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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5797876" data-attributes="member: 42582">And as I already said, whether or not it matters to move the trap depends a lot on what has gone before. If the PCs are choosing by rolling a die, then what is at stake in moving the trap?In a Pulsipherian game, this is what at stake: the PCs could have used an augury spell, but didn't, and if you move the trap you remove the incentive for them to be better operational players.But in a non-Pulsipherian game, no one may care about these sorts of stakes. And to reinforce that lack of caring, the augury spells might be stripped out of the game. What might the players of a non-Pulsipherian game care about? Perhaps how the PCs perform against the trap. Perhaps whether or not they're prepared to read the scroll that was given to them by a suspicious imp in order to escape from the trap. Etc.What is at stake here is the verb "establish". In a non-simulatoinist game, the "establishing" isn't settled by the action resolution mechanics. It is settled by whatever the metagame constraints are on framing new scenes in response to previous scenes.Exactly.First, there was no criticism - either by me or Ron Edwards. There was a contrast drawn between playstyles.Second, the comment was about scene transition/extrapolation. And I subsequently posted a quote from Paul Czege to elaborate the point.Even if, in the fiction, a deadline is given, the deadline only constrains things if action is resolved in a certain matter. (I'm putting to one side cases in which the PCs are on the Prime Material plane, the prisoner in Tarterus, and the PCs lack planar travel magic. In that sort of scenario, it's already given that the prisoner is going to die off-screen, and so it's already given that there will be no climax of the PCs rescuing the prisoner. The original example had a superspeedster in the same city as the bomb, which is quite disanalagous to the Tarterus case - or a case in which Sherlock Holmes is in London and the prisoner on a Pacific island with no telegraph station.)There are a range of possible action resolution systems in an RPG, and a range of possible scene extrapolation/transition approaches, and one in which you would work out whether a PC can get from the end of scene A to the start of scene B by plotting speed against a map is only one of them.Here is a pasage from Maelstrom Storytelling (p 116) that reinforces this contrast between action resolution techniques: A good way to run the Hubris Engine is to use "scene ideas" to convey the scene, instead of literalisms. . . focus on the intent behind the scene and not on how big or how far things might be. If the difficulty of the task at hand (such as jumping across a chasm in a cave) is explained in terms of difficulty, it doesn't matter how far across the actual chasm spans. In a movie, for instance, the camera zooms or pans to emphasize the danger or emotional reaction to the scene, and in so doing it manipulates the real distance of a chasm to suit the mood or "feel" of the moment. It is then no longer about how far across the character has to jump, but how hard the feat is for the character. .In this way, the presentation of each element of the scene focuses on the difficulty of the obstacle, not the law of physics. . . If the players enjoy the challenge of figuring out how high and far someone can jump, they should be allowed the pleasure of doing so - as long as it doesn't interfere with the narrative flow and enjoyment of the game. . . Players who want to climb onto your coffee table and jump across your living room to prove that their character could jump over the chasm have probably missed the whole point . . .HeroQuest (and to a lesser extent, its predecessor HeroWars) uses a similar approach to action resolution. 4e skill challenges, if they are to be used as anything other than complex skill checks, in my view have to be resolved in the same sort of way.And once you are using these sorts of action resolution techniques, the character of scene extrapolation/transition can change very significantly.</blockquote>

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