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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5466714" data-attributes="member: 42582">I agree with this 100%. (There could be exceptions to the first sentence. Suppose, having encountered the water weird, the PCs all run away and just use rocks, bears, magic, etc to cave in the roof of the temple. That would end the threat of the weird without needint to succeed in a skill challenge - assuming that I didn't have any ideas on how to make an interesting challenge out of the cave-in plan - but it would also mean the PCs had essentially abandoned their goal in the scene, which was to extract some gold statues lying in the bottom of the water weird's pool.)It doesn't therefore follow that the narrative is irrelevant. It just follows that it is not solely determinative.Why, on my approach, is the first action not going to resolve the situation? Suppose the first action, as narrated, is manifestly not enough to resolve the situation - say, in a navigation challenge like the Jester's, the first action is simply pulling out an old journal and trying to correlate it's contents to the surrounding terrain - then the narrative itself explains why more skill checks are needed. Suppose, on the other hand, the first action, as narrated, does appear sufficient to resolve the situation - let's say the first action is to summon a genie from a bottle - then the narrative itself doesn't explain why more skill chekcs are needed. At that point, the GM's role (on my approach) is to inject complication. (Perhaps the genie is grumpy. Perhaps the site the PCs are looking for is magically warded against geneis. Perhaps the genie doesn't want to go there because of something that happened there in the past - and this gives the players a clue to pick up on for their further checks.)Notice here that the narrative is still very important. The nature of the complication that the GM introduces is itself related to the ongoing narrative - both the fact that the PCs are trying to get somewhere, and that they have summoned a genie to try and get them there. It's just that the narrative is not all that is going on. In Raven Crowking's terminology, it is not "fiction first" because something other than considerations of ingame causal logic are in play - namely, the GM is introducing complications out of metagame considerations.(This post hasn't addressed at all why one might want a game where metagame matters in ths way. Suffice it to say that some - including me - do.)You say this as if it is self-evidently true. But, as in many other systems, the interaction and mediation between components can be quite a bit more complex. I don't, and never have, denied that action resolution in 4e is very different from simulationist games. And of course it is connected, in part, to the relationship between narrative and mechanics. But your slogan doesn't capture what the difference is.In particular, your slogan implies that in 4e the narrative is irrelevant. And I've given numerous examples that demonstrate the contrary. It's just that something can be relevant without being determinative.</blockquote>

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