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The Best Thing from 4E
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<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6594943" data-attributes="member: 42582"><p>It's a bit of a side-issue, but I don't really see what's unbelievable about an overturned wagon. I'm sure I've read city adventure modules in which wagons have collided or overturned (I think Night's Dark Terror has something like this, for instance).</p><p></p><p>A few months ago when I got to the train station near my work, a car had run off the road that runs parallel to the tracks and was being pulled by a workcrew off the railway embankment. I wasn't at the station when it happened, but I'm sure <em>someone</em>, as I don't think I've ever seen that station completely deserted during the daytime.</p><p></p><p>I think the classic adventures tended to have more bizarre freeze-frames - I described an example upthread, of a cult superior being in the dungeon "office" looking for information about a stolen statue, while (i) the orc guards are still at the dungeon entrance apparently having not responded to the arrival of this superior, (ii) the thieving cut member is conducting a ritual sacrifice in another freeze-frame room about 20 feet away on the map, and (iii) the statue itself is in a room maybe 100 feet away on the map and trivial accessible to anyone who has walked past the orc guards.</p><p></p><p>From the "naturalistic" point of view that strains credulity, but of course the point of those old dungeons wasn't naturalism: the point of this particular freeze-frame is to give the players an opportunity to gain advantage via negotiation (and thereby test their skill as players) and the backstory has no function other than providing the thinnest veneer of verisimilitude and NPC motivation. (The NPC is Chaotic, and the PCs in this particular adventure are expected to be Lawful or Neutral, but this is also from the era when players were expected to treat alignment as another obstacle to be expediently worked around rather than as a motivational constraint on the declaration of PC actions. Only paladins were forbidden from doing friendly deals with bad-guy NPCs!)</p><p></p><p>What does push against "naturalism" is that the PCs <em>repeatedly</em> find themselves at the centre of unlikely occurrences, but I don't see how any interesting RPG is going to avoid that - it's endemic in all serial adventure fiction.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 6594943, member: 42582"] It's a bit of a side-issue, but I don't really see what's unbelievable about an overturned wagon. I'm sure I've read city adventure modules in which wagons have collided or overturned (I think Night's Dark Terror has something like this, for instance). A few months ago when I got to the train station near my work, a car had run off the road that runs parallel to the tracks and was being pulled by a workcrew off the railway embankment. I wasn't at the station when it happened, but I'm sure [i]someone[/i], as I don't think I've ever seen that station completely deserted during the daytime. I think the classic adventures tended to have more bizarre freeze-frames - I described an example upthread, of a cult superior being in the dungeon "office" looking for information about a stolen statue, while (i) the orc guards are still at the dungeon entrance apparently having not responded to the arrival of this superior, (ii) the thieving cut member is conducting a ritual sacrifice in another freeze-frame room about 20 feet away on the map, and (iii) the statue itself is in a room maybe 100 feet away on the map and trivial accessible to anyone who has walked past the orc guards. From the "naturalistic" point of view that strains credulity, but of course the point of those old dungeons wasn't naturalism: the point of this particular freeze-frame is to give the players an opportunity to gain advantage via negotiation (and thereby test their skill as players) and the backstory has no function other than providing the thinnest veneer of verisimilitude and NPC motivation. (The NPC is Chaotic, and the PCs in this particular adventure are expected to be Lawful or Neutral, but this is also from the era when players were expected to treat alignment as another obstacle to be expediently worked around rather than as a motivational constraint on the declaration of PC actions. Only paladins were forbidden from doing friendly deals with bad-guy NPCs!) What does push against "naturalism" is that the PCs [i]repeatedly[/i] find themselves at the centre of unlikely occurrences, but I don't see how any interesting RPG is going to avoid that - it's endemic in all serial adventure fiction. [/QUOTE]
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