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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Balesir" data-source="post: 6578191" data-attributes="member: 27160">Wow, this thread is getting hard to follow with limited free time and challenging to winnow out theposts I want to respond to from, but here goes... Sorry if it's a bit "piecemeal".If I wanted to make a "race the clock" situation these days I would pretty much always do it with a skill challenge; it's a great metric to use openly but in a low key way (I just have green and red beads that I lay out to signal successes and failures).If a decision is on the table about preparing for the anticipated showdown after the race at the cost of some speed, it seems to me the answer is simplicity itself: tell the players their characters can spend the time enchanting an item (or whatever) at a cost of one automatic failure in the challenge. Skill challenges are not lost after a single failure, so it's not a simple abandonment - but now you need X successes before two failures, instead of X successes before three failures. A straight tradeoff decision for the players to make, with no fuss.Choices to help with potential later challenge issues - like the "get a decent meal before setting out" - on the other hand are just as simple. A check on Streetwise (to get a good meal fast) can substitute for an Endurance check later (to press on fast on an empty stomach).The example brings up a point I find interesting about Robin Laws' "Gumshoe" system. Gumshoe is intended specifically for running mystery/crime solving adventures (and its offshoot, Trail of Cthulhu, is the first game I've seen out-Call of Cthulhu Call of Cthulhu!). A major feature is that finding core clues is never rolled for. If a character gets to the appropriate scene with an appropriate investigative skill and uses it (i.e. announces they search around), they get the clue. Automatically. Laws' insight was that detective stories aren't about finding the clues - they are about what you do with the clues once you have them. [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION] wrote about illusionism for Story Now! gaming, but I think this brings to mind a better example still of how that could happen. Suppose a character is faced with a choice to either save a loved one and let a village be destroyed, or save the village and lose the loved one (just to pick an example at random...). If the player has the character choose the village, but it turns out afterwards that the loved one survived anyway, that's a form of Nar illusionism, I think. The hard, emotional choice was never really a hard choice, or an emotional one. It was merely a matter of which the GM had decided was "right" and which "wrong" (assuming that choosing to save the loved one would have meant the villagers got splatted). That might be OK for some sort of pseudo-tactical morality play, but it's not really about the characters' hard choices.And, going back for a minute to my last post, here we have Edwards' third "agenda" - Gamism. The players are looking to make decisions that are tactically meaningful in the sense that they determine success or failure. "Illusionism" here means having choices that look like they should affect success chances, but don't really.As an aside, I always found D&D to be a really awkward Gamist vehicle - even though I have found ways to pursue what [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] calls "lite gamism" - because the only real "loss condition" implicit in the system is character death. If you want a long-running game with character development and hardcore gamist agenda, you really need loss conditions that keep characters alive (but beaten). 13th Age has the start of an interesting idea for this in its "campaign losses".This was such a good post I just wanted to quote part of it again. A real moment of expanded understanding as I read it - thanks!Oh - I couldn't resist fixing up your spelling for you, though <img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/devil.png"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":devil:" title="Devil    :devil:" data-shortname=":devil:" />It's funny; I used to think this, but now I really, really feel the exact opposite. Shows how tastes differ and also change, I think.Mechanical resolution following from in-game narrative now seems to me to be the root of so many of the problems I have always perceived in RPGs - D&D, especially. Narrative following mechanics lets the players have more freedom and clarity, allows all involved to envision the world as makes sense to them (as opposed to swallowing whatever BS the GM trots out in purple prose about the specific topic you happen to know about while the GM, evidently, doesn't) and means the designers can be sure that they have a game that works (assuming they playtest it properly...).This leads to one point I wanted to make but failed to find [MENTION=6668292]JamesonCourage[/MENTION]'s post about (sorry). He explained quite convincingly how he found 4E skills, skill DCs and Skill Challenges lacking in "player empowerment". I get the sense that an important part of what he found important in having "transparent DCs" was that the DCs related directly to the game world. I actually don't think that is required, or even desirable to me. The DCs for skill challenges are "transparent" in the same way that combat encounter "monster lists" are in 4E. They generally, but not necessarily, are set somewhere near the PCs level and the number of successes (or monsters) will generally be proportionate. Exact parameters will be found through play, but the position in the challenge will be evident from the number of successes and failures. There is no "opposition" in the challenge, unless you use a "token" system as I outlined in a post way back.This provides a type of transparency and clarity that is much more aligned to the "game" than to the game world, but I find that, as with the "game-aligned" rules for combat, these can be projected onto the game world via the players' imaginations quite easily. Such a modus operandi - give a clear and understandable game, which is abstract but transparent in its workings, and then let/make the players project the situation symbolised by this abstract game onto the imagined roleplaying world - I find to give several advantages. It makes it easy to share a clear and unambiguous picture of the state of play - literally, as it's the "game" state we share, not the detail of game-world colour. It also allows each player to imagine the game world in a way that makes sense to him or her; too often in the past we have stumbled over descriptions (either from the GM or from another player) that, to someone who actually has some knowledge of the topic being modelled, seem totally nonsensical. It also makes available options and choices clearer to the players, at least at the game level, and it allows consistent adjudication of quite variable "cool moves". It assumes character expertise, rather than having effective character expertise limited by the collective/shared expertise and communications abilities of the play group. Overall, I find it vastly superior. YM, naturally, MV.</blockquote>

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