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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6987255" data-attributes="member: 42582">I would not run this adventure as you describe it. It is far too railroad-y for my taste. Given the reasons that I engage in RPGing (primarily, to see how the players respond, via their PCs, to the situations into which I as GM frame them), I would have no reason to frame the PCs into a situation where I already know what I want them to do with their PCs and am encouraging them to do that. It would be self-defeating.I assume that you are talking here about your game? Or some ideal game?I mean, in my game the players made a decision to fight the hogboblgins based on the imagined world of the game.I thought I explained this in my post to which you replied.At present I am GMing 4 campaigns across 3 systems. In 4e I set DCs using the DC-by-level chart. In Marvel Heroic RP every check is opposed, either by an opposing character or by a roll of the GM's "doom pool". In Burning Wheel I set DCs on an "objective" basis - there are long lists of DCs for various tasks, which are intended to correlate the "realistic" degree of difficulty with the mechanical expression of capabilities in the game. Because of its different approach to setting DCs BW is far more "gritty" than the other two systems, and produces far more failure - hence a lot of the GM advice and guidelines in that system are about adjudicating failure in a way that keeps things moving on a trajectory that engages the concerns of the players. (This is sometimes called "fail forward". I use that in my 4e game also, but it is less essential because 4e involves a lot less PC failure.)The latter would be the mechanics determining the fiction, wouldn't it? As in, you only know the sea spray made the rocks slippery because the check fails. You didn't narrate that slipperiness prior to the check being made and use it to adjust the DC.I'm not really sure what this means. That is, I'm not sure what it means for "the fiction serves the mechanics". I don't know what that would look like. As far as I've experienced, everyone who plays RPGs uses the mechanics to establish, in some fashion or other, the content of the shared fiction.But none of the people you are arguing with in this thread are ignoring or not playing with any of the things that differentiate a RPG from a board game.They just don't share you approach to what the relevant category of things is.For instance: in post 104, you said "People have described their gameplay more akin to a boardgame, where all the flavor text and lore about the monster is ignored". Paying attention to monster lore and flavour text is not, in my view, very relevant to distinguishing a RPG from a board game. I've played Traveller, for instance, with random animal encounters on random planets. Those animals have no flavour text or lore other than bare ecological description. What makes it a RPG and not a board game is the relationship between the shared fiction and resolution - namely, in RPGing the shared fiction actually matters to resolution. (<a href="http://lumpley.com/index.php/anyway/thread/427" target="_blank">Here's</a> a discussion by Vincent Baker.)Let's add to that: the chief function of the mechanics, in a RPG, is to <a href="http://lumpley.com/hardcore.html" target="_blank">regulate the participants' contributions to the shared fiction</a>. Then let's relate that to monster mechanics: if the participants in the game (i) think it would be interesting for the game to have (say) a hill giant who can knock enemies prone when it hits them with its club; and (ii) think that they would rather have this be regulated by the mechanics rather than just something the GM gets to make up (eg because they think the latter wouldn't necessarily be fair to the players); then (iii) they might prefer monster design that gives the hill giant that mechanical capability.This desire, by these imagined RPGers, could arise whether, in their game, the rulebook entry for hill giants had 1000 words or prose, or 10. And it won't be solved by paying more attention to those words of prose, be they few or many. "Monster lore and flavour text" is completely irrelevant to it. It's an issue about whether or not the mechanics of the game support the creation of the fiction they want in the fashion that they want.And it has nothing to do with board gaming.</blockquote>

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