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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8742043" data-attributes="member: 82106">Hmmmm, I don't have a problem with them. I think 4e also has this rule, or a very similar one. I think it is a lot less flexible than the SC framework, for sure. OTOH if you tie it together with something like helping others, the ability to utilize resources like spells and such as part of the group check, etc. then it could take on a similar character. The main difference being there is only one skill in play.Well, I think the printed text, certainly in DMG1, is easy to read as a recipe for a GM to construct an SC as a fairly 'fixed' structure, where the obstacles and the basic plot and fiction were invented beforehand, and then skill check uses are kind of envisaged as appropriate or not to produce a set that maps onto the fiction pretty well (and this is probably fairly iterative if you do that). Remember, 4e sort of holds back, textually, from completely breaking with the traditional D&D paradigm of GM generated fiction and players just 'playing through it'. While a lot of things in the rules don't quite make sense in a Trad interpretation, a more story now/narrative type of approach is mostly cloaked in "you could do this" or "maybe if someone tries something unexpected, just make up some new stuff to happen" and whatever. So, there's skill and experience in terms of having played these types of non-trad RPGs and being able to see through the 'trad wrapper' that WotC seems to have not quite dared to completely rip away. However, I think once you go there and simply pick up the tools that are available that will work in this narrativist fashion, you find that the required bits and pieces are all there in 4e, and it isn't at all hard to use them. I think the most difficult thing is typically like with many introductions of narrativist game techniques, you have people who are just completely unaware of even the possibility that RPGs can be anything but trad D&D.I think this is the canard of the 'objective scenario'. There's so much unspecified, in even the most nailed down RPG scenario that any realistic human GM can put together, that almost anything COULD happen. So, to say that a specific action MUST 'escalate into unmitigated catastrophe' is simply the GM deciding that is the case! I mean, even if a PC draws a sword during a negotiation and makes like their going to whack the guy they're supposed to be talking to, there are 100 possible ways that fate, circumstance, or the other participants in the scene, could turn it from catastrophe to success or at least a situation where the challenge goes on. Nor is it like a 4e SC can't go sideways, it just happens after everyone gets to roll a few times (3 at least).I don't think honesty is necessarily enough. Sure, GMs can be creative, principled, and even-handed. Nobody is denying that. Nor are we in any sense trying to state that every exercise of free RP with unbounded skill checks and such is a recipe for disaster or even sub-standard. We all played this way, most of us for a few decades! I'd like to say I'm a past master of this kind of play. I just found a stronger technique that obviates the need for me to worry about all that too much. I just have to keep in mind the tally and provide some descriptions of things that honor it.Again, I agree that the 4e SC construct, as described in DMG1 particularly, is very GM-centered in this sense. 4e seems to me to be literally written in such a way that you can interpret it as a trad game, or as a non-trad narrativist game. When you do the later, you might also introduce some looser or more modern interpretations of how to use some of 4e's tooling, as I've stated above. Players should be describing INTENT, so if the Fighter succeeds in his Athletics check, HE is describing the resulting fiction, and potentially bringing the situation to the next obstacle (though the GM may start asking questions and filling in missing information, typically). I know that when you really go for it with this technique it starts to sound fairly different in many ways from DMG1 SC presentation. These various things are kind of tucked away in there, in a mild form though. I mean, at first I ran pretty cut-and-dried SCs as the book described them. I wrote up adventures as I expect most people running 4e would expect to do also. Laziness actually was one of the greatest factors in my perfecting my SC and adventure techniques. Pretty soon I just got sick and tired of all the prep! So I did less and less, and just starting asking the players to explain what they were accomplishing, how, and why. Pretty soon they were telling me a LOT of what was going to happen, if the dice cooperated with them. After that I saw some people posting about narrativist techniques, which I hadn't really formally paid attention to before. It was quickly pretty obvious that I was essentially doing a 4e-ized version of those things, and at some point, a couple years in IIRC, some posters started to explicitly link their play to things like GNS models and whatnot and explain why it all worked. So, I would never say that people playing 4e SCs as just fairly pre-specified little mini-adventures are WRONG. No, that was an intended reading IMHO, but they definitely have, even then, a more open-ended structure than other formats.</blockquote>

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