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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6576645" data-attributes="member: 42582">There are three references in this quote to what the PCs are aware of and/or are choosing.Should I read that as "PC" or "player".It goes without saying that, in my game, the PCs - certain imaginary beings in an imaginary world - are aware that every hour of delay could spell doom for the prisoners, so they have reason to make maximum haste.The question at issue, though, is not about what the PCs think and do - it's about what the players think and do.In the examples you give, do the players know how their decisions to delay will change things? If they do - to give a crude example, if they know that resting for one day will add one demon to the evil army, but let them recover sufficient hit points to take on two extra demons - then I agree that time is a genuine resource.I personally have never played a D&D game where the role of time on the GM side of things is so constrained and knowable by the players. The only GM whom I've personally seen post about using such precise techniques is [MENTION=386]LostSoul[/MENTION].If the time line is all secret from the players, however, so all they know is that stopping to rest will power them up a measurable amount (say, replenish a spell load-out) but will make things worse by some indeterminate degree, then I don't see how there is meaningful choice. There's just a gamble.  I don't think so! I'm not ignorant about record-keeping. I'm a little bit sceptical about the details of the action resolution. Moldvay Basic and Gygax have very tight time rules for dungeoneering, and somewhat tight time rules for walking through the wilderness, for building castles and dungeons, for healing and for spell research. 3E has time rules for crafting.But I've not seen time rules for many of the other activities that PCs in a contemporary game might undertake.Furthermore, in Gygax's D&D long-term time was mostly a resource to be used in competition with other players - his examples in his DMG make that clear. And dungeoneering time is mostly about handling wandering monster checks. In neither Gygax nor Moldvay is there any serious discussion of how players can use time as a resource to beat cultists performing rituals, or evil overlords raising armies, or anything of that sort.In the examples that you and [MENTION=6775031]Saelorn[/MENTION] are discussing, you are positing time as a player resource to be used to win against the GM (as in - get there in time the prisoners are saved, otherwise the GM declares them dead). That's fine, but as I've said I'm far from clear how, in the typical case, the players are meant to choose a winning strategy.The impression that I got is that player decisions affect the passage of time, and this then leads the GM to declare certain changes in the setting. To me that looks like the GM is making the changes, but on a clock that is set by the players.I'm not saying anything is invalid. Or valid, for that matter. I'm just trying to work out what is going on at the table.If the GM has a secret timeline, and choices by the players about how to spend ingame time on declared actions for their PCs trigger new narrations from the GM, I can see that the players are part of a mechanism - the "clock" I referred to a paragraph or two above - but I don't really see how the players are making meaningful decisions. From their perspective, it just seems to be a gamble - maybe resting an extra day will be worth it in terms of benefit-to-cost ratio, maybe it won't.In Gygaxian dungeoneering it is different, because the players know the rough odds of wandering monsters turning up, and so can make rational judgments about risks vs rewards.If the timeline is, instead, about immersion in a "living, breathing world" then I can see that; but that doesn't make the players' choices more informed or rational - but I'm sure some players enjoy the fact that their choices are part of the mechanism of the GM's clock.That making time part of the stakes, in circumstances where the players don't have access to the GM-side information - eg how long it will take to run through a marketplace?; how long does an evil cultist ritual take? - is an invitation to GM fiat: to the GM making decisions (such as deciding how long these things take) which are not knowable to the players, or able to be factored into their plans, therefore tending to make the GM's choices more significant than the players' plans in actually determining the evolving content of the shared fiction. That is certainly an option and I've used it, it works well, but it isn't the only possible way to resolve time.What fudging of a map are you talking about? That example was [MENTION=6668292]JamesonCourage[/MENTION]'s, and has nothing to do with me (except that I posted some thoughts about the hypothetical upthread).My question to JamesonCourage was: when I decided that the players, upon bursting into the cultist chamber in the temple, would encounter the gnolls mid-ritual, what player choice was I invalidating? This has nothing to do with maps: the map I was using is found in H2, Thunderspire Labyrinth, as are some of the basic elements of the scenario that I was running.But on the map hypothetical: if the players, having no knowledge about what lies left and what lies right, toss a coin, what choice is invalidated by the GM simply using his/her prepared material for the passage the players happen to choose? An analogue would be the players choosing to have their PCs go north rather than south, so the GM narrates a cold temple rather than a warm one. Without giving me some indication of what was at stake in the players' choice, you haven't shown me what the illusion is - ie what choice that seemed to be significant was in fact invalidated?Without that, the choice to go north or south, to wear a red cloak or a blue one, to give your character the title "The Fey" or "The Sly", is just colour.And the point is not rhetorical. I'm not denying that there can be stakes in going left or right - that's basically the whole of Gygaxian or Moldvay Basic play! But those systems have determinate ways of establishing these stakes, from mapping conventions to search rules to detection magic to systems for providing the players with rumours.In your hypthetical of it mattering whether the players choose to have their PCs go left or right, what are you envisaging being the meaningful decision, and how are you envisaging that being invalidated?</blockquote>

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