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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7592705" data-attributes="member: 4937">[MENTION=20564]Blue[/MENTION]: So, I'm going to cut to the chase and say that I think based on that response we are largely in agreement about things, and that the real crux then is "How do you go about achieving the desired result?"And there are two camps about fixing this problem.  One camp is that, if this is a desirable result, then you should achieve it by application of narrative force.  That is to say, by rules or rulings or narration, the GM should tell the players that the desirable thing has happened and that the game should explicitly empower the GM to do this, because it is desirable.   The "three round" rule we are discussing is one example of this application of narrative force.The problems that I see in this camp are many.  One is that it requires a high degree of spontaneous imagination and foresight.  The GM is required to in the midst of the stress of running a session also invent imaginative and creative things to happen which lead to further creative and imaginative things.  This is hard and much harder than I think "nar" type games tend to claim.  The second is that these applications of narrative force, however well intentioned they may be, are taking narrative agency from somewhere and giving it to the GM, and it's far too easy for that narrative agency to be consistently be taken from the PCs because the GM thinks that it's in the best interest of the game for this desirable thing to happen.  So in essence, it's trying to put a nice spin on some of the heaviest handed DMing techniques associated with railroad games where the GM is maneuvering the game in the interest of maintaining the desirable story.   And thirdly, dropping these techniques are emersion breaking because they break out of the illusion of the setting and force the player to view the game in terms of the metagame.  This last one is why I believe most "nar" games most often fail at their narrative goals, because they become so obsessed with producing story as the outcome of play, that they ignore story as the process of play.   The result is not a game that feels like sharing in a story, but a game that feel like sharing in the creation of a story.   That is the difference between feeling like you are a character in your favorite story, and feeling like you are a script writer in a meeting hammering out a movie script by committee.  The alternative I'm advocating for here is for the GM to use narrative control not as part of the process of play, but as part of the process of preparing to play, which is a big topic but as it touches on this issue of grindy combat is mostly about "encounter design".   In other words, I see this problem not mostly as a rules problem, but mostly as a design problem or a setting issue.  People are too busy trying to fix the problem with the science of GMing - the rules and such - and not the art of GMing, the content creation.  I totally agree with you that too often combat is just attrition fights in static locations.   But in the defense of GMs, that's the easiest sort of group challenge to arrange or imagine, and too often its the only sort of problem that the GM is exposed to through the game system's examples of play.  The reason you don't see a lot of examples of interesting scenarios like "Save the commoners who are going to get sacrificed. Stop the ritual. Deal with the stirges while trying to escape the cave-in. Stop the necromancer from escaping while his undead minions try to slow us down." is that they are harder to design and imagine, and the professionals who ought to be showing the more novice GMs how it is done, too often themselves aren't providing the examples of play (which in my opinion is best done in adventures or modules, otherwise the risk is high that your example is just a toy example).  But, even if we just confine ourselves to attrition fights, there are plenty of ways to keep the fiction evolving.  Consider cases where there is some barrier to getting into the encounter area such as perhaps to get into the encounter area you have to climb down a rope, or perhaps crawl and squeeze through a narrow tunnel.   Scenario's like this present an interesting evolving fiction in that the first player to enter the encounter area may find themselves challenged by a foe which the party as a whole would not have a problem with.  Now the scenario is not just an attrition race between the party and a foe, but also a race by both sides to bring reinforcements to the fight.   The portion of the party in the fight is facing a tactical challenge, while the portion of the party not yet in the fight is facing a skill test to get into the fight.   That's an evolving fiction and it is tense and exciting, and it will go longer than 3 rounds.  In fact, it's probably going to go 3-4 rounds + the number of PC's in the party.   Or, consider the case of the party attacked while on a moving vehicle, or the party trying to attack a moving vehicle (or the party attacking a moving vehicle while in another moving vehicle themselves!).   Now we have a fight that is continually moving across new terrain.  Even if it is an attrition fight, the fact that you can bring new obstacles into the fight and new conditions into the fight means that the fiction remains tense and exciting.  Real mastery of these techniques can turn even randomly rolled up wandering encounters in attrition fights into exciting combats, just by varying the weapons and terrain.  The GM I consider my mentor and guru pulled this off for me in an eye opening way by turning an encounter with demihuman mooks into something tense and incredible, just by arming all the mooks with bows, and putting the encounter in a wooded area where the mooks were acting as snipers and skirmishers.   What could have been an easy fight if the foe had just gone toe to toe with us, became a tense encounter filled with terror and fog of war as our foes hid behind the boles of trees and maneuvered to stay at range and generally made an encounter that should have been a foregone conclusion into one that saw a high level party huddling behind trees trying to figure out what to do.  Granted, we were young and novices at the time, but at the time as a middle schooler learning how to DM, this was eye opening and amazing.I guess what I'm saying is that the only reason we think we need a 3 round rule is it's too rare that we see combats in published scenarios designed as well as the chase scene in 'Mad God's Key', to pick one example of an amazingly designed encounter.</blockquote>

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