NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MwaO" data-source="post: 6797028" data-attributes="member: 12749">Speaking from a movie PoV - there was a time when they didn't use cuts the way that they do today. If a movie wanted to show that someone arrived at their house and went to straight to bed, they wouldn't just show them the necessary scenes. They'd show them climbing the stairs. Now they'd cut right to the character going to the bathroom to find some aspirin or getting a washcloth, then lying down to bed. As long as there's an establishing shot of the house being two stories say, we know where the character is. Or if you watch any TV show, when a character picks up the phone, they'd say hello, instead of going to right to the narrative of the show as they do today. No one calls this mechanical or gamist - it simply reflects that good storytelling, especially the collaborative kind that happens in RPGs or moviemaking, needs to pare away the uninteresting stuff.i.e. realism or gamism is only valuable when it serves the narrative. Having a wide variety of meaningless combats in order to have the possibility of a suddenly exciting one isn't anywhere near as interesting as having a much faster skill challenge to represent them and failure at the skill challenge creating an unexpectedly interesting combat.As an example, let's say the PCs have just defeated a regular group of monsters and did badly at the skill challenge at some point. Right when they begin their short rest and are mostly drained of encounter powers, a low level group of Orcs gets a surprise round on them, raining arrows on them from above. They're minions, but they're spread out and have good position. Or maybe it gets reversed - the party starts the fight against the hard to get to minions, but then a regular group of monsters then attacks them. Those could both be exciting and have meaningful effects on play - and to be clear, I generally run minions as having 5+level hp - most of the time, they function the same way, but they're hard to simply pop with a power that doesn't have a damage roll.Good skill challenges create interesting results when failure happens - and failure should be something that happens regularly.</blockquote>

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