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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 6578797" data-attributes="member: 82106">I haven't personally utilized the technique of 'entire story-arc as an SC' but it is feasible, as you say. Today I might consider approaching it as a key series of 'challenges', but I think it would be more of a plot-arc than a single SC. I would loosely determine what decision points exist and the factors at stake in them, and then compose smaller plots leading up to them and perhaps others that were around them but not tied in directly. Some of those might be extended SCs, but I'm not committing to anything, it requires a lot of thinking about if you're going to make a campaign with a fairly intricate and rapidly evolving plot.When using an SC to regulate the 'getting there in time' challenge? Yes, in the fiction the PCs must make haste. That would translate to mechanics as well, since failing to ACTUALLY make haste in the fiction would prevent them from mechanically progressing in the SC. There's nothing that prevents the DM from declaring failures either, in this case inaction would be tantamount to failure, and if the players said "Oh, we're going to rest for a week and THEN take on your SC" I'd just move on with the plot, they've failed, the opportunity has passed and we go on to something else. SCs aren't some sort of absolute straightjacket that has to be run through to completion. If a party takes some action that removes the relevancy of the SC or is so amazing that it simply mandates automatic success, etc then so be it. Its like combat, if the party decides to hoof it and retreats, then the battle ends, maybe it transitions directly into a chase or whatever, but there are always potentially multiple exit points from encounters/challenges.Well, according to you. We will simply have to disagree on that point. I don't understand how using an SC would be related to whether or not 'time bears no consequence' though. I'm really not sure where you are coming from on that. If you are trying to say that an SC cannot impose time pressure then I'd say that is simply an erroneous idea, but I'm not really sure what you ARE saying.Sure, but there were a mixture of outcomes. The players didn't abandon the central conflict of the story, they simply chose to go about handling it in a way that was very different from what was envisaged. That lead quickly to a situation that was outside of the parameters of the original timeline, and meant that most of its details weren't relevant anymore. Its not that so much as it is that creating the detailed timeline that is entailed in the theory of 'knowing the consequences of everything' as [MENTION=6775031]Saelorn[/MENTION] has explained it is simply vastly more work than simply driving the tension via the SC mechanics. The players would presumably put the same weight on their various goals, but the SC-based technique is a lot easier to use and from the player's perspective more reliably conveys tension. In the narrative the two should be equivalent in as much as the sequence of events which takes place could be explicated using either a timeline or a list of key events.Again, there's no 'hyperbole', because this was exactly the sort of question that was raised further up thread. You just made some statements about "oh, the style of our campaign is very slow paced and time isn't measured in a very quantifiable way." That's fine, so maybe you would never tell the story of the party that needed to get to location X before event Y. I don't think that "we just don't do that" would answer the question though. It sounds like maybe you don't need either timelines nor time-pressure-based SCs! That's fine, nobody is telling you what has to go in your game.I can only state that this question isn't all that interesting to me. If this were a court of law we could argue about 'attempted cheating' etc, but in terms of games? If the DM happened to fudge some fairly trivial thing, lets say he just decided to declare that the hit on the hobgoblin killed it even though the thing still had 50 more hit points to chew through, big deal. If the outcome was a foregone conclusion and nothing interesting is at stake then just move on. Maybe the DM doesn't tell the players he did it, I don't think that's Illusionism, though it certainly is using a technique that could be used in such a way. As with inconsequential cheating on tests, one can ask if its leading to something more significant, but then again there was a benefit to the players (improved pacing). IMHO its better to be up-front about doing these kinds of things since it is more transparent and allows everyone to more clearly see how the game is running. See, we agree, probably on many things, <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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