. And also promised Kas to let him know when they found the necromancer who trapped him in a tower for 70-odd years. I'm not sure yet what the long term consequences of these choices might be, but they're likely to be signficicant!This is true, although planning can factor in in other ways. But operational planning is only one of several possible dimensions of planning, and planning is only one of several possible dimensions of signficance.In the game I run, the most important dimension of signficance is not planning, but thematic/moral choice. That the PCs favoured their own safety, over the safety of the prisoners of the gnolls, and therefore let a prisoner die. That one of the PCs executed a rescuee (who was also a devil-worshipper) in cold blood. That the same PC executed unconscious hobgoblin prisoners in cold blood. That the same PC donated most of his spare money to a priestess of Pelor, so she could take care of refugees from the hobgoblins' depredations. That the PCs (except perhaps for the Paladin) made a solemn promise to help Kas. And so on.As far as planning is concerned, 4e is not a game that is strongly oriented towards operational planning, and I do nothing to push against this. Planning by my players tends to be mostly out of character (or in that amporphous "we talked about this around the campfire last night" zone of in-character-but-not-really) - in author stance - and involves thinking about who to ally with, who to betray, what place to go to next, what to do when they get there, and so on. As a GM, I respond to this in two main ways: (i) using it to get ideas about what situations to present; and (ii), by pushing the players in various ways - sometimes playing an NPC, sometimes just as metagame interventions by the GM, jibing them or egging them on, but always trying to keep them aware of the stakes of their decisions.A tight simulationist treatment of ingame time and space is fairly peripheral to most of these goals as a GM. The one time in my current campaign that I can think of where it was crucial was in relation to a contract: the PCs had negotiated with some duergar slavers to redeem a number of prisoners in exchange for payment, the actual redemption to take place one month in the future. The players made sure that they kept to the date. And I made sure that I didn't set up any situations that would create external obstacle to the PCs keeping to the appointment. I wanted them to be free to honour the contract, or not, as they saw fit. As it turns out, they honoured the contract, and so did the duergar, and the players (as their PCs) are now trying to work out whether the duergar are reasonable people that they should be trying to work with, or evil slavers whom - in due course - they should be trying to crush. Or both.</blockquote>

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