NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pedantic" data-source="post: 9244523" data-attributes="member: 6690965">It does seem  like there's two competing understandings of "survival challenge" or maybe just "challenge" at play here. One seems to be genre first, asserting that a survival challenge is made up of specific elements (finding food, finding shelter, dealing with ongoing environmental conditions, dealing with surprise environmental hazards, etc.) and that gameplay should thereby consist of allocating limited resources (including time) to resolve them. The other important part of of this understanding, I think, is fragility; any solution or victory must be a temporary state, that will collapse under new pressures and require reiteration of the gameplay loop of finding stuff and reallocating resources.The other view seems to be heavily influenced by progression. Challenges are singular and discrete, and once conquered are meant to be replaced by new challenges. "Survival" might be a general class of challenge, but it can't be the same one repeatedly. After a problem is resolved, the game must produce a new, distinct and probably escalated obstacle.The synthesis position is some kind of modularity, that has challenges explicitly tied to specific points on the progression; the kind of survival the first position is looking for could be squarely placed in a specific level range, and perhaps some supplement could provide alternative progression that doesn't allow the characters to exceed them. You can't readily do this kind of thing in 5e without a lot of additional design work, but then you can't do a lot of anything in 5e without a lot of additional design work, so I'm not sure that's saying much.</blockquote>

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